1831

by Louis P. Masur

  Like so many travelers, Audubon endured terrible seasickness. In Men and Manners in America, Thomas Hamilton, who arrived in England just as Audubon was departing, summarized the miseries of the transatlantic voyage: “At its worst, it involves a complication of the most nauseous evils that can afflict humanity,—an utter prostration of power, both bodily and mental,—a revulsion of the whole corporeal machinery, accompanied by a host of detestable diagnostics, which at once converts a well-dressed, and well-favoured, gentleman, into an object of contempt to himself and to those around him.” “A long voyage,” Audubon confessed, “would always be to me a continued source of suffering, were I restrained from gazing on the vast expanse of the waters, and on the ever-pleasing inhabitants of the air that now and then appear in the ship’s wake. The slightest motion of the vessel effectually prevents me from enjoying the mirth of my fellow passengers, or sympathizing with them in their sickness. When the first glimpse of day appears, I make my way on deck, where I stand not unlike a newly hatched bird, tottering on feeble legs.”33

  Audubon’s work appeared at a moment when the study of birds was in vogue, and his drawings turned interest into obsession. “We remember a time,” mused the editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, “when the very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed company; and when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child who does not know a hawk from a handsaw.” The explanation for such intense passion seemed simple enough: “All objects of nature are capable of exciting intense interest in the mind of man, the moment he begins to look upon them as fragments of the vast and wondrous machinery of which he himself forms a part.” And of all the animals, suggested Thomas Nuttall in his Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada, none were “more remarkable in their appearance and habits than the feathered inhabitants of the air. They play around us like fiery spirits, elude approach in an element which denies our pursuit, soar out of sight in the yielding sky, journey over our heads in marshalled ranks, dart like meteors in the sunshine of summer, or seeking the solitary recesses of the forest and the waters, they glide before us like beings of fancy.”34

  It was no accident that Audubon became the most celebrated naturalist of the day. He worked hard at cultivating influential contacts, promoting his drawings and writings, and managing the business aspects of his work. He envisioned a family enterprise in which his sons would take over and the name Audubon would become synonymous with the study of birds. He also denounced his competitors, even if they were documenting species other than birds. Some reviewers linked Audubon’s enterprise with George Catlin’s attempt to preserve images of the Western Indian tribes before they all disappeared. One writer said he was “proud of such men as Audubon and Catlin—of native artists who are diffusing accurate knowledge of natural objects, in the land of their birth, by means of the elegant creations of the pencil.” But Audubon ridiculed Catlin’s work as “trashy”; in response, Catlin might have pointed out that at least his portraits brought no harm to his subjects.35

  In the way he looked, through the stories he told, and especially by the drawings he made, Audubon presented himself as hailing from the forests themselves. He did all he could to cultivate his image as the “American woodsman.” He embodied the part, with shoulder-length hair “yet unshorn from the wilderness,” tattered leather coat, frayed blanket, and a large knife hanging at his side. Once, he was mistaken for an itinerant preacher and, asked to say grace, did so with “fervent spirit.” But if Audubon was a missionary, he cast himself as a missionary from the wilderness into civilization, not the other way around. “I received light and life in the New World,” he testified, and “when I hardly yet learned to walk, and to articulate those first words, always so endearing to parents, the productions of nature that lay spread all around, were constantly pointed out to me. They soon became my playmates … . I felt that an intimacy with them, not consisting of friendship merely, but bordering on phrenzy, must accompany my steps through life.” “Self-nursed, self-ripened, and self-tutored among the inexhaustible treasures of the Forest,” Audubon emerged from the woods and offered birds as salvation.

  In a story told in Ornithological Biography, he expressed his despair at being trapped in the forest by a violent storm that destroyed his shed and extinguished his fire, a storm that “seemed to involve the heavens and the earth in one mass of fearful murkiness, save when the red streaks of the flashing thunderbolt burst on the dazzled eye.” Only at dawn, with the sounds of the wood thrush, did he feel safe: “How fervently, on such occasions, have I blessed the Being who formed the wood thrush, and placed it in those solitary forests, as if to console me amidst my privations, to cheer my depressed mind, and to make me feel, as I did, that man never should despair, whatever may be his situation, as he can never be certain that aid and deliverance are not at hand.”36

  What separated Audubon from other naturalists and artists was that the birds he captured on paper appeared as if they were still alive. “We must look upon them as scenes from nature,” declared one admirer, “not merely as representations of birds.” “To paint like Audubon,” thought another, “will henceforth mean to represent Nature as she is.” Those who viewed Audubon’s drawings felt transported into nature. At an exhibition of his watercolors in England, one visitor reported, “The spectator imagined himself in the forest.” The birds were all life-size, and the colors rich and vibrant. Audubon depicted the birds not as static, isolated objects, but with “attitudes and postures … in motion or rest, in their glee and their gambols, their loves and their wars, singing, or caressing, or brooding or preying, or tearing one another to pieces. The trees, too, on which they sat or sported, all true to Nature, in bole, branch, spray, and leaf; the flowering—shrubs and the ground flowers, the weeds and the very grass, all American. So too the atmosphere and the skies—all transatlantic.” Audubon’s drawings provided the illusion of nature observed and undisturbed and allowed viewers to indulge themselves in the belief that they had journeyed into the wilderness, although they never left the safety of civilization. 37

  The first volume of Birds of America contained a hundred plates with pages three feet three inches long and two feet two inches wide. Audubon issued five plates at a time, and each set cost about ten dollars, a week’s wages for a skilled worker. Its expense, lamented one reviewer, “puts it beyond the means of any but the richest.” Describing it as “the handsomest octavo ever got up in America,” the United States Gazette celebrated Birds of America as “the most magnificent illustrations of natural history that has ever been produced.” In saying so, the paper, published in Philadelphia, took Audubon’s side in a controversy that left the artist embittered. The leading American naturalist before Audubon was Alexander Wilson, whose American Ornithology appeared in nine volumes between 1808 and 1814. Wilson had come to America in 1794 and settled in Philadelphia, where he became a prominent figure in the literary and scientific community of the city. Although Wilson had died in 1813, those who cherished his memory felt that the praise of Audubon’s drawings constituted an implicit attack on Wilson’s. For example, one reviewer remarked that in no case did the birds of Audubon’s prints “appear before us in the stiff and formal attitudes in which we find them in other works, perched upon an unmeaning stump or stone.” Another observed that in his descriptions of birds Audubon “does not appear as the dry, systematic naturalist, the manufacturer of the barbarous Latin jargon, after the manner of the old school.”38

  In retaliation, some defenders of that old school attacked Audubon’s prints as unnatural fiction rather than natural history. They took particular aim at a drawing in which Audubon showed a family of mockingbirds defending their nest from a rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes, they chortled, did not and could not climb. Perhaps the naturalist confused the rattlesnake with the moccasin, which was known to climb plants after prey. The picture may have told a moving story, but the stor
y was a lie. Seeking to keep Audubon from election to the American Philosophical Society, they circulated a report that speculated about other instances in which the ornithologist invented facts and chastised Audubon for propagating fantasy rather than history.

  The newly published Monthly American Journal of Geology and the Natural Science came to the artist’s defense. A colonel of the United States Topographical Engineers confirmed that rattlesnakes did indeed climb. Audubon responded to the accusations against him with disdain, proclaiming, “Rattlesnake do clime Trees!!!” and suggesting that his detractors ought to leave the city more frequently. “It has now been made notorious, that numerous respectable individuals, whom duty, or the love of adventure, have led into the wilds of our country, have often seen snakes—and the rattlesnake too—in trees,” commented Audubon. He described his critics as passing “their lives in stores and counting houses,” and observed that they “ought not to contradict these facts, because they do not meet with rattlesnakes, hissing and snapping at them from the paper mulberries, as they go home to their dinners.” In the end, the American Philosophical Society not only elected Audubon to membership, the institution subscribed to Birds of America. “My Enemies are going down hill very fast,” exulted Audubon.39

  The naturalist did not linger in Philadelphia. By early October, he was in Richmond, “a rather flat Country bounded as is always in America by Woods, Woods, Woods!” He met with Governor Floyd, who thought Audubon “accomplished and sensible,” and reported to his wife that “the negro disturbances are quite at an end and the famous Genl. Nat is supposed to have drowned himself.” Audubon pressed on to Charleston, and took lodgings at a boardinghouse where he paid ten and a half dollars for three meals and two nights. Always preoccupied with money, he had set out in search of less expensive lodgings when he was introduced to Reverend John Bachman, who invited Audubon to stay at his house. “Could I have refused his invitation,” Audubon asked his wife rhetorically. “No!—it would have pained him as much as if grossly insulted. We removed to his house in a crack.”

  Audubon settled in with the Bachmans for three weeks. He was accompanied by two assistants, Lehman, who completed the drawings by filling in the scenery, and Henry, whose responsibility was skinning and preserving the specimens. He loved his time in Charleston, where the city’s elite showered him with “attention, Kindness, and hospitality.” “The Papers here have blown me up sky high,” he reported. “I am the very pet of every body,” he boasted, “and had I time or Inclination to visit the great folk I might be in dinner parties from now until Jany next.” But Audubon had hunting to do, and he was reluctant to become drawn into political issues. “Politics run high with the Tariff men,” he noted, and quickly added, “Further I know not.” He did express delight, however, that his connections helped assure passage of an act that would allow for “the free entry of my Works in America.” “The Birds of America,” wrote one enthusiast, must be “permitted to come in without duty, and free as the animated beings of which they are the beauteous resemblances.”40

  On November 8, Audubon set out on a trip to Cole’s Island, twenty-five miles south of Charleston. Accompanied by Bachman and a neighbor, and rowed by four slaves, the party reached the island by midday. Audubon was in search of the long-billed curlew, and at nightfall he spied his prey: “As the twilight became darker, the number of Curlews increased, and the flocks approached in quicker succession … . Not a single note or cry was heard as they advanced. They moved for ten or more yards with regular flappings, and then sailed for a few seconds … their long bills and legs stretched out to their full extent.” The curlews, Audubon warned, “are extremely wary … . Some one of the flock, acting as sentinel, raises his wings, as if about to fly, and sounds a note of alarm … . At times, a single step made by you beyond a certain distance is quite enough to raise them, and the moment it takes place, they all scream and fly off.” Still, he found the bird “in general easily shot,” and in the contest between the army of curlews and Audubon’s troops, the birds, which sold for twenty-five cents a pair at the Charleston market, had little chance.41

  Audubon’s drawings vibrate with life, but to achieve the effect the naturalist slaughtered thousands of birds. He reveled in his role as hunter and sportsman as much as in his other capacities. “Out shooting every day—skinning, drawing, talking ornithology,” he exulted. Once he saw a “Hawk of great size entirely new,” and thought that the next day he “may perhaps kill him.” It took dozens of birds for Audubon to capture one on paper, especially since the colors of the feathers faded rapidly after death unless quickly skinned and preserved. “Shot a vast quantity of birds, without meeting with any thing new,” he reported from Charleston. Henry was kept busy; in Charleston, he skinned over two hundred birds, including “upwards of 20 Carion Crows & Turkey Buzzards.” When the birds were sparse, Audubon became irritable. “You must be aware,” he informed the editor of the Monthly American Journal, “that I call birds few when I shoot less than one hundred per day.”42

  18. John James Audubon, Long-Billed Curlew, in Birds of America, Plate CCXXXI, Robert Havell, engraver, 1834 (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., gift of Mrs. Walter B. James)

  One bright December morning in East Florida, he and several “negro servants” went in search of birds. “I was anxious to kill some 25 brown Pelicans to enable me to make a new drawing of an adult male bird,” Audubon reported. Suddenly, he came upon several hundred pelicans “perched on the branches of mangrove trees, seated in comfortable harmony.” Audubon studied the sleeping birds, “examined their countenances and deportment well and leisurely, and, after all, levelled, fired my piece, and dropped two of the finest specimens I ever saw.” He only regretted that a mistake in reloading his gun prevented him from shooting “one hundred of these reverend sirs.”

  Audubon’s relentless pursuit of prey reached its apogee a little over a year later in Boston. Called to the museum to inspect a live bird, he found himself staring at a golden eagle. “As I directed my eye toward its own deep, bold and stern one, I recognized it at once,” he exclaimed. Audubon purchased the eagle for $14.75 and carried it back to his residence. He studied “the captive … , watched his eye, and observed his look of proud disdain.” In the eagle’s eye, Audubon saw humanity, and he acknowledged that “the eye of Birds is like that of man.” For perhaps the only time in his life, he weighed releasing a specimen rather than destroying it. “At times I was half inclined to restore to him his freedom,” admitted the naturalist, “that he might return to his native mountains; nay, I several times thought how pleasing it would be to see him spread out his broad wings and sail away toward the rocks of his wild haunts; but then, reader, some one seemed to whisper that I ought to take the portrait of the magnificent bird, and I abandoned the more generous design of setting him at liberty, for the express purpose of shewing you his semblance.” For the eagle to survive, it had to die.

  So Audubon set out to kill the captured eagle. He tried suffocating the bird with the fumes of burning charcoal. Placing the blanket-covered cage in a small room, Audubon set a pan of lighted charcoal by the bird and waited to “hear him fall down from his perch.” He listened for hours, but, hearing nothing, he crept into the room, lifted the blanket, and stared at “the Eagle on his perch, with his bright unflinching eye turned towards me, as lively and vigorous as ever.” Audubon resumed the experiment but after ten hours the bird still survived, “although the air of the closet was insupportable to my son and myself.” The next morning, Audubon added sulfur to the mix, but he was “nearly driven from our home in a few hours by stifling vapours, while the noble bird continued to stand erect.” At last, Audubon resorted “to a method always used as the last expedient.” He took a long pointed piece of steel and thrust it through the eagle’s heart. “My proud prisoner fell dead,” he reported, “without even ruffling a feather.”43

  In death, the eagle nearly cost Audubon his life. The artist stayed awake all night
outlining the bird; he worked incessantly for a fortnight to complete the drawing. Suddenly, Audubon was “seized with a spasmodic affliction” that left him prostrated for days. He recovered, but his family feared the worst. For over a year, a bilious disease had plagued America, and residents of port cities seemed especially vulnerable. The boats journeying west from Europe brought more than goods and travelers to American shores. They brought contagion as well.

  Throughout the year, Americans watched nervously as a cholera epidemic spread west. The epidemic began in India in 1817 and reached China by 1820. A few years later, it crossed the border into Siberia; by 1830, it had reached Moscow. On June 26, 1831, residents of St. Petersburg first exhibited symptoms of the disease. By September, it had swept across Europe and made its appearance in Liverpool. One newspaper reported during the summer that Europe stood “awestruck at the approach of this terrific disease, the most formidable which ever scourged the world.” The Boston Medical Journal predicted confidently in July that the cholera was “destined to be arrested in its progress only by the ocean which divides us from Europe,” but that was only wishful thinking. Although the Atlantic may once have served as a divider, now more than ever it was a connector. By the fall, it became clear to all that “this disease will ravage the United States.”44