This Strange Wilderness: The Life and Art of John James Audubon (7 page)

Lizars wrote from Edinburgh to say that his colorists were on strike, and he advised Audubon to find a new engraver. After days of trudging up and down London streets, Audubon met a father-and-son team, Robert Havell Sr. and Robert Havell Jr. The older Havell was a colorist, the younger an engraver. They made a sample print of one of Audubon’s birds. When he saw it, he wanted to hug and kiss them but danced around the room instead. The Havells were even better at their work than Lizars. Faster and cheaper, too.

Not everyone idolized the American artist. One aristocrat, the Earl of Kinnoul, called Audubon to his mansion to tell him that his pictures were a “swindle.”
18
To the earl, all the birds looked alike. Audubon held his temper in front of “the rudest man I have met in this land.”
19
But later, he wrote that the earl looked like a bird himself, “with a face
like the caricature of an owl.”
20
Then came news from Philadelphia that his old enemy, George Ord, was in a fury over scientific papers that Audubon had written. In one Audubon described experiments he had conducted that showed that vultures find their prey by sight, not scent. In another, he claimed that rattlesnakes could climb trees. “Lies,” fumed Ord, and he teamed up with an English naturalist named Charles Waterton to try to ruin Audubon’s reputation.
21
But these men were “crazed Naturalists of the Closet,” countered Audubon.
22
They stayed home and merely read about nature while he, Audubon, went out to see it for himself. In time Audubon’s findings on the vulture
would be proven largely correct. His paper on the snake, although it contained other errors, was also right: rattlesnakes
can
climb trees.

“I do any thing for money now a days,” he told Lucy.
23
In between his stays in the big cities of Scotland and England, he toured the smaller ones, looking for new subscribers and collecting money from old ones. In September 1828 he went to Paris—his first time back to France in twenty-two years. Both his parents were dead now, but his sister, Rose, was still living in Couëron. Audubon did not visit her. Instead he stayed in the city, enjoying French coffee, which he thought was the best in the world, and trying to sell his book. Although he did not sign up many new subscribers, he met with Baron Georges Cuvier, the most respected naturalist in France. Cuvier took one look at Audubon’s portfolio and called it “the greatest monument erected by art to nature.”
24
Cuvier introduced Audubon to the duc d’Orléans, who would soon become King Louis-Philippe. D’Orléans subscribed to
The Birds of America
, and so did the current French king, Charles X.

Back in London, Audubon concluded, “I have not worked in vain.”
25
He had won great praise in Europe. And his “Great Idea,” thanks to the Havells’ engravings, was on its way to becoming a reality. But by 1829 he had been away from America for three years. His marriage with Lucy was at the breaking point, and he had missed seeing his sons grow from boys to young men. He had more work to do in America, too, with more species to find. On April 1, having left the Havells with enough watercolors to keep them busy for a whole year, Audubon boarded the ship
Columbus
and headed for home. Out on the Atlantic, he thought about the twists and turns his life had taken—“Fortune if not blind certainly Must have his Lunatic Moments.”
26
He had left America under a cloud of bankruptcy and failure. He was coming home a star.

7

Team Audubon

Audubon did not rush to Louisiana to see Lucy. Now that
The Birds of America
was in production, he was in a race against time to collect as many species as he could. He had begged his wife to understand: “Thou knowest I must
draw hard
from Nature
every day
that I am in America.”
1
Everything else, even family, would have to wait. If the 1820s were a storm of activity for him, the 1830s would be a hurricane. In a time when horseback, stagecoach, and steamboat were the main means of travel, he would cover an almost impossible amount of territory. Not only would he make three more trips back and forth across the Atlantic, but he would crisscross North America—east, south, north, and west.

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
:

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

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

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:

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 member 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

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.