by Lynne R. Parenti
Division of Fishes, MRC 159, Department of Vertebrate Zoology, PO Box 37012, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 20013-7012.
Francesca Raymond Lamonte was an accomplished ichthyologist of the early- to mid-20th century. Details of her early life are vague yet intriguing. An American, Mary Wayne Seeley, and an Armenian, Grigor Vertaness Papasiantz, married in London, England, in 1894. Their daughter, Francesca, was born on June 5, 1895 in Germany. This and other records need verification[1].
Grigor Papasiantz died in 1898. A decade later, Mary Papasiantz married Robert Rives LaMonte in Connecticut. Robert was one of the “millionaire socialists” of the early 1900s: young men with inherited wealth and socialist politics (Reynolds, 1973). Mary and Francesca were Daughters of the American Revolution. Francesca benefited from these cultural advantages and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with a Certificate of Music from Wellesley College in 1918.
Francesca LaMonte began her long career at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1919 as an editorial assistant on Bashford Dean’s A Bibliography of Fishes. She became Secretary in the Department of Herpetology and Ichthyology and received promotions to Assistant (1927), Assistant Curator (1928), and Associate Curator (1935). Her ability to translate texts from French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian made her a valuable colleague (Brown, 1994). She retired from the AMNH Department of Ichthyology in 1962 and was Curator Emerita until her death on December 26, 1982.
Francesca LaMonte was a tireless collaborator. AMNH colleagues John Treadwell Nichols, Charles M. Breder Jr., and William King Gregory are among her many co-authors. With Gregory, she wrote The World of Fishes in 1934 as a pamphlet and in 1947 as an updated hardcover. The AMNH published each as a general reference on fish biology and as a guide to the fishes exhibited in the museum’s Hall of Fishes of the World.
LaMonte shared with Ernest Hemingway a passion for game fishing. She wrote to persuade him to contribute to her co-edited Game Fish of the World (1949). He obliged. An annotated typescript of his essay, “Cuban Fishing,” and correspondence between LaMonte and Hemingway related to it---letters and telegrams---comprise a collection of papers in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
LaMonte maintained an international focus throughout her career. She traveled often by ship for scientific collaboration and specimen collection and examination (Fig. 1, top). She was the Scientific Leader of the 1940 Lerner--American Museum Big Game Fish Expedition to Peru/Chile and led or participated in other expeditions and fieldwork in Brazil, the Bahamas, Florida, Hawaii, South Carolina, and the Gulf of Maine.
On the 1939 Lerner Australia/New Zealand Expedition, AMNH Field Associate (later Trustee) Michael Lerner, William K. Gregory, and Clive Firth, Sydney, discussed the need for an organization for anglers. The International Game Fish Association (IGFA) began on June 7, 1939, based at the AMNH, later in Florida. The IGFA collects data, maintains records, and promotes game fishing and the conservation of game fishes. LaMonte was the first IGFA Secretary and held other offices in the organization. She is the first woman inducted into the IGFA Hall of Fame. Ernest Hemingway was a vice-president of the IGFA for over twenty years (Ott, 2003). Newspapers and other media reported on many game fish expeditions during the 1930s through 1950s. LaMonte was famous because of her research on marine game fishes and their conservation. And because of her friendship with Hemingway.
LaMonte could organize, write, and edit informative, popular texts on fishes with apparent ease (Fig. 1, bottom). The comprehensive co-edited The Fisherman’s Encyclopedia (1950) went through several editions and reprints. She secured leading natural history artists to illustrate her books. British ichthyologist A. Fraser-Brunner painted the 80 illustrations in Game Fish of the World. Janet Roemhild, an artist of the George Vanderbilt Expedition, prepared color plates for LaMonte’s North American Game Fishes (1945).
LaMonte was an expert on the biology and systematics of marlins and swordfishes. She again called on Roemhild to prepare the informative and detailed illustrations of the internal anatomy from her dissections of them for a review and revision of the marlins, genus Makaira, published in the Bulletin of the AMNH in 1958.
LaMonte’s scientific interests extended beyond marine fishes. She described freshwater fishes from Africa, Madagascar, and South America. Lamontichthys Miranda Ribeiro, 1939, is a valid genus of loricariid catfishes named in her honor with the type species her own Harttia filamentosa LaMonte, 1935. She was a member of ASIH and supported publication of the special 20th anniversary issue of Copeia, 1933 (4), in which she described a new genus of pimelodid catfish, Parapimelodus LaMonte, 1933.
The more personal details of Francesca LaMonte’s life and what drew her to ichthyology are unknown. She deserves a more complete Historical Perspective in this journal, even a biography. Today she is unfamiliar to most members of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. This essay is her reintroduction, long overdue.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tina Ramoy, Mary Anne Courtney, and Hasmik Malumian kindly helped research and evaluate biographical information. The photographs of Francesca LaMonte are provided through Rebecca Morgan of the Library Archives of the American Museum of Natural History and AMNH Curator of Ichthyology Scott Schaefer who also reviewed a draft of the manuscript. I thank all for their time and interest.
[1] Dates herein come from websites, articles, and databases available through the American Museum of Natural History Research Library and Ancestry.com. Some online dates are contradictory.
TO LEARN MORE
Brown, P. S. 1994. Early women ichthyologists. Environmental Biology of Fishes 41:9–30.
International Gamefish Association (accessed 10 August 2021).
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (accessed 10 August 2021).
Ott, M. P. 2003. A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream. A contextual biography. Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio.
Reynolds, R. D., Jr. 1973. Robert Rives La Monte: Mencken’s “Millionaire Socialist” Collaborator. Menckeniana 48(winter):2–4.