Naturalism in the United States was then in its infancy and anyone who wanted to make a name for himself in the field had to be ready to head into the wilderness to seek new species. He also had to be able to record what he had seen, in drawing and in accurate, scientifically grounded notes. Audubon was a keen outdoorsman, a superb shot, and a robust camper, able to endure enormous hardship for the sake of capturing one new finch on paper. He was, of course, a brilliant artist and a tireless observer. Rafinesque - although gifted with occasionally brilliant insight and credited by some with having discovered "the basic law of change in species some twenty years or more before Charles Darwin" - was a terrible draftsman and an unreliable note-taker who went into the field in the summer but waited until winter to draft his observations. He was an impatient researcher and a foolishly rash publisher who "once sent for publication a paper describing, in regular natural history style, twelve new species of thunder and lightning which he had observed near the Falls of the Ohio." As David Starr Jordan, first president of Stanford University, noted, "Rafinesque's work as a whole is bad enough, and bad in a peculiarly original and exasperating way." Another refers to "the beauty of the quaint French penmanship and the atrocious badness of the accompanying drawings." Although he crossed the Alleghenies five times on foot, once registering twelve hundred miles in a single year, he was out of place in nature, where he was tormented by weather, hunger, and biting insects and where, by his own admission, he carried an umbrella.
Of all the differences between the two men, perhaps the most telling was Audubon's ferocious single-mindedness. From his earliest days, he had had one ambition and one ambition only: to draw and be recognized as the world's foremost artist of nature. From early adulthood, his entire life and substance were devoted to that purpose. He left his beloved sons and wife for years on end to raise money and support for his project and, when in the field, often spent eighteen hours a day shooting, drawing, and taking notes. Rafinesque was, to put it mildly, eclectic. Although he always considered himself to be a naturalist, he also boasted without irony of having been a botanist, geologist, geographer, historian, poet, philosopher, philologist, economist, philanthropist, traveler, merchant, manufacturer, brewer, collector, improver, teacher, surveyor, draughtsman, architect, engineer, palmist, author, editor, bookseller, librarian, and secretary. "I hardly know what I may not become as yet, since, whenever I apply myself to anything which I like, I never fail to succeed," he wrote with considerable exaggeration.
Up to the moment of their encounter, Rafinesque had endured the same sort of ill fortune that would continue to pursue him throughout his remaining days. Born in Galata, near Constantinople, in 1783, he was raised in Marseilles and Genoa. He lost his father to yellow fever when he was ten and his father's fortune to a dishonest partner. His mother, a timorous German, kept him locked away from the rest of the world, educated him with private tutors, and generally left him "largely unprepared to defend himself in an aggressive, selfish world." It did not help that his sole passion was botany, a solitary vocation. With Napoleon's recruiters closing in, she shipped him off to Philadelphia in 1802, where he toiled as a shipping clerk while scouring the countryside for specimens.
He returned to Italy in 1804, moving to Sicily where he lived for the next ten years. He worked as secretary to the United States consul and as the manager of a whiskey distillery before making a small fortune exporting medicinal squill, a wild herb which he allowed the Sicilians to believe was being used in the manufacture of dye. He married and had two children, a daughter and a son who died in infancy. When the Sicilians came to understand how profitable his business was and cut off their dealings with him, and when his wife took up with a squalid comedian named Giovanni Pizzarrone, he decided to cash in his chips and head back to the States. For Rafinesque, Sicily had become a land of "fruitful soil, delightful climate, excellent productions, perfidious men, deceitful women."
On November 2, 1815, his ship lost its keel off Race Rocks, at the eastern end of Long Island. "I had lost every thing, my fortune, my share of the cargo, my collections and labors for 20 years past, my books, my manuscripts, my drawings, even my clothes . . . I walked to New London." He eventually found his way to New York, where he worked for a time as private tutor to the Livingston family in Clermont. But it was the opening West, with its uncounted new species of plants and fish, that held his fascination. Traveling almost exclusively by foot through New York state, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, he gradually made his way to Kentucky, where an old family friend recommended him for a job as professor of natural history and modern languages at Transylvania University, in Lexington. It was to this, the sole of the many academic posts to which he applied that he was ever appointed to, that he was headed when he stopped off in Henderson. If anyone in the world needed a helping hand and a sympathetic ear in the wilderness, it was Rafinesque.
He was warmly welcomed into the modest but respectable Audubon log cabin, which was only too well accustomed to accommodating travelers and itinerant family members. He amused the occupants by refusing to change his filthy clothes and by his very apparent reluctance to wash before dinner. Upon examining Audubon's drawings, he categorically refused to believe that one plant depicted therein really existed until Audubon led him to the riverbank to observe the original. When convinced, he danced with joy, hugged Audubon, and there and then declared the discovery of a new genus. Still, despite the visitor's eccentricities, Audubon claims to have found him charming and erudite. "I listened to him with as much delight as Telemachus could have listened to Mentor."
Late on the night of Rafinesque's arrival, when all but Audubon were asleep, the household was disturbed by an almighty racket coming from the naturalist's room. Audubon rushed to the scene of the commotion:
I saw my guest running about the room naked, holding the handle of my favorite violin, the body of which he had battered to pieces against the walls in attempting to kill the bats which had entered by the open window, probably attracted by the insects flying around his candle. I stood amazed, but he continued jumping and running round and round, until he was fairly exhausted, when he begged me to procure one of the animals for him, as he felt convinced they belonged to "a new species." Although I was convinced of the contrary, I took up the bow of my demolished Cremona, and administering a smart tap to each of the bats as it came up, soon got specimens enough. The war ended, I again bade him good night, but could not help observing the state of the room. It was strewed with plants, which it would seem he had arranged into groups, but which were now scattered about in confusion. "Never mind, Mr AUDUBON," quoth the eccentric naturalist, "never mind, I'll soon arrange them again. I have the bats, and that's enough."
Over the next few days, the men went their separate ways, Audubon attending to his store and birds, Rafinesque searching the woods for plants. When Rafinesque expressed his desire to see an authentic canebrake, Audubon was unable to resist the opportunity to avenge his destroyed Cremona. He had clearly sized up his guest as an inadequate woodsman, wholly unsuited to exploring dense and dangerous canebrakes, "the usual mode of passing through [which] is by pushing one's self backward, and wedging a way between the stems." He led Rafinesque to the densest canebrake in the vicinity. When Rafinesque fled and collapsed in terror at the appearance of a bear, Audubon could not help but laugh out loud at his "ridiculous exhibition." He also lied outright to the exhausted Rafinesque by assuring him that their worst difficulties were nearly over, knowing full well that they still had miles to go. "I kept my companion in such constant difficulties, that he now panted, perspired, and seemed almost overcome by fatigue . . . I kept him tumbling and crawling on his hands and knees." Audubon secretly exulted when they were drenched in a downpour; Rafinesque had apparently left his umbrella in Henderson. In an effort to lighten his load, the naturalist abandoned all of the valuable plant specimens he had collected along the way. They eventually emerged onto the riverbank and were ferried back to town.
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nbsp; Rafinesque remained with the Audubons for a full three weeks, "but never again expressed a desire of visiting a cane-brake." Then one night he disappeared. He was sought high and low, to no avail, and the Audubons feared the worst. His evaporation remained a mystery for several weeks until the Audubons received a thank-you note from him, presumably sent from Lexington.
Some thirteen years after the encounter, Audubon included a six-page account of this visit in the first volume of his Ornithological Biography, the textual accompaniment to his Birds of America. By the time of its publication, Audubon was well established on the path that was to lead to international fame, while Rafinesque was already deep into his professional decline, having been hounded in the most humiliating fashion from his post at Transylvania University in 1826. "The Eccentric Naturalist" is written in such a way as to shed the utmost possible ridicule on its subject, quite cruelly in view of the broad professional readership that Audubon could anticipate. Although he disguises Rafinesque under the pseudonym "M. de T.," no one was fooled. Everyone was able to recognize, in the words of one anonymous observer, the "genius with many peculiarities and not much dignity." Oddly enough, Rafinesque praised "The Eccentric Naturalist" when it was published, calling Audubon "my friend," but by that time he was probably grateful for recognition of any sort.
If so, he was almost certainly unaware of the even greater injustice Audubon, in his role as trusted host and intellectual peer, had inflicted on him thirteen years earlier. Audubon makes no mention of the prank in "The Eccentric Naturalist" and seems, presumably for shame, to have shared it with very few. It only came to light some fifty-five years later, retailed by David Starr Jordan in a paper read before the Indiana Academy of Sciences on December 30, 1885, and subsequently published in The Popular Science Monthly. Jordan had received the story from one Dr. Kirtland, who had heard it directly from John Bachman, Audubon's great friend whose daughters were married to Audubon's sons.
When Audubon claims in "The Eccentric Naturalist" that "M. de T. although a highly scientific man, was suspicious to a fault, and believed such plants only to exist as he had himself seen," he was being entirely disingenuous. In fact, he was concealing the trail of a miserable fraud that he himself had perpetrated. It seems that, during the course of Rafinesque's stay in Henderson, Audubon had given him some ten drawings of fantastic and imaginary fish that he claimed to have personally observed in the Ohio. Although these creatures are entirely implausible, Rafinesque - ever in thrall to his impatience, excitability, and childlike enthusiasms - fell for them hook, line, and sinker, as Audubon must have known he would.
Even if it had gone no further, it would have been a cruel enough trick to play on anyone who was such an easy mark and so far out of his element. But it did go further. Rafinesque subsequently named and published these findings in his Ichthyologia Ohiensis, declaring the discovery of such new genera as Pogostoma, Aplocentrus, Litholepis, and Pilodictis. One fish, the "devil-jack diamond-fish" (Litholepis adamantinus), supposedly grew up to ten feet long and weighed four hundred pounds. Sleeping on the surface of the water and often mistaken for a log, it had "scales as hard as flint, and even proof against lead balls! . . . they strike fire with steel!" It seems incredible that Rafinesque would publish such findings without proof, until we remember that all of his information had been "communicated to me by Mr. Audubon," a man whom he respected and had no reason to mistrust. (This incriminating evidence went unnoticed because it was published long before Audubon achieved fame.) After all, as far as Rafinesque was concerned, Audubon had been an exemplary host and generous guide in the wilderness.
Because the prank went undiscovered during Rafinesque's lifetime, it did immeasurable harm to his reputation. The Ichthyologia Ohiensis continued to be a puzzle and a torment to ichthyologists for many years, since no one but Rafinesque ever succeeded in identifying the mythological creatures it describes. It led to the general opinion among his peers that "he had described certainly twice as many fishes, and probably nearly twice as many plants and shells, also, as really existed in the regions over which he traveled." His few remaining supporters began to melt away. Already widely disliked and dismissed by his colleagues for his rash denunciations and his monomania on the subject of new species, as well as for his lack of scientific rigor, Rafinesque had been hanging on to respectability by a thread. His Ichthyologia cut it. Even today, more than 160 years after his death, his work continues to be debunked. One noted scholar, David Oestreicher, recently disproved Rafinesque's claim to have discovered the Walum Olum, an epic saga written in pictographs on tree bark, supposedly documenting the Lenape tribe's migration to North America from Siberia across the frozen Bering Strait.
His declining years in Philadelphia tell a miserable tale of desperation, paranoia, and grandiosity. He became the kind of man who refers to his perceived enemies as "the foes of mankind." While writing, seemingly, on every subject under the sun from the principles of wealth and safe banking, through the Hebrew Bible, to the cure for consumption, not to mention a two-hundred-page poem titled The World; Or, Instability - he claimed to have invented coupon bonds, steam plows, aquatic railroads, and fire-proof houses. In 1832, he made the utterly delusional claim that "my illustrations of 30 years' travels, with 2,000 figures will soon begin to be published, and be superior to those of my friend Audubon." Although he published more than nine hundred titles in his lifetime, he was utterly ignored and forgotten at the time of his death of cancer in 1840. His landlord locked the corpse in his room, intending to sell it to a medical school, until a small group of friends broke in, lowered it by ropes out the back window, and spirited it away for burial in the "Strangers Ground" of Ronaldson's cemetery. In the words of one biographer, he "loved no man or woman, and died, as he had lived, alone." When sold at auction, his lifetime's collection of books and specimens, filling eight drays, left his administrator $14.43 in debt.
It could be argued that Audubon's abuse of the laws of hospitality - his cruel pranks played upon a trusting and vulnerable guest had a tangible negative impact on the progress of American science and naturalism. While such a claim is debatable and may even be grandiloquent, in my opinion it barely scratches the surface of the enormity of Audubon's crime.
The story is told in Judges of the traveling Levite who, on his way from Bethlehem to Ephraim, is given shelter by an old farmer of Gibeah. That evening, the Benjaminites of Gibeah surround the farmer's house and demand that he deliver the Levite to them. Rather than violate the law of hospitality requiring hosts to protect their guests, the farmer offers the mob his own virgin daughter. In the end, the thugs take the Levite's concubine, whom they rape and murder, an outrage that precipitates a war and the desolation of the tribe of Benjamin.
The farmer of Gibeah knew very well that there was more at stake in protecting his guest than his own honor and the safety of a single traveler. This was a time when the Israelites were consolidating their power over recently and imperfectly conquered land. If they could not guarantee safe travel among their own kind, how could they ever hope to establish secure and prosperous dominion? Hospitality was not just a revered tradition - it was also an essential component of national unity and the trading network. Its failure posed a direct threat to Israelite strength. Ensuring safe and comfortable passage to one's kinsmen was a patriotic duty.
Americans and Europeans on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century were in a very similar situation. Frontiers may be opened by force, but they can only coalesce and mature around communities, which must be prepared to welcome newcomers into their midst. White people who found themselves on the frontier without kinfolk had no choice but to rely on the hospitality of strangers, as there were no hotels, inns, or even reliable roads to speak of and federal currency was scarce. Audubon, who played long-term host to several frontier families, knew this better than most. Unless the newcomers could trust their hosts implicitly, they would not come, or stay, so reliable hospitality was as crucial to the consolid
ation of frontiers as armed self-defense. What Audubon did, for better or for worse, in failing in his duties as a host was to put the entire vanguard of American westward expansion at risk. The fact that Rafinesque may not have been the easiest of guests, or that Audubon's pranks might be considered by some to be well-earned payback, is no excuse whatsoever.
But we do not need to embrace the political argument to condemn Audubon for Use hospitalite. On the face of it, true, he assumed his responsibility for feeding and housing a stranger in need, but that can hardly mitigate his delinquency. What he did was to take in a stranger - some sort of holy fool by all appearances - gain his trust and friendship, and then betray him in the crudest and most unjustified way. Why did he do it? For fun? Rafinesque certainly didn't need anybody's help making a fool of himself. Out of boredom, pique, rivalry? We will probably never know, but it hardly matters. Abusing a guest under one's own roof undermines the entire edifice of hospitality, which perches at the best of times on dubious foundations. Without trust, there is no hospitality; without hospitality, there is no civilization; without civilization, there are no naturalists.
CHAPTER IV
THE DUCHESS WHO WOULDN'T SIT DOWN
People of quality know everything without ever having had to learn a thing.
Moliere, Les Precieuses ridicules
When I was a young boy, I had a friend from a wealthy and very proper French family. His father was the first secretary in the embassy or perhaps even the ambassador to the Court of St. James. My friend was the kind of child who cried when he got a B+. His brother and very beautiful older sister were the same. It was a family of brilliant, brittle overachievers with very high standards. I didn't know such people existed and I was wholly unprepared when I was invited for a sleepover.
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