Creation (9 page)

It is important work, the hydrographical survey. He had said this to the same young lady at Castle St. Lewis in Quebec. Crucial, defining work, to verify the boundary of this country and the United States.
It is a difficult boundary because so much of it is water. Water is a most unreliable surface. Beyond that, the survey marks the channels that are safe for navigating. The Admiralty wants our charts quickly now, as the number of shipwrecks in the Gulf is rising, he had explained, even as he spoke, feeling a rising urgency to be off.

Briefly, Collins’s head appears out of the mist covering the deck. His voice rises and falls, saying what, Bayfield cannot quite grasp. He thinks of the time they were both young assistants under William FitzWilliam Owen in 1814. He, Bayfield, had expected to fight a war and had been selected not for valour but for the neatness of his handwriting. Collins, a midshipman at the time, was relieved to have steady occupation that did not involve the use of violence. They cut their teeth on the Thousand Islands, verifying the American boundary from Montreal to Kingston in anticipation of another war with the United States. In fact, there are more than one thousand islands. There are 1,768 between Brockville and Kingston, ranging from a size of one acre to twenty-two square miles, to be precise. Owen drove them to exhaustion, day and night, even in winter, until even he had to concede it was too difficult to pierce the ice and handle the frozen lines.

And the islands! So many that the naming of them became a delirium. They began with groups: the Old Friends, the Hydrographers (half a dozen named after each other), the Statesmen, the Admiralty (all the British Lords), the Navy Isles, and the Lake Fleet (including nineteen vessels or types of vessels including the Punts, the Cutters, Gig and so on). But soon they ran out of words. It is a solemn act to confer a name; it gave one the feeling of being a god.

That has been his story.

Come for a war and found a boundary.

Come to survey a boundary and found nothing so simple as a line through water: found land smashed up and broken to bits, humped and rising out of water, shallow and sometimes disappearing. Irrational, useless and obstructing land, needing to be made sense of.

With Collins’s help, he finished in August 1816 and presented his masterpiece, “A Chart of Lake Ontario, Scale 0.835 Inches to a Mile of Longitude, or about 1.65432. Particular Places on a Scale of 1.12,000” to the Lords of the Admiralty. But the Lords were fickle; the survey was no longer essential, as peace had been achieved, and the longest undefended border in the world had been established by the Treaty of Ghent. The Lords sent Owen off to Africa and suggested abandoning the Great Lakes survey, “unless you want to leave Bayfield to do it.”

“
Bayfield had been selected not for
valour but for the neatness of his handwriting
.”

So Bayfield became lieutenant and almost by default went on to complete the survey himself. Lakes Erie, Ontario, Superior and Huron with its enormous sidecar, “la mer douce,” Georgian Bay, followed. He did it all in two small boats, with only Collins to help. The waters were capricious, festering with granite teeth both above and below the waterline. In the early 1820s, they were granted chronometers to determine longitude. Now he had the means to make his survey perfect, and he was determined to. There were more islands, including a long archipelago in Georgian Bay.

He arrived in London in 1825 with the product of their immense labour: the completed surveys of Lakes Huron, Erie and Superior, including charts of no fewer than twenty thousand islands. He thought perhaps he would be sent to Africa, where Owen was, or the Indian Ocean, or the Pacific, where Cook was. But no.

Instead he was promptly put on half pay. Half pay meant ten shillings and sixpence a day. What was worse was that he had nothing to do. He took up residence in his brother’s Chelsea house, and paced the banks of the Thames. His mother wrote from Bayfield Hall that she feared he was wearing himself out in “the fleshpots of London.” He could not visualize a fleshpot, but he would not tell his mother that. He read and watched the traffic on the Thames. This went on for an interminable year and a half until Owen returned from Africa, found him languishing and promptly made an appointment with Lord Melville.

The Canadian survey had given the Admiralty ideas. The survey was mammoth; it made a claim; it gave glory to Pax Britannica. They had done such a fine job with their chronometers that the Admiralty now made chronometers available for all His Majesty’s ships.

Through Owen’s intervention, Bayfield was promoted to captain. He took on the task that, he imagines, will occupy the rest of his working life — the survey of the St. Lawrence to the sea, and the
entire eastern seaboard of Canada including the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, and the islands of Anticosti, Prince Edward and Cape Breton, and Nova Scotia. This summer he will proceed into the most dangerous part of it all, the isolated and treacherous coast of Labrador, as far as the Strait of Belle Isle.

Thousands, tens of thousands, more islands.

He will spend his life amongst these ropes and sails. That was determined when he was a lad. He did not question it. Boys are the best warriors, unfettered by conscience, by remorse, by compassion. Or at least boys raised as he was, to be leaders of men. It was his duty to take charge of others, and, if necessary, to lay down his life on their behalf. He seemed to recall the moment when he was told this. He sat in a large chair and his feet did not touch the floor.

Henry sits now, legs wrapped around the mast, and looks over the top of the fog into the other direction. Though grey cloud clogs the foreground, such is the perversity of this fog that he can see the shore a hundred yards away. Speaking of the devil, he spots the painter walking on shore. His posture, the eagerness and set of his step, put Bayfield in mind of Captain John Franklin, whom he met at Fort William on Lake Superior. Franklin and his party of thirty-three were on their way to the Arctic coast. It was in May of 1825. It strikes Bayfield that these men share a fiendish determination that separates them from others. Where does it come from? Is it all these hours alone in the weather and the wild? Or is it from setting oneself a near-impossible task that tempts God? Perhaps he, Henry Wolsey Bayfield, might appear fiendish himself. He prays not.

Audubon is likely doomed, too, Henry thinks. Then he wonders why he should think that. Was it the joy and relief on his face as he thought of returning to his birds last evening?

The
Gulnare
’s figurehead emerges for a moment from the fog beneath him. Her wooden shoulders and back make Bayfield smile. If he were alone and out of sight of Bowen and all of the crew, a highly unlikely possibility in the close quarters of the schooner, he would go and stroke her shoulders. What would if be like to feel love? No doubt pleasant enough, but troublesome. Lust is that way.

The painter climbs up on a rock and disappears into a billow of fog.

Henry takes one last look around. The coast is out there, unmeasured, unknown, untamed. He climbs down the mast.

“Impenetrable in all directions, save for from a distance of fifty feet up!” he announces to Bowen. “We shan’t go anywhere today. Have the men swab the deck. And scrape the boards clean in the hold.”

“Why don’t you take a walk onshore and look at the rocks?”

“Thank you, Bowen, for your suggestion. I’ll give it due consideration,” Bayfield says dryly.

His lieutenant flushes.

When Bayfield enters his cabin, the ticking assails him. It is as if the moments up in the rigging above the fog erased time for a stretch. Now that it is back, it finds an easy way to his nerves. Time pressing implacably on is not what he wishes to hear. He takes a length of chain, some lead weights and his leather book, and heads for the
Owen
. At least he can take a sounding.

The
KILLING

I
n the way of footing, the harbour offers two extremes: uneven eruptions of rock and an evil-smelling mixture of drowned grasses and black mulch.

Audubon tries the muck. It is deeper than he thinks. The instant he steps in it, it swallows his leg up to and above the rim of his hob-nailed boot. Dragging it out (suck suck suck pop), then placing it ahead, where it sinks again (with a sound like a fart), he feels he walks with ball and chain. As he would in debtor’s prison. He drags up his foot, nearly losing the boot, and wades toward the rock, which seems to shoot up at him as if with intent to injure. Once out of the muck, he springs light-footed from jagged head to jagged head. Rejoicing in his nimbleness he leaps onward until his foot slides into a crevice and the boot is caught. The same boot that sank in the mud. This is the land that eats boots.

He sits and pulls. His muck-slippered foot pops out but the boot remains firmly wedged three feet down. Below it, the fissure opens to a window of red sand over which the sea sucks and foams, then disappears with a hollow thump. He contemplates abandoning the boot but he needs it. He has no other footwear except thigh-high moccasins made of sealskin, and their soles are not hard enough for this punishing surface.

He lies on his stomach, exposing his gut to a rough fist of rock. He reaches down with a long arm. Long but not long enough. The boot beckons another six inches below. A surge of sea comes up to ruffle its sole.

He shifts to his side, the aggressive fist pushing now into his kidney. He grasps the upper of the boot. He pulls. Nothing happens.

He rolls on his back. The clouds are scudding quickly; the fog may blow off. It is three o’clock in the afternoon and he already put in ten hours at the deal table in the hold. His eyes ache. His back is tired. His brain is fevered. The stuck boot seems an insurmountable problem.

The black rock on which he lies is rough and porous. Under its carapace the sea expands and retreats with hollow, percussive sighs. He closes his eyes. Peace, he admonishes himself, peace. He thinks of Maria. Bachman’s last letter reverberates in his mind, the one he received in Boston just before he left. “Our sweetheart … willing as ever to do backgrounds. To gratify you will always afford her pleasure.”

The man does not know what he is saying.

He sees an eagle above him, soaring. It plunges from the sky. He turns his head to watch as it emerges from the water triumphant with a fish in its claws. It rises into the blanket of fog, then reappears like a ghost gliding in circles. How does the eye of the eagle penetrate this grey mist? Does the eagle see him, a little X on the rock?

He realizes with a shock that he has painted himself from an eagle’s-eye view. It was the last painting he finished before coming to Labrador. He was a little X then too, insignificant, and caught straddling a log over a chasm.

That golden eagle was magnificent, a male that had been caught in a fox trap in the White Mountains. A man from the Boston Museum came to Audubon’s rooms with the cage in his arms. “This is an emperor of birds,” said the man. “There is a story that it seized a human child in its bunting and flew off with it to its aerie. The mother of the child ran after it and climbed where no man had dared to climb before, found the nest, and took back the child unharmed. Then the people trapped it.”

“That is not a story about an eagle,” said Lucy. “It is a story about a mother.”

“That it should even come into my house is a sad thing,” said Audubon to the donor, “for this bird more than any is meant to soar.”

But he took it anyway.

The eagle was majestic, even when caged. His talons gleamed and his black eye glinted. He knew there was no escape, and was too dignified to beat his wings against the bars.

Audubon sank into a chair opposite the cage. Eye to eye and beak to beak they sat for hours. He did not know whether to kill it or keep it.

He stood and paced and his eyes filled with tears. The bird sat, hunched, eyes glittering.

“Fougère,” Lucy said. “You want to paint it.”

“I must. And if I kill it, I do not damage it, only stop it, fix it in its perfection, to make the painting.”

And there began the drama.

As hard as he fought to snuff its existence, so did the eagle strive to remain alive. (“I warrant that the rest of us have not put up half the fight against being overtaken by my husband’s conviction,” Lucy would say after it was all over.)

First he decided that, in order not to mark the creature in any way, he would asphyxiate it. He put it in an empty closet, stopped the doors with cloth, lit a charcoal brazier alight. He stayed in the closet alongside the bird. It seemed the respectful thing to do. After some time he lifted the cloth: the bird’s eye gleamed in the sooty air and he stood just as magnificently as before on his humble perch.

Startled, Audubon dropped the cloth.

“I think the bird does not wish to die,” said Lucy through the door.

“Go away, Lucy! I do not need your tongue!”

Adding sulphur to the fire, he bowed the way he had been taught, as a gentleman would in a ballroom, or a parlour. The bird failed to acknowledge this courtesy. The eagle had become, through Audubon’s murderous intent and low violence toward it, superior to his jailer. He backed out the door.