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Upper Egypt, this pencil drawing signed and dated. “HCM 1882," records a view Mercer saw during his travels.
1881-1882 November-March: travelled to England, France, Italy, Egypt, Corfu, and Austria. Arthur Carey, a Harvard classmate and fellow Art Club member, accompanied him duringpartof this journey. HCM suffered from recurring illness during this trip, which was eventually diagnosed in Vienna as venereal disease (gonorrhea). The effects of this disease, for which no cure existed until after his death, continued to trouble him the rest of his life and he suffered increasingly from bouts of illness (see “Final Note”).
1883	August: travelled in Germany.
1884	Travelled in England and Germany; read his first paper for BCHS, “The Doanes before the Revolution,” which concerned a family of local brigands.
1884-1885 Researched and published The Lenape Stone, or the Indian and the Mammoth (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885), his first published archaeological work. The controversial Lenape Stone, with its juxtaposition of incised mammoth and Indian figures, raised nagging questions about the date and sequence of New World inhabitation. These questions provided a strong impetus toward archaeological research.
The Lenape Stone, as depicted on the frontispiece of HCM's book concerning it.
1885	May-June: travelled with a friend, Tom Plummer, by horse and wagon through Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia. Sought out Mercer family haunts (e.g., Aldie, the Virginia town founded by an ancestor, and Belmont, the plantation where his great-aunt Margaret Mercer’s girls’ school had been located).
Visited Civil War sites and sketched Indian rock carvings on boulders in the Susquehanna River, designs he later employed in the tile floor of the State Capitol building at Harrisburg.
1886	May-December: travelled in Germany from the source of the Danube River by raft and houseboat through lower Austria. Tom Plummer again accompanied him for the first segment of this trip. A cholera outbreak in Hungary postponed completion of the trip until the following spring. Meanwhile, he returned with his boat to Diirnstein, Austria, town of Richard the Lionhearted’s imprisonment, where he stayed at an inn with his sister. There he made lasting friendships and she met her future husband (see entry for Elizabeth Mercer Fidler von Isarborn).
This pewter-lidded stein, #1 in HCM's Catalogue of Objects in Fonthill. was acquired in Nuremberg in 1886, the year HCM began his voyage » down the Danube.
1887 January-November: still abroad. He left Austria by railroad in January with Lela and brother Willie, and they travelled down the Dalmatian coast to Greece,
HENRY CHAPMAN MERCER: AN ANNOTATED CHRONOLOGY