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UNDER A WILD SKY by William Souder
Copyright © 2004 by William Souder
Published by North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CHAPTER ONE

PHILADELPHIA

Tanagra rubra: The Scarlet Tanager
You have now before you representations of one of the most richly coloured of our birds, and one whose history is in some degree peculiar.—Ornithological Biography

On a fine spring afternoon in 1824, the daily coach from Pittsburgh swayed down the turnpike toward Philadelphia, the team moving easily on the smooth, macadamized lane. The road ran beneath forested hillsides, dropping steadily as it came alongside the Schuylkill River near the city. The woods were green and alive with birds, which flushed at the oncoming hoofbeats and sped off through tunnels of sunlight and shadow. From far away came the bleat of geese flying in wedges high above the horizon, and closer by was the hissing of cupped wings as flocks of ducks coasted in to land on the river. Peering out from the carriage, John James Audubon watched the birds intently, though his thoughts traveled on to the days ahead in the city. Unlike the birds, which came back every year, Audubon had been away a long time.

The stage rumbled over a wooden bridge and rolled through the city, halting near the Delaware waterfront and its bustling taverns and inns. Audubon climbed down and swept a hand through the mane of hair that hung past his shoulders. He was an imposing figure, rangy and athletic, and, according to many women who knew him, dashingly handsome. Dressed in buckskin pantaloons and a dirty greatcoat, Audubon blinked at the city's broad, cobbled streets and immaculate plank sidewalks. It was the fifth of April—his wedding anniversary. Audubon was just shy of thirty-nine years old.

Streetlamps were being lighted. A waxing moon hung low in the west-ern sky. Audubon had lived beneath that sky for seventeen years, moving from place to place, acquiring a family while making and losing a fortune in a string of business failures. The carefree life he'd known as a young man on his father's estate outside of Philadelphia was a distant memory. Partnerships in enterprises from Kentucky to New Orleans had gone to dust, several in ugly confrontations. In one dispute, Audubon had lost several thousand dollars he could ill afford when the owner of a steamboat Audubon held as collateral made off with the vessel in Henderson, Kentucky, taking it down the Ohio River, then the Mississippi, all the way to New Orleans. Enraged, Audubon chased the man to Louisiana and back. He got neither the boat nor his money. On returning to Henderson the man threatened Audubon's life—but bided his time. He finally took Audubon by surprise one morning, clubbing him over the head in the middle of a city street. Audubon, who'd recently injured his right arm and had it in a sling, appeared defenseless. But as blood poured down his face, Audubon used his good hand to draw a dagger from his belt and stab his attacker in the chest. A mob that included many of Audubon's creditors later had to be dispersed from in front of his house. But while the man's wound was grave, he recovered. Charges against Audubon were later dismissed on grounds of self-defense. Shortly afterward Audubon was insolvent and was forced into bankruptcy after being arrested and briefly jailed in Louisville over outstanding debts.

So it had gone, from one river town to another, always heading down-stream, always riding a little lower in life. Moving west and south through Kentucky, then down to Mississippi and Louisiana, Audubon had tried his hand at shopkeeping, lumber milling, real estate development, and teaching. He'd worked as a dance instructor, fiddler, and taxidermist. He'd taught fencing and art, drawn portraits, sold landscape paintings and urban sketches on the street. Lucy, his wife, found occasional work as a governess. But the one thing that held Audubon's interest—and the thing he was best at—was hunting and studying birds.

Keen-eyed, and with a tolerance for the rigors of the outdoors, Audubon had wandered widely across the American frontier, honing his woodcraft. He disappeared into the wilderness often, turning up days or weeks or even months later, laden with trophies: animals of every kind—most dead, sometimes a few still living—plus eggs, nests, plants, and a myriad of brilliantly hued skins of birds both known and unknown to science. And there were his paintings. Audubon had begun drawing birds as a child. He had talent, but more important, he had a rare feeling for his subjects. He was as interested in how birds lived as he was in their appearance. Over time, as he refined his technique, Audubon's paintings had begun to merge the beauty of the birds with their wildness in a way no previous naturalist had managed. As his fortunes dwindled, Audubon's collection of paintings grew thick.

By 1823, Audubon felt his time and his prospects running out. He and Lucy were living near New Orleans with their two nearly adolescent sons. Two daughters had died in infancy. Despite his frequent absences, Audubon was devoted to his family and weary of their precarious circumstances. At the urging of friends who admired his paintings but were doubtful of their value on the frontier, where anyone curious about birds and nature had only to look around, Audubon came East in search of an agent or publisher. He may have envisioned some kind of book—illustrated volumes on natural history were popular, though shockingly expensive or, more likely, he thought only of finding someone who might tell him how to sell his work.

He left New Orleans that fall, taking along his elder son, Victor, who was fourteen. Initially they rode comfortably up the Mississippi aboard the steamship "Magnet," turning east into the Ohio River on October 15—where unexpected low water prevented further progress by boat. Audubon, impatient to proceed, arranged to have his belongings forwarded and set off with Victor toward Louisville on foot, accompanied by two other passengers. One of them, a big man named Rose, warned Audubon that he was in a great hurry and would not wait for a young boy unable to keep up.

Audubon worried about Victor as well. He knew this stretch of low, swampy country, having walked through it some years previously when ice had forced him from the river. At another time he had hiked along the Ohio farther ahead, after lightning killed a horse literally from underneath him. Beyond the river confluence stretched an endless wood, both pretty and daunting. The land was sparsely settled, with few roads. Narrow trails, which had to be walked single file, sometimes petered out in thickets or vanished in burned-out forests snarled with deadfall. The distance upriver to Henderson, Kentucky, where Audubon hoped to find transportation, was more than two hundred miles.

In the end, it was Audubon and Victor who outpaced the other trav-
elers, and later Audubon would recall the episode as a happy adventure, though it was, he admitted, "a tough walk for a youth." Victor at times appeared near exhaustion. On one occasion he grew faint and collapsed sobbing only to be roused by a smiling Audubon who pointed out a large turkey strutting through the woods close by. Somehow, Victor woke restored each morning. He was a pleasant, intelligent boy, with his father's high forehead and large eyes, and, evidently, some of his sturdy constitution.

Audubon, as usual, strode over even the most difficult terrain without complaint, repeatedly leading the party out of trouble, encouraging everyone on, breaking trail or slogging ahead through the rocky shallows when they were forced down to the river's edge. He caught fish to eat and kept a watchful eye on their bearings. Well versed in the customs of backcountry travel, Audubon unerringly found houses where the group could put up at night. His powers of observation operated continually, and he found their various hosts as interesting and as colorful as the many birds in the area. They met a man who kept a large black wolf that was "tame and gentle." At another place where they stopped, Audubon was disgusted by the man of the house, who was lazy. The man's industrious wife was uncommonly attractive and seemed slightly out of place. She had delicate hands, lovely blue eyes, and a manner that suggested "her right to belong to a much higher class." The memory of the morning feast she served the travelers—ground corn, freshly killed chicken, and coffee—remained with Audubon. It was, he said, the best breakfast he had ever eaten. Upon leaving, he gave a dollar to one of the children and said a tender goodbye to the woman as she nursed a baby. The husband, Audubon noticed, stood by sullenly, smoking his pipe.

After three days' walking, the group topped a hill early in the morning and saw a vast forest spread out before them. The rising sun lit the frost on the trees. Mile by mile, Audubon coaxed the party onward while thinking to himself that this must be among the most beautiful places on earth. The season was turning. They found ripe peaches in an orchard and saw wood ducks fattening themselves on the acorns collecting in the river bottoms. At the end of an arduous day, Audubon took Victor for a swim in the wide Ohio. As the sun went down, they lazed in the glassy current and watched as robins flying south filled the sky overhead.

They had marched six days, the fifth in a driving rain, when they came at last to a decent road, where the others in the group decided they must slow down. Two hours after reluctantly leaving the rest of the party behind, Audubon and his son reached the Green River ferry, just above Henderson, where they hired a wagon to take them on to Louisville. On the crossing, they dangled their feet in the cool water as the river slipped quietly by on its way into the heart of the untamed country.

Audubon and Victor stopped a few days later at Shippingport, a trading community on the south bank of the Ohio, just below the falls at Louisville. Audubon had barely enough money remaining—$13—to rent a room. They called on old friends, and as Audubon and Lucy had hoped, Victor was placed as an apprentice in their family's counting house. Audubon spent the winter saving for the remainder of his trip. He occupied himself dodging old creditors and painting portraits, signs, and even murals on the interiors of steamboats. In March he had booked passage for Pittsburgh. He brought with him only a few possessions, including a kit of watercolors and an unusually handsome double shotgun with fine engravings on its breech. Firmly clutched under one arm was an oversized portfolio tied with string.

In Philadelphia Audubon found lodging in one of the inns on tavern row. The noise and activity was disorienting. Rooms were cramped but cheap—$10 a week, which included two heavy meals a day featuring slabs of meat, eggs, fowl, and cheese, accompanied in the evenings by wine and ale. In his small room with its rough bed and whitewashed walls echoing with the woozy laughter of taverngoers until late at night, Audubon made his plans. Within a few days he had bought a suit of clothes, and readied himself for introductions to some of the city's influential citizens. He decided against cutting his hair or even buttoning his shirt collar. He hoped his rough style marked him as a true backwoodsman—an image Audubon was convinced would lend credibility to his claim as a naturalist. He also felt his curling locks recalled the city's foremost figure, Benjamin Franklin, in an appealing way.

Audubon called first on Dr. James Mease. Mease was a prominent physician and part of Philadelphia's growing community of intellectuals, many of them doctors, who had developed an interest in their young nation's natural history. And Mease was an acquaintance. He'd known Audubon as an adventurous, undisciplined teenager who once lived close to his friends the Bakewells, in the country outside Philadelphia near Valley Forge.

The Audubon who appeared at Mease's doorstep in a prosperous section of Chestnut Street had changed considerably. He was now a middle-
aged man, rough-looking and obviously nervous. His English—muddled when Mease had known him as a recent immigrant from Europe—was improved, despite a still noticeable French accent. Mease, taken aback at seeing Audubon after such a long absence, was even more surprised when Audubon came inside, loosened his inexpensive new coat, and untied his portfolio. Awed by Audubon's paintings, Mease suggested they get the opinion of a knowledgeable ornithologist. And he had one in mind—a young visitor to the city named Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, who was himself engaged in the study of American birds.

Only twenty-one years old, Bonaparte was already an accomplished naturalist. Aboard ship to the New World—a trip that lasted fifty-one nervous days, during which the ship encountered several terrible storms en route from Plymouth to New York—Bonaparte had collected an assortment of fishes and turtles, and had shot and studied many birds, including several unknown species of petrels. Upon landing in America, Bonaparte was immediately smitten with the young republic, which he declared "the most perfect of all those that have ever existed, without excepting those of Athens, Sparta, and Rome." He set about investigating the many strange animals new to his experience. Like all European newcomers, he was fascinated by the American rattlesnake. He was at the same time naive about certain New World fauna, like the small black-and-white quadruped he encountered one day while out riding. Dismounting, Bonaparte chased the animal hoping to catch and examine it. He got close enough to the skunk to learn what it was.

Bonaparte had been welcomed into Philadelphia's scientific and social circles after arriving there in the fall of 1823, about the same time that Audubon had left New Orleans. At first, he stayed at Point Breeze, his relatives' New Jersey estate on the Delaware River, about twenty-five miles north of Philadelphia. That winter Bonaparte and his pregnant wife moved to the city not far from Dr. Mease and Bonaparte began corresponding with the Academy of Natural Sciences. The academy, formed only eleven years earlier by a handful of amateur naturalists who met weekly above an apothecary, had become one of the country's leading learned institutions. Its monthly Journal, first published in 1817, was an important scholarly publication. In 1819, four members of the academy had been chosen for Stephen Harriman Long's expedition to the Rocky Mountains—the first scientists to accompany such a government-sponsored endeavor. Meetings now took place every Saturday evening in the academy's own building, which also housed a large library, as well as an overflowing collection of natural specimens.

In January 1824, Bonaparte submitted a paper on his new petrels to the academy, where it was read to the members and later accepted for publication. On February 24, while Audubon was shivering on the docks and saving his pennies in Shippingport, the academy elected Bonaparte as a member. He was received warmly a week later at his first meeting. Bonaparte's new colleagues doubtless respected his ornithological work, but they were probably influenced by his glamorous connection with Europe as well. Born in France and raised in Italy, Bonaparte had wealth and a title of sorts. He was the prince of Musignano, which was neither a country nor even a locality, but merely his father's house on a hill overlooking the Italian town of Canino, not far from Rome. Still, Bonaparte was an aristocrat, even if he wasn't a very impressive one physically. He had dark hair and eyes, and he was short and plump. Everyone agreed he was the spitting image of his late uncle Napoleon, the emperor of France.

When Mease took Audubon to meet Bonaparte a few days later, the two naturalists saw at once that they were quite different, though they had much in common. Audubon, obviously, was French. But he was poor and only marginally educated, and seemed uncomfortable in his surroundings after years away from civil society. For his part, Audubon regarded the little man before him as scarcely more than a boy—though he was literate and precocious and displayed the easy assurance of the upper class. Both men must have found their meeting in this way the kind of odd circumstance that could only happen in America.

Bonaparte brushed aside the awkwardness of the moment. Like most naturalists, he was insatiably curious. Bonaparte invited Audubon to show him his drawings and made space on a table where the portfolio, which seemed unusually large, could be opened. As Audubon fumbled with the string, Bonaparte may have allowed himself to hope the portfolio contained a bird or two he could add to a list he was making of undescribed or misidentified North American species. The New World was full of taxonomic opportunity. Bonaparte, who'd pored over rare illustrated texts and investigated European specimen collections of birds from around the world, expected that he knew more about these matters than almost anyone alive. And Bonaparte had a good idea of what Audubon's paintings might look like. With luck, they would be proper scientific renderings—clean, two-dimensional studies of the birds in static profile, wings demurely folded alongside their bodies, the plumages neatly colored against a white background. Such work required not only skill, but also discipline and a patient attention to detail—not exactly qualities that Audubon projected.

Bonaparte stepped nearer the table. Audubon opened his portfolio.

It is unclear at which meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences Audubon first appeared after that. But word of everything else that happened in Philadelphia that summer traveled far and for a long time, as is usually the case with bad news.

Bonaparte had been amazed by Audubon's drawings. In his brief time in the city, Audubon had met a few painters Mease knew, and they had praised his work. But Bonaparte was the first person who truly understood the significance of what Audubon had brought out of the wilderness—and also the first to share Audubon's passion for his subjects. The paintings were unlike anything the young prince had seen, though they depicted something he loved deeply—the terrible life-and-death struggle that is nature itself. Aububon's birds were breathtakingly beautiful. And huge—even the largest were painted to full life-size, some filling Audubon's enormous sheets of paper from edge to edge. But it was the aliveness of the images that startled and delighted Bonaparte. Instead of showing only what the birds looked like, Audubon had captured how they lived. Wheeling beneath storm-wracked skies, clamoring in bushes and trees, recoiling from attacking animals, or ripping flesh in bloody gobbets from freshly killed prey, Audubon's ferocious birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. This was not good form, not the accepted style at all. It was something totally new. To Bonaparte, the birds looked truly wild, much like the strange, nervous man standing next to him.

With Bonaparte as his patron, Audubon rushed through the city over the next several weeks, being introduced to artists and scientists. Meanwhile, his new acquaintances developed a fascination with the artist—an inquisitiveness Audubon met with a Kentucky storyteller's penchant for exaggeration. Audubon was quite a piece of work—shy and awkward one minute, a blustery braggart the next. Everyone wanted to know who he was and where he came from. His account of himself, even alongside the slight support Dr. Mease could offer, was difficult to swallow. Audubon claimed to have been born in the territory of Louisiana. His father, he said, served as an admiral in the French navy and had also been a hero in the American war of independence. His mother was a Creole of Spanish extraction, who was courted and married by his father at her sprawling plantation near New Orleans. After her untimely death, Audubon was taken to France, where he was adopted by his father's second wife and developed an interest in nature and painting. One of his teachers there, Audubon boasted, was the great portraitist Jacques-Louis David. At eighteen, Audubon had come to America to manage his father's property, a large farm called Mill Grove, just west of Philadelphia. From there, he said, he had traveled far, seeing much of the country while devoting himself to the study of birds, acquiring a knowledge of their ways and appearance that he felt sure was unequaled by any other ornithologist.

And that is how the real trouble started.

Audubon was on safe ground in his airy dismissal of European naturalists as "cabinet ornithologists" who studied American birds by looking at moth-eaten stuffed specimens, never setting foot in America. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson—who had identified more than one hundred new bird species and who feuded with scientists in France over the vigor and uniqueness of New World fauna—American naturalists had been eager to gain authority in their own country. In Philadelphia, especially among members of the academy, any informed opinion against European views of American natural history was enthusiastically received.

But Audubon threatened the legacy of Alexander Wilson, America's preeminent ornithologist and a hero in the cause of New World scientific independence. Wilson, who had come to Pennsylvania from Scotland in 1794, was a poet and naturalist. A lonely man, Wilson was repeatedly troubled by political and romantic intrigues. He supported himself as a weaver and peddler, and later by teaching school and working as a book editor. Wilson discovered an interest in birds after he was befriended by William Bartram, an eminent botanist whose well-stocked library in Philadelphia became Wilson's favorite retreat. In 1804, the year he was granted citizenship, Wilson had set out to draw and write about all the birds of North America. He was advised against it. He had limited artistic ability and the large, lavishly illustrated book he had in mind—what we would today think of as a coffee-table book—made little financial sense. It was almost sure to cost him more to publish than he could ever hope to earn back.

Wilson never did get rich. But he did publish American Ornithology. When he died suddenly in 1813 at the age of forty-seven, he had completed seven volumes and was working on the eighth. By any measure, it was the most handsome, the most expensive, and one of the most important works yet published about America. At the Academy of Natural Sciences, Wilson was revered as the "father of American ornithology"—a true giant in American natural history—and American Ornithology was regarded as an almost sacred text, the first major scientific publication produced in America by an American.

Audubon failed to be suitably impressed. He may have mentioned what he believed were mistakes in Wilson's taxonomy and drawings. He may have alluded to his later claim that he had actually met Wilson—in Kentucky. As Audubon recalled, Wilson had shown up in Louisville some years back, selling subscriptions to his book and looking for new birds. According to Audubon, Wilson had been flustered and then dismayed when Audubon, who seemed ready to purchase American Ornithology, instead got out his own bird drawings, which on comparison were decidedly superior to Wilson's. In an attempt to make his visitor feel better, Audubon said, he took Wilson hunting the next day and even helped him locate and bring down a new species of warbler—a bird Audubon now claimed Wilson had included in American Ornithology without acknowledgment.

All of this—the sketchy story of where he was from, the frontiers-man posturing, and especially the casual disparagements of Wilson—was in the air when Audubon at last made his way to the Academy of Natural Sciences on a Saturday evening sometime between May and the middle of July. He arrived with Bonaparte in the prince's carriage, stopping before a narrow, two-story brick building with high, arched windows. They walked down a sidewalk that skirted a courtyard and mounted a steep flight of stairs. Audubon, portfolio pressed to his side, was naively convinced that he stood on the threshold of acclaim.

Although the members of the academy were in the end divided in their feelings about Audubon and his birds—a few were enthusiastic about the drawings—the mood at the academy would swing against him. It was not entirely his fault, since there was little Audubon might have done differently that would have prevented the opposition of the long-faced man presiding over that evening's session.

The son of a rich ship chandler and rope maker, George Ord was only four years older than Audubon. He was a doughy, sharp-tongued man who had spent more time tending the family business and going to academy meetings than he had tramping the woods. His only serious attempt at field research was an abbreviated expedition to Florida with several academy colleagues in 1817. The explorers got as far as St. Augustine, where rumors of Indian unrest forced them to retreat. What Ord had that Audubon didn't was a reputation as a zoologist. Ord was also an influential promoter of American science—in particular the science of Alexander Wilson. Ord had been a close friend of Wilson's and was the executor of Wilson's estate—not that it amounted to much. Wilson died with many more liabilities than assets, but Ord construed his responsibility in larger terms. He'd completed Wilson's unfinished eighth volume of American Ornithology and had started on the ninth and final installment. Ord was protective not only of American Ornithology but also of Wilson's role in earning respect for American science, and he took an instantaneous dislike to Audubon that would congeal into lifelong hatred.

Ord dismissed Audubon's drawings, which he found gaudy and ridiculous. They were simply too, too much. Audubon, he said, had twisted his subjects into attitudes never seen in nature. The images were too big and too busy with extraneous elements like trees and flowers—Audubon had commingled zoology with botany! Ord did not limit his observations to Audubon's art and science. In the weeks following Audubon's appearance before the academy, Ord denounced him as a man without honor—an imposter and a liar who misrepresented himself and traduced the reputation of Alexander Wilson. Ord was delighted when he learned that a young artist named Joseph Mason, now working in Philadelphia, claimed to have collaborated with Audubon in Louisiana, painting background plants and flowers under the false impression that he was to be given credit for these contributions.

Audubon, who could well have wondered why he was set up for this
abuse, evidently didn't. He never questioned Bonaparte's motivations, which must have been complex, in bringing him to the academy. Bonaparte, who didn't have the same investment in "American" science as other members of the academy—and who did not share their reverence for Wilson— may have been insensitive to the politics of the situation. More likely, he wanted to see what would happen when Audubon's brash new interpretation of North American birds came up against Wilson's. Bonaparte hinted at a future partnership with Audubon. But he was already engaged in a delicate business of collaborating with Ord on the continuation of American Ornithology while at the same time drafting a series of papers for the academy disputing many entries in the Wilson classic. His loyalties divided, Bonaparte sided with nobody, steering a middle course that Audubon—hungry for the prince's approval—went along with.

Bonaparte was circumspect as well, carefully avoiding asking Audubon too many questions. But he could easily have checked out his new friend's story. Jacques-Louis David, Audubon's supposed teacher, had recently painted portraits of Bonaparte's wife and sister-in-law. And Louisiana was not the faraway place to Bonaparte that Audubon assumed it was in claiming it as home. Bonaparte's father had negotiated the 1801 treaty with Spain that ceded the territory to France—two years before his uncle Napoleon sold it to Thomas Jefferson.

Audubon's company stole some of the luster from Bonaparte's reputation around Philadelphia. They seemed an odd, guileless pair—one compact and neat, the other a hulk fresh out of the woods, both of them so animated and eager, so French. Their manners were foreign and their instincts for doing the wrong thing infallible. After the disastrous visit to the academy, Bonaparte had another idea. He took Audubon to see Philadelphia's most accomplished engraver, a man named Alexander Lawson. Lawson, who had engraved the plates for American Ornithology and who had stood by Wilson during the arduous years of its production, had already heard all about Audubon from George Ord. Bonaparte and Audubon called at Lawson's shop one morning early enough to wake him up.

Lawson could not believe that Bonaparte took Audubon seriously. Flipping through Audubon's portfolio, Lawson repeated Ord's complaints about the drawings. They were too big. The images were mushy, and in some cases wrong. The birds looked unnatural. He told Audubon he could understand why some people liked his work—it really wasn't bad for a self-taught amateur. But ornithology, Lawson said, was about "truth" and "correct lines." When Audubon mentioned his training under David, Lawson was incredulous. He was even more put out when Bonaparte suggested that he wanted to publish some of Audubon's drawings. "You may buy them," Lawson said, "but I will not engrave them."

Audubon was not without supporters. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, a fellow French expatriate and illustrator who had discovered more than two thousand new species of fish on a daring expedition to the South Pacific, considered Audubon's drawings brilliant. But he suggested that Audubon would be more likely to find a publisher for them in Europe. Lesueur cosponsored Audubon's nomination to the academy. Although the bylaws stipulated that election of a new member required a unanimous vote, this was not normally a great obstacle. Admission to the academy after being nominated was almost automatic. So the vote on Audubon, in the face of stiff opposition to his election, was an unusual one. Members cast their votes by dropping either a white (yes) or a black (no) marble into a small wooden box. Ord, though he could have blocked Audubon's election by himself, lobbied against Audubon's suitability and expected support from his colleagues. He got it. When the vote for Audubon was counted on August 31 he had been officially blackballed.

Audubon was, by then, long gone. Sensing that the situation in Philadelphia was hopeless, he decided not to wait out his rejection at the academy and instead left for New York at the start of August. He found the city empty in the heat of late summer—and learned that word of his failure in Philadelphia was already spreading. Facing dim prospects of finding a publisher for his drawings, Audubon visited the Lyceum, New York's version of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences. His work was so admired there that he was invited to deliver a paper and was hastily elected a member. But he continued to feel uncomfortable in these gatherings, and grew increasingly "cloudy and depressed" in the city. Audubon entertained the contradictory thought, reflecting his doubt and ambition all at once, that he had wasted his life and might "die unknown." After a few weeks he decided to return to Louisiana. He took his time, traveling through upstate New York, earning a few dollars sketching landscapes as he went. He idled for weeks watching the waterfowl massing ahead of their migrations before making his way to Pittsburgh, where he managed to buy a skiff and head downriver. Unshaven and wearing moccasins, he visited Victor at Shippingport, where he endured the stares of townsfolk appalled at his appearance. By the time he got home it was late fall. He had been gone for more than a year.

On the long way back, Audubon had weighed his options. He would have to find the means to go to Europe to publish his work. That seemed certain. Audubon was less sure how to deal with the most widely shared criticism of his drawings—their size. It had never occurred to him to scale down his birds from their natural dimensions. He had invented his own technique for posing freshly killed specimens against a grid so that he could copy them exactly. To accommodate larger birds like turkeys and eagles, Audubon used the largest available papers—a size called "double elephant" that measured nearly forty by twenty-seven inches—and even then long-necked birds like cranes or swans had to be bent into somewhat contrived positions to make them fit. Publishing these large color images would be, Audubon had been assured, utterly impractical. It would cost a fortune to produce, and even if it could be managed who would want to buy such a huge and expensive book?

Floating downriver under the stars, traveling by day with the birds once again going in his direction, Audubon decided there was no answer to those questions other than to try anyway. Audubon had many gifts, but perhaps none was more valuable than his short memory for hardships and reversals. He forgot about his critics in Philadelphia and reflected instead on his luck at having met there a few people who were more encouraging. Thinking about his drawings, Audubon had a sudden insight. He didn't want to change their scale—but he could put them in a more appealing order. There were large birds, medium birds, small birds—a crude visual phylogeny. Audubon began to imagine his drawings produced in groups, each composed of one large image accompanied by several smaller ones.

While Audubon drifted back into the wilds of America, in Philadelphia George Ord sniffled back into his work on "American Ornithology," hoarding new species and descriptions, feeling himself well rid of a would-be usurper of Alexander Wilson's legacy. It had been a nasty job, but a necessary one. Ord was not about to let American science lose the ground it had gained in recent years by endorsing Audubon's substandard work. Besides, the man was obviously a fraud—as dishonest as his drawings were worthless. Audubon, he was sure, was headed back to the swamps of Louisiana where he belonged, unlikely to be heard from again.

As it turned out, Ord was right about a few things. Audubon was not exactly who he claimed to be. His father was not an admiral. He had not been born in Louisiana. He never studied with Jacques-Louis David. John James Audubon, in fact, was not even his real name.

CHAPTER TWO

COMING ACROSS

Troglodytes hyemalis: The Winter Wren
The extent of the migratory movements of this diminutive bird, is certainly the most remarkable fact connected with its history.—Ornithological Biography

At the end of the eighteenth century, the coastal settlement of Les Cayes looked out over a busy Caribbean harbor on the southwestern arm of Saint-Domingue—the island known today as Haiti. It is a poor country now, but in those days it was not. After Columbus landed there, the island was plundered and its native Indian population destroyed. For more than two centuries Saint-Domingue was home to wild cattle and pigs and an equally unruly assortment of English, Spanish, and French colonists and freebooters. By the late 1700s, the western portion of the island was under French control and had grown far richer than the Spanish part to the east. Sugar and coffee plantations, built on the blood and sweat of African slaves, prospered. At night, a ribbon of lights from towns and sugar mills along the coast traced the line of the sea, and Saint-Domingue was known throughout Europe as a thriving and bountiful colony, ripe with opportunity.

On April 26, 1785, a twenty-seven-year-old chambermaid named Jeanne Rabin, recently arrived from France, delivered a baby boy after a difficult two days of labor at a plantation just outside of Les Cayes. Rabin, already weak from the effects of unremitting tropical illnesses, never fully recovered after the baby arrived. Despite frequent medical attention brought to her by the baby's father, a French sea captain from Nantes named Jean Audubon, Rabin died a few months later.

Audubon's mulatto housekeeper Sanitte, with whom he already had two children and would soon have another, took charge of the infant. This tangled domestic arrangement—Audubon also had a legal wife back in France—relied on unstated conventions between whites and people of color, but it was a relatively uncomplicated situation in the loose social climate of the island. Audubon and Rabin had met on board ship from France. Sanitte stepped aside when the captain's new love showed up at the plantation—and then resumed her position as lady of the house after Rabin died.

They called the little boy Jean Rabin. His early childhood was happy. Saint-Domingue was lush and mountainous, with thick forests and a warm, hypnotic sea close by. The abundant wildlife delighted Jean, who showed a curiosity about nature as soon as he could talk. Though his father was often absent and his mother had died before he knew her, the boy had the run of the plantation and several half-siblings to play with. Yellow fever and malaria were epidemic on the island, and European settlers complained of Saint-Domingue's oppressive heat and torrential rains. But the climate suited Audubon's children. Young Jean's eyes were often turned upward, looking to the trees and across the wide tropical sky for birds, which were everywhere in dizzying profusion. Pelicans, sandpipers, frigate birds, herons, parrots, cuckoos, trogons, gulls, terns, plovers, and owls were common. In winter months they were joined by eagles, mallows, warblers, shearwaters, grosbeaks, and hosts of other species from the north.

Jean Audubon continued a hard life at sea. He first sailed at the age of thirteen, and at fifteen was wounded and captured when his ship was attacked by the British. After a year and a half in an English prison, Audubon returned to France and again went to sea, eventually gaining command of his own merchant ship. Seeking his fortune in the New World, Audubon acquired the plantation at Les Cayes and was soon trading in cargoes of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and slaves. In 1779, with the American Revolution in progress, he was again captured at sea by British forces and this time imprisoned in New York. After his release, he briefly commanded a French naval corvette just as the war was ending.

In the spring of 1789, with another revolution brewing in France, Audubon looked to diversify his assets. He sailed to America with a shipload of sugar, which he traded for a farm called Mill Grove, twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. But the deal was no sooner done than Audubon had a new worry. The colonists in Saint-Domingue had become alarmed at mounting unrest among the slaves—unrest being the simmering final stage before open rebellion. With only 35,000 French colonists on the island and close to a half-million black slaves, the civil order of Saint-Domingue was balanced on a knife's edge of colonial privilege and racial oppression. Nervous authorities there declared white control "in imminent peril." They blamed the sudden instability on whites who were, in the words of one official communique, "drunk with liberty" and sympathetic to blacks demanding enfranchisement. In fact, Saint-Domingue was on the brink of a fifteen-year struggle toward independence that would produce a general evacuation of the French colonists. Those who didn't leave were eventually massacred.

For a time Audubon believed his family in Les Cayes was more or less safe, as long as he stayed away. But as the situation deteriorated he worried about six-year-old Jean, who was white, as well as his younger mixed-blood half-sister, Rose, who was unusually fair. Finally, he arranged passage to France for the two children. They arrived in June of 1791, eyes wide open at this strange country an ocean away from their home, and thrilled at being reunited with their father and at meeting his wife Anne. Three years later, the Audubons corrected the children's ambiguous status by adopting them.

Jean Rabin became Jean Audubon. He was sent to school, where he showed an interest in making pencil sketches of birds, but was otherwise an indifferent student. At the age of eleven, he was enrolled at the naval academy at Rochefort. There he became an accomplished musician—he played the flute and the violin—and learned to dance and fence. He was also known for his swimming prowess. All of which was somewhat beside the point. Young Audubon did miserably in his military training, and also demonstrated a propensity for seasickness. After three years, he was dismissed for failing several classes. His disappointed father, who was about to retire after reaching the mid-level rank of commander in the French Navy, began to think his son needed a change of scenery and occupation.

In March 1803, the elder Audubon received unexpected news from America. The tenant farmer living at Mill Grove had discovered lead ore on the property. Lead, with its many uses in munitions and paints, was a valuable commodity. Audubon dispatched an agent from Nantes to open a mine at Mill Grove, and turned his attention to his now-eighteen-year-old son. Napoleon was conscripting an army on the eve of declaring himself emperor. The Audubons were not eager to see their son drafted and thought his prospects would be brighter in America. In August, they put young Jean on a ship bound for New York—but not before extracting a promise from him that he would never reveal his illegitimate birth. When he walked down the gangway at the piers on the East River in Manhattan a few weeks later, Jean carried documents stating that he was from Louisiana—the sprawling western territory the United States had just acquired from France. The papers gave his name as John James Audubon.

While Audubon was a toddler being dandled in the gentle surf at Les Cayes, a book of poetry was causing a sensation on the other side of the world, in Scotland. Its author, a peasant farmer named Robert Burns, had gained overnight celebrity for a slim volume of earthy verse treating everyday subjects. Despite a modest first printing of six hundred copies, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect stirred readers of every kind, from the literati in Edinburgh to field hands and tradesmen who saw their own lives and passions reflected in Burns's lines about love and work. Imitators appeared across the country. One of them was a twenty-year-old weaver named Alexander Wilson, who lived in the town of Paisley. It seemed that everyone in Paisley was either a weaver or a poet. Many fancied themselves both.

Now a suburb of Glasgow, Paisley was then the fastest-growing city in Scotland. Situated on the pretty White Cart River in a region known as "the Seedhills," the town was a model of the new industrial and trading prosperity. It was also a hub on the smuggling routes from America and the Far East. Goods moving between the beaches on the Firth of Clyde and Glasgow regularly passed through Paisley. Sugar and tobacco were smuggled, as was a large quantity of tea, all in avoidance of British taxes. As much as half the tea consumed in England entered the country illegally, principally by way of Scotland.

But it was cloth making—in particular its trademark patterned silk gauzes—for which Paisley was better known, and to which its comfortable middle class was indebted. Weavers endured tedious, physically exhausting hours at their looms but earned good money. Many of them belonged to after-hours clubs, associations of fellow workers who shared pastimes such as fishing, hunting, political debate, and especially golf. In the summer, when twilight lingered late in western Scotland, the weavers of Paisley could be seen heading out for rounds of golf long after their workdays and dinners were done.

As a boy, Wilson was called Sandy—short for Alexander—a gentle, fair nickname for a child who was neither. Wilson had dark hair and eyes. He was thin, but grew tall and passably handsome, with sharp, solemn features. The Wilson family fortunes were up and down. His father traded smuggling for weaving and respectability when he married, and for a time the family's prospects were sunny. Young Sandy, who was bright and bookish, was sent to school in preparation for joining the clergy. But his mother's death when he was only ten changed everything. His father quickly remarried, and Wilson's stern new stepmother ended his studies and sent him to work as a cowherd on the windswept moors between Paisley and the coast. The solitude and the countryside appealed to him, but Wilson was not good at this work. He much preferred reading and contemplating nature to tending the herd, which often strayed.

At thirteen, Wilson accepted a three-year apprenticeship as a weaver. When his father renewed his smuggling activities, the family moved about ten miles west of Paisley, to an ancient, half-ruined castle called the Tower of Auchinbathie, leaving Wilson behind to learn his trade. Nobody knew for sure how old the tower was, but local legend held that it had once been owned by the father of William Wallace, the national hero of Scottish independence, in the thirteenth century. Wilson visited his family there on weekends. He took up hunting and was often out with his gun, chasing grouse across the fields near a well-known hilltop called Misty Law, the highest place in the county.

Wilson was a distractible young man. He developed a love of poetry, memorizing the mock epic poems of Alexander Pope, and often reciting verse or composing his own while he worked at his loom. He took a job in a weaving shop near Edinburgh, and began spending part of his time on the road peddling the cloth he helped to make. He traveled from one end of Scotland to another on foot, calling at farmhouses and in towns. When business was good, he stayed in inns and wrote to his friends from fashionable addresses. His letters often included poems or fragments of poems. Sometimes the whole letter was in verse. Wilson was moody, and he walked through a land of moods. With midnight approaching on New Year's Eve in 1788, Wilson wrote to a friend back in Edinburgh from St. Andrews, on the dark threshold of the North Sea, reflecting on the universal human failure to take advantage of a short life on Earth:

Respected Sir,
Far distant, in an inn's third storey rear'd,
The sheet beneath a glimmering taper spread,
Along the shadowy walls no sound is heard,
Save Time's slow, constant, momentary tread.

Here lone I sit; and will you, sir, excuse
My midnight theme, while (feebly as she can)
Inspiring silence bids the serious Muse

Survey the transient bliss pursued by Man.
Deluded Man, for him Spring paints the fields:
For him, warm Summer rears the rip'ning grain;
He grasps the bounty that rich Autumn yields,

And counts those trifles as essential gain.
For him, yes, sure, for him those mercies flow!
Yet, why so passing, why so fleet their stay?

To teach blind mortals what they first should know,
That all is transient as the fleeting day.

When Wilson was broke, he slept in the open or in barns and wrote to no one. The travel proved agreeable. Wilson was an eager sightseer, visiting historic locations, archeological curiosities, old golf courses. He made frequent detours on private pilgrimages to the homes of well-known writers. Wilson was also always on the lookout for graveyards, where he stopped to add to his collection of epitaphs copied from headstones.

Wilson's idol, Robert Burns, who lived only a short distance from the Tower of Auchinbathie, found his subjects all around him. Burns wrote about farms and churches and country life. Poetry seemed to abide, waiting to be born, in the gray airs over Scotland. And nothing was outside the realm of literature, no subject was too mundane for a poet's consideration. Burns wrote an ode to a field mouse he'd accidentally run over with a plough, and told the tale of a hardworking farmer's Saturday night.

His poems were frequently crowded with descriptions of the natural world:

The Wintry West extends his blast, And hail and rain does blaw;
Or, the stormy North sends driving forth,
The blinding sleet and snaw:

While, tumbling brown, the Burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast, in covert, rest,
And pass the heartless day.

Many heartless days were in Alexander Wilson's future, but the power to describe them as Burns did would mainly elude him. Like Burns, Wilson was attuned to his surroundings. Unlike Burns, his vocabulary and his imagery were mostly uninspired borrowings. The cleverness and sensitivity friends detected in Wilson himself rarely materialized in his writing. He wrote a poem about his hunting spaniel. When he abruptly ended a flirtation with a girl working for his family and she poisoned the dog out of spite, he wrote a poem about that, too. Wilson wrote poems about his life on the road that inspected every particular of his experience. A lost pack. A rainy night. The way a drop of water would form at the end of his nose on a cold winter day, "dangling, limpid as the brain it leaves." Wilson's eyes were open to the world around him, but what he saw came across as trivial and dull in his poetry.

Wilson began to chafe under a growing burden of unrealized ambitions. He barely scraped by on the money he made weaving and peddling. He fell in love with a woman named Martha McLean. Martha was beautiful, literate—and just out of Wilson's reach. Her family was proper, and they viewed Wilson, who was poor and aimless and worryingly artistic, as unsuitable. But the two met often, and talked of poetry as they walked in the evenings beside the Cart. In Wilson's mind at least, an erotic attraction formed between them. He wrote poems about Martha's ravishing beauty, describing in panting verse improbable late-night assignations on the moonlit moors.

But Wilson's fascination with Martha stalled. In addition to the social chasm between them, Wilson's attentions were often elsewhere. And so was he. Encouraged to publish his poetry—not everyone thought him without talent—he found a printer who agreed to bring out a book if Wilson would sell subscriptions to it in advance. He succeeded in selling a few hundred copies on a peddling tour, but it was far less than he had hoped. Wilson had to beg forgiveness from the cloth supplier whose goods he had neglected on the trip, and only a last-minute subscription and promise of help from a local nobleman allowed publication of his book to go forward. Perversely, Wilson grew morose just as things seemed to be looking up for him.

Admittedly, Wilson's situation was largely unchanged. But he complained that he had become the caricature of a struggling poet, afflicted by poverty, dressed in tattered clothing, and living alone in his garret with only "lank hunger and poetical misery" for company. A wiser man, Wilson felt, would give up the literary life and earn an honest laborer's living. As his anxieties over Martha and money mounted, Wilson lost weight, becoming shockingly emaciated. He fell ill, probably with pneumonia, and was bedridden at the tower in grave condition for months. His family was convinced he would die. But he didn't.

Wilson recovered and went back to work weaving. He also resumed writing, and, for the first time, politics figured in his verse. The ideas of God-granted liberty and individual rights, recently articulated and won during the revolution in the American colonies, were spreading across Europe. Weavers in Scotland were beginning to question their treatment by the owners of looming operations, and Wilson joined the attack, anonymously publishing a series of satirical poems describing certain recognizable Paisley mill owners as cheats. One of these poems resulted in a civil suit against Wilson, who defended himself by arguing that the poem was not about the plaintiff. Nothing ever came of the case. In the meantime, Wilson kept up a proper appearance. He placed second in a speech contest in Edinburgh—his was in verse—and then landed a job as an assistant editor on a fledgling literary magazine. Word spread that his book had been recommended to Robert Burns himself, and that the great poet had actually sent for a copy.

Wilson then did something inexplicably weird. One day in May 1792, he went to Glasgow, apparently to visit a printer. While he was away, a mill owner named William Sharp turned up at the sheriff's office in Paisley waving two documents. One was the manuscript of a long, inflammatory poem titled "The Shark." It was about a boozy mill owner who exploited his workers. Sharp believed he was the subject of the poem—a complaint the sheriff found reasonable, given that the second document was an extortion letter.

The letter informed Sharp that a copy of "The Shark" was with a printer and would be published at once unless Sharp returned a payment of five guineas within three hours, whereupon the poem would be destroyed. The note was signed "A.B." Nobody had any idea who A.B. was, but Sharp accused Alexander Wilson of being the author of the poem. Wilson was arrested later that day. He spent the next two years in and out of jail, regularly changing his story.

Wilson confounded everyone by admitting that he had written the letter. But he refused to identify the author of the poem, or to say whether he was part of a conspiracy. Eventually, he admitted to writing the poem as well. But he insisted, just as he had in the earlier case, that any similarity to an actual person in "The Shark" was purely coincidental. This was a crude defense—the blackmail attempt made it clear that the poem was aimed at Sharp—and Wilson was fined ($270), about a year's salary, which he of course did not have. More ominously, a review of the offending poem was launched under the provisions of a new law prohibiting the publication of revolutionary materials. Wilson was threatened with a charge of treason.

Over the course of many months, Wilson was interrogated, fined, jailed, released on bond, and jailed again when he failed to appear in court. A judge awarded ($225) in damages to Sharp. Wilson, unable to pay the damages or the fines, skipped more hearings. This led to contempt charges and still more fines. At one point Wilson was made to burn copies of "The Shark" in public, and endured the humiliation of having his bail paid anonymously by Martha McLean, who could no longer openly have anything to do with Wilson. The Paisley jail became a second home. It was a squalid, oppressive existence. The food provided to the inmates was so bad that prisoners often avoided starvation only if they could afford to buy meals from a commissary on the premises. Wilson borrowed from friends to stay alive and to get out when he could. Ironically, it was at this time that Wilson published his one truly popular poem—a first-rate comedy about an argument between a husband and wife titled "Watty and Meg." It sold unexpectedly well. But not well enough. Wilson was soon broke again and back among the "wretches." Jail, he said, was a daily horror show. He felt entombed by "the rumbling of bolts, the hoarse exclamations of the jailor, the sighs and sallow countenances of the prisoners, and the general gloom of the place." During one of his releases, in the spring of 1794, Wilson decided to go to America. Taking care not to tip off the authorities, Wilson hastily scraped together the fare. On May 23, he sailed for Philadelphia aboard the "Swift," accompanied by his sixteen-year-old nephew, William Duncan. "I must get out of my mind," Wilson said to a friend just before leaving.

Crossing the Atlantic was then a common but still hair-raising experience. In addition to the risks of bad weather or other misfortune, the ships were usually overcrowded and disease-ridden. Wilson waited until he and Duncan had safely arrived in Philadelphia before writing to his family about the trip.

They'd gone first to Belfast, Ireland, and had a look at the Swift that almost decided them against going. Surveying the throng of passengers, 350 in all, Wilson doubted half would survive the voyage in the dank, cramped spaces below decks, where the berths were no wider than a coffin. The good news, as they chose to see it, was that passage on deck was all that remained available. After they determined themselves to be among the fitter specimens in the crowd, Wilson and Duncan gamely got aboard, never to see Scotland again. They were seasick for a few days but soon felt better in fair weather and gentle seas. Once away from land, one of the passengers, a physician, revealed that he recently had been tried as a seditionist and condemned to death in Ireland. Rum was found and everyone drank to the doctor's health and the cause of liberty the world over. In three weeks of pleasant sailing only three passengers died, an old woman and two children.

In the middle of the voyage, the "Swift" passed for two days through a maze of "ice islands." Wilson was astounded at the size and number of the icebergs. Some were more than twice as high as the ship's tallest mast. At one time he counted thirty-four of them surrounding the vessel. A steady breeze pushed the ship onward until they got through. But soon after they were hit by a terrific storm—the most violent Wilson had ever seen. A day later, one of the sailors fell overboard. He swam strongly after the ship and came agonizingly close. But despite every effort, the man could not be rescued.

(This book excerpt ends on page 27 of the hardcover edition)

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