by Nancy Plain
His ship had docked in New York in May, just in time for him to comb the Northeast for birds that had flown up from the South. Back in the woods and the wild again, Audubon was happy. It was the love season, and birds were pairing off and building nests. At Great Egg Harbor on the New Jersey shore, a meadowlark was looking for his mate. To Audubon, it was like a scene from Romeo and Juliet:
The male is still on the wing; his notes sound loud and clear as he impatiently surveys the grassy plain beneath him. His beloved is not there. His heart almost fails him, and disappointed, he rises toward the black walnut tree, . . . and loudly calls for her whom of all things he best loves.—Ah!—there comes the dear creature; her timorous, tender notes announce her arrival. Her mate, her beloved, has felt the charm of her voice. His wings are spread, and buoyant with gladness, he flies to meet, to welcome her, . . . they place their bills together and chatter their mutual loves!2
Next Audubon explored Pennsylvania’s Great Pine Forest. Remote and unspoiled, it inspired him to write, “There is nothing perfect but primitiveness.”3 He spent two weeks in the forest with a lumberman, Jedediah Irish, and his family, eating venison and bear meat, collecting plants and birds, nests and eggs—and drawing. By summer’s end, he had a batch of new pictures to send to England for engraving. A Swiss landscape artist named George Lehman painted backgrounds, but still Audubon had so much to do that he wrote, “I wish I had eight pairs of hands.”4
Not until the birds migrated back down south in the fall did he see his family again. First he stopped in Louisville, where Victor and Johnny were living with their uncle Billy Bakewell. Audubon hardly recognized his sons. Victor was almost twenty; Johnny was sixteen. After the visit, Audubon made his way to Louisiana. The state was then in the grip of a yellow fever epidemic, but he risked exposure to see Lucy. He arrived at the town of St. Francisville, in the West Feliciana country, in the middle of the night: “It was dark, sultry, and I was quite alone. I was aware yellow fever was still raging at St. Francisville, but walked thither to procure a horse. Being only a mile distant, I soon reached it, and entered the open door of a house I knew to be an inn; all was dark and silent. I called and knocked in vain, it was the abode of Death alone! The air was putrid; I went to another house, another, and another; everywhere the same state of things existed; doors and windows were all open, but the living had fled.”5
33. Eastern Meadowlark by John James Audubon.
At last he found a horse and rode through the woods to Lucy’s plantation. “I went at once to my wife’s apartment; . . . I pronounced her name gently, she saw me, and the next moment I held her in my arms. Her emotion was so great I feared I had acted rashly, but tears relieved our hearts, once more we were together.”6
He showed Lucy some of the Havells’ engravings and asked for her—and the boys’—help with The Birds of America: “We should all go to Europe together and to work as if an established Partnership for Life consisting of Husband Wife and Children.”7 Now that Lucy was reunited with John, her feelings of abandonment melted away, and when she saw what he had accomplished, she agreed to become part of the team. Victor and Johnny liked the idea, too. Soon the three would be almost as busy as Audubon himself. Victor would go to England to collect payments and supervise the engraving process. Johnny would hunt for birds with his father and even draw some of them for the publication. Lucy would copy and edit manuscripts and take care of many business details. The long years of separation were over, and Audubon could proudly say, “We are a Working Familly.”8 In 1830 John and Lucy traveled to Washington DC, where they met with President Andrew Jackson in the White House. Then they sailed to England.
While Robert Havell Jr. turned out one engraving after another (his father had retired), Audubon sat down to write a companion text for The Birds of America. Titled Ornithological Biography, it would be a collection of short biographies, or “life histories,” of every species that the artist drew. The biographies are based on Audubon’s close observation—“I write as I see,” he had said—and they sparkle with the personality of each bird.9 Scientific details, such as measurements and taxonomy, are included. Ornithological Biography is also sprinkled with the frontier “Episodes,” Audubon’s stories about everything from a country fair in Kentucky to the ordeal of a man lost in the forest for forty days.
He wrote until he dreamed about birds. He wrote until his fingers puffed up and his muscles cramped. “I would rather go without a shirt or any inexpressibles through the whole of the florida swamps in musquito time than labour as I have hitherto done with the pen.”10
In Edinburgh, he met a Scottish naturalist named William MacGillivray. In addition to being a friend of Charles Darwin’s, MacGillivray was a fine writer and an expert on bird anatomy. Audubon hired him as an editor and scientific adviser. Working around the clock, the two men finished the first volume of Ornithological Biography in four months. Lucy patiently copied every word by hand for publication in the United States. Audubon and MacGillivray kept writing the bird histories even when they were apart, exchanging manuscripts and ideas by mail.
The search for America’s birds was far from over. Audubon chose Florida for his next ramble. Claimed by Spain for centuries, the Territory of Florida had only joined the United States in 1821 and would not become a state until 1845. In 1831 Audubon toured Florida’s east coast with George Lehman and a young taxidermist, Henry Ward. Starting in St. Augustine, they wandered up the St. John’s River. The trip was disappointing, yielding too few birds and too many scorpions. According to Audubon, the region was “a garden, where all that is not mud, mud, mud, is sand, sand, sand.”11
34. Roseate Spoonbill. Like other birds with beautiful feathers, this bird was hunted almost to extinction.
But then, on a schooner called the Marion, the group explored the southern tip of Florida and the islands off its coast known as the Florida Keys. This journey was worth it. “The sea was of a beautiful, soft, pea-green color, smooth as a sheet of glass,” wrote Audubon.12 The men passed an abandoned shipwreck, saw manatees and giant sea turtles. Once Audubon swam too close to a large shark. At night he dreamed that it was dragging him out to sea. Among flowers and groves of trees, he saw flocks of water birds—flamingos, cormorants, pelicans, and snow-white egrets. “The air was darkened by whistling wings.”13
By the side of a pond, Audubon shot a white ibis, and it fell to the water with a broken wing. As it struggled to shore, alligators chased it. Audubon tells what happened next:
35. White Ibis by John James Audubon.
I was surprised to see how much faster the bird swam than the reptiles, who, with jaws widely opened, urged their heavy bodies through the water. The Ibis was now within a few yards of us. It was the alligator’s last chance. Springing forward as it were, he raised his body almost out of the water; his jaws nearly touched the terrified bird; when pulling three triggers at once, we lodged the contents of our guns in the throat of the monster. Thrashing furiously with his tail, and rolling his body in agony, the alligator at last sunk to the mud; and the Ibis, as if in gratitude, walked to our very feet, and there lying down, surrendered itself to us.14
He kept the big bird and cared for it. When its wing was healed, he released it back into the wild.
From Florida he went all the way north to Labrador, a peninsula in northeastern Canada. No ornithologist had ever been there before. Eskimos, Canadian fishermen, French fur trappers—only the hardiest people lived there. Even in summertime, when Audubon arrived, the seas were treacherous. Gale-force winds blew, and icebergs glittered off the coast. His traveling companions were four adventurous young men, including his own son Johnny. They all wore mittens, woolen hats, thick trousers, and heavy boots but were still freezing and wet most of the trip.
They sailed from Maine on the Ripley. Near Nova Scotia, the Ripley approached the famous Bird Rock, which juts four hundred feet above the water. At first Audubon thought that the rock was covered with snow. It wasn’t snow, explained a membe
r of the crew, but a colony of seabirds called gannets.
“I rubbed my eyes,” wrote Audubon, “took my spy-glass, and in an instant the strangest picture stood before me. They were birds we saw—a mass of birds of such a size as I never before cast my eyes on. The whole of my party stood astounded and amazed. . . . The nearer we approached, the greater our surprise at the enormous number of these birds, all calmly seated on their eggs or newly hatched brood, their heads all turned to windward, and towards us.”15
36. Northern Gannet, with the Bird Rock in the distance.
The air was swirling with gannets, too, and everyone watched as the birds dived for fish. From heights of more than a hundred feet, they plunged into the water like rockets.
Labrador itself was rocky and wind-torn, dotted with stunted trees and covered in spongy moss. Audubon thought it a land of “wonderful dreariness,” except for the millions of birds that came there to breed—ducks, auks, guillemots, gulls, puffins, loons, and more.16 At forty-eight, he couldn’t hike as far as the young men, but he spent seventeen-hour days drawing birds on a table below the Ripley’s deck.
Although Audubon shot thousands of birds in his lifetime, he claimed that he never disturbed nesting birds or their eggs. In Labrador, he saw—and instantly despised—the “Eggers,” men who raided wild birds’ nests and sold their eggs for a living. “At every step each ruffian picks up an egg so beautiful that any man with a feeling heart would pause to consider the motive which could induce him to carry it off.”17 Eggers destroyed whole generations of birds, and Audubon concluded that “this war of extermination cannot last many years more.”18
By August the storm clouds of winter were already gathering. Audubon had lost fifteen pounds and was exhausted from the rain and cold, the tossing waves. “Seldom in my life have I left a country with as little regret.”19 But he was satisfied that he had learned much that was not known by any other ornithologist either in Europe or America.
In 1837 Audubon looked west to Texas and headed there with Johnny and his friend Edward Harris. Their route took them by stagecoach across Alabama. There they witnessed one of the tragic events in Native American history—the Trail of Tears.
Five Indian tribes—the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Creeks—had lived in the southeastern part of North America for centuries, long before the United States was founded. But after the American Revolution and into the 1800s, southern states and territories were established. White settlers came and began to covet Indian lands.
In 1830 President Andrew Jackson had signed a law called the Indian Removal Act. It decreed that the southern tribes must be resettled in “permanent Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River. So tribe by tribe, family by family, Indians were torn from their homes. Taking with them only what they could carry, they endured a forced march westward. Thousands died along the way.
Audubon recorded what he saw:
100 Creek Warriors were confined in Irons, preparatory to leaving for ever the Land of their births!—Some Miles onward we overtook about Two thousands of These once free owners of the Forest, marching towards this place under an escort of Rangers, and militia mounted Men, destined for distant Lands. . . . Numerous groups of Warriors, of half clad females and of naked babes, trudging through the Mire . . . the evident regret expressed in the masked countenances of Some, and the tears of others—the howlings of their numerous Dogs; and the cool demeanour of the Chiefs—all formed Such a Picture as I hope I never will again witness.20
In New Orleans Audubon’s three-man expedition boarded a boat and sailed across the Gulf of Mexico along the Louisiana coast. Although they were tormented by mosquitoes and sweltering heat, they collected a wealth of plants and birds along the way. When they reached Galveston, they were no longer in the United States but the new Republic of Texas. The year before, Texans had won their independence from Mexico and elected Gen. Sam Houston as their first president. (Like Florida, Texas would join the Union in 1845.)
Audubon’s group ventured inland to Houston, the capital of the republic, where they met the president himself. Sam Houston wore a velvet coat and trousers trimmed with gold lace, but his presidential mansion was a two-room log cabin. Noted Audubon, “The ground floor was muddy and filthy; a large fire was burning; a small table, covered with paper and writing materials, was in the centre; camp-beds, trunks, and different materials were strewn around the room.”21 President Houston introduced the visitors to members of his cabinet, “some of whom bore the stamp of intellectual ability.”22 Everyone took a glass of grog and toasted to the future of Texas. It was a visit that Audubon would never forget.
It took longer for Audubon’s fame to catch on in America than it had in Europe. And throughout the 1830s, his constant enemies, George Ord and Charles Waterton—those “beetles of darkness”—were hard at work.23 As volumes of Ornithological Biography were published to glowing reviews, Ord and Waterton accused Audubon of not being the real author. “That impudent pretender and his stupid book,” Ord wrote.24 Audubon never responded directly to their attacks, but he told a friend, “I really care not a fig—all such stuffs will soon evaporate, being mere smoke from a Dung Hill.”25
He was right. Newspapers were reporting on his travels. Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences subscribed to The Birds of America, easing Audubon’s anger at that city. America’s great universities and public institutions—the U.S. Congress and several state governments—signed up as well. Many subscribers were prominent citizens, such as the statesman Daniel Webster and the writer Washington Irving, author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
By the summer of 1837 The Birds of America was almost finished. All Audubon needed now were specimens of birds that two other naturalists, Thomas Nuttall and John Townsend, had collected on their expedition to the American West. The Audubon family was now together in Europe, shuttling between London and Edinburgh in a final push to the finish line. From dream to reality, thought Audubon. “How delicious is the Idea.”26
37. Atlantic Puffin by John James Audubon.
8
This Strdge Wildersss
From its earliest days, Audubon knew that The Birds of America was unique. As it neared completion, he wrote, “I have laboured like a Cart Horse for thirty years on a Single Work, have been successful almost to a miracle in its publication so far, and am thought a-a-a (I dislike to write it, but no matter here goes) . . . a Great Naturalist!!!”1
The last number of The Birds was published in 1838, twelve years after the first. The entire work was four volumes long and depicted 489 American species, twice as many as Alexander Wilson—or anyone else—had shown before. Some of the family and larger groupings had taken years to assemble, with Audubon using a collage technique to paste several bird drawings onto one sheet of paper. The printed engravings were so faithful to the original watercolors that they made Robert Havell Jr. famous along with Audubon.
One year later, the fifth and last volume of Ornithological Biography came out. This work, too, was revolutionary. Audubon had created a new kind of nature writing, combining scientific fact with his exuberant and poetic descriptions. “You may well imagine how happy I am at this moment,” he wrote. “I find my journeys all finished, . . . my mission accomplished.”2 The family sailed back to America—this time for good—and settled in New York City. At fifty-four and after so many years of almost superhuman effort, Audubon could finally rest.
Of course, he did not. He immediately began work on the Octavo edition, a miniature version of The Birds of America. Johnny Audubon helped. Using a device called a camera lucida, Johnny projected the images at one-eighth their original size onto sheets of paper and traced them. The traced drawings were then prepared for publication, not by copper engraving like the originals, but by the process of lithography, or etching on stone. The Octavo would be published in installments from 1840 to 1844. At the price of a hundred dollars, it was much less expensive than the big bird book, and to Audubon’s delight
, it became an instant best seller.
Audubon had a friend named John Bachman who was a minister and fellow naturalist. Bachman’s motto was “Nature, Truth, and no Humbug.”3 He had been an important member of the team that had helped produce The Birds of America, sending from his home in Charleston, South Carolina, specimens and information about the birds of the American South. Audubon’s and Bachman’s families had merged as well. Johnny Audubon married Bachman’s daughter Maria, and Victor married another Bachman girl, Eliza.
In 1840 Audubon and Bachman decided to do for North American mammals what Audubon had done for birds. As with the birds, no complete work had been published on the subject before. It was to be a joint effort—drawings by Audubon, text by Bachman. They chose a title—The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. (Quadrupeds are four-legged animals. The term “viviparous” refers only to mammals because all mammals except the platypus and the anteater give birth to live babies instead of laying eggs.) But early in the project’s planning stages, tragedy struck. Both Johnny’s and Victor’s wives died of tuberculosis. Audubon had particularly loved Victor’s wife, twenty-two-year-old Eliza. He was drawing a hare when she died: “I drew this Hare during one of the days of deepest sorrow I have felt in my life.”4
38. Northern Hare, pictured in its winter coat.
Still he kept working. In 1841, with money from the Octavo, he bought land for his family—thirty acres on the banks of the Hudson River. That land is now part of New York City’s Upper West Side, but it was country then, all grass and tall, old trees. The Audubons named the new place Minniesland, because Victor and Johnny called their mother Minnie.
“Minniesland for ever say I!”5 Audubon built a large, wooden house—the family’s first permanent home since the Kentucky years—with a view of the water and the boats sailing by. Next came a barn and stables, a garden, and fruit trees. The naturalist also gathered around himself a menagerie of wild animals—foxes, elk, deer, even wolves.