The Audubon Reader (3 page)

For the next five years Audubon labored to assemble a definitive collection of drawings of American birds while struggling to support himself and his family, to move Lucy and the boys to
Louisiana and to accumulate the funds he would need to travel to England and hire an engraver. He had decided to produce a great work of art and ornithology (a decision that Lucy’s relatives condemned as derelict):
The
Birds of America
would comprise four hundred two-by-three-foot engraved, hand-colored plates of American birds “at the size of life” to be sold in sets of five and collected into four huge leather-bound volumes of one hundred plates each, with five leather-bound accompanying volumes of “bird biographies” worked up from his field notes.

He had found a paradise of birds in the deciduous forests and bluegrass prairies of
Kentucky; he found another paradise of birds in the pine forests and cypress swamps of Louisiana around St. Francisville in West Feliciana Parish, north of Baton Rouge along the
Mississippi River inland from the river port of
Bayou Sarah, where prosperous cotton planters hired him to teach their sons to fence and their daughters to draw and dance the cotillion. Elegant Lucy, when finally she was able to move south, opened a popular school of piano and deportment on a cotton plantation operated by a hardy Scots widow.

On his first inspection of the St. Francisville environs Audubon identified no fewer than sixty-five species of birds. He probably collected his best-known image there, the prized first plate of
The Birds of America
—a magnificent specimen of wild turkey cock which he had called from a Mississippi canebrake. (In Audubon’s time the river margins of the Midlands and the South were one vast canebrake; cane, the giant perennial grass
Arundinaria gigantea
, one of only two native American
bamboos, grew in dense profusion
ten to twenty feet high wherever the soil was rich and wet, with woody stems like corn and fern-like compound leaves that it shed in the spring when new leaves emerged. Birds nested in the cane; it sheltered deer, bears and other wild game; settlers turned their cattle and hogs into it to graze as bison had grazed it in Daniel Boone’s day all the way east to the Potomac.)

Finally, in May 1826, he was ready. With the equivalent of about ten thousand dollars in gold in his purse and a collection of letters of introduction from New Orleans merchants and Louisiana and Kentucky politicians including
Henry Clay, he sailed from New Orleans on a merchant ship bound for Liverpool with a load of cotton. He knew not a soul in Liverpool other than Lucy’s younger sister Ann and her English husband
Alexander Gordon, a cotton factor, who would take one look at his rough frontier pantaloons and unfashionable shoulder-length chestnut hair (about which he was comically vain) and avoid him like the plague. But
James Fenimore Cooper’s
The
Last of the Mohicans
had been published in London in April and was blooming to a nationwide fad, and some who met Audubon in Liverpool judged him a real-life Natty Bumppo. His letters introduced him to the first family of Liverpool shipping, the Rathbones, Quaker abolitionists who recognized his originality and sponsored him socially. Within a month he was the Georgian equivalent of a rock star, his presence sought at every wealthy table; the Gordons soon came round.

More than Audubon’s novelty won him attention in Liverpool and then in Manchester, Edinburgh and London. Britain was the most technologically advanced nation in the world in 1826, with gaslights illuminating its cities, steam mills weaving cotton, steamboats plying its ports and railroad lines just being laid to replace its mature network of canals, but the only permanent images then available in the world were images drawn by hand. Traveling from city to city, Audubon would hire a hall and hang it with his lifesized watercolors of birds luminescent against their backgrounds of wilderness, several hundred images at a time, and charge admission to the visitors who flocked to see them. So many scenes of birds going about their complicated lives—birds hunting, feeding, courting, soaring and fighting, nesting and nurturing young—in such natural settings of wild shoreline and forest and canebrake,
would have flooded viewers’ senses as an Imax Theater presentation floods viewers today, and all the more so because the world these creatures inhabited was America, still largely wilderness and a romantic mystery to the British, as Audubon discovered to his surprise. He answered questions about “Red Indians” and rattlesnakes, imitated war whoops and owl hoots until he could hardly bear to accept another invitation, but accept he did, because the prosperous merchants and the country gentry would become his subscribers once he found an engraver in London worthy of the great project, which he calculated would occupy him for sixteen years.

Audubon produced his five-plate “Numbers” of
The
Birds of America
pay as you go, and managed to complete the work in only ten years even though he had to increase the total number of plates to 435 as he identified new species in collecting expeditions to the
Carolinas and East
Florida, the Republic of Texas, northeastern Pennsylvania, Labrador and the Jersey Shore. In the end, he estimated that producing
The Birds of America
cost him $115,640—about $2 million today. Unsupported by gifts, grants or legacies, he raised almost every penny of that immense sum himself from painting, exhibiting and selling subscriptions and skins. He paced the flow of funds to his engraver so that, as he said proudly, “the continuity of execution” was not “broken for a single day.” He paced the flow of drawings as well, and before that the flow of expeditions and collections. He personally solicited most of his subscribers and personally serviced most of his accounts. Lucy supported herself and their children while he was establishing himself; thereafter he supported them all and the work as well. If he made a profit it was small, but in every other way the project was an unqualified
success. After he returned to America he and his sons produced a less costly octavo edition with reduced images printed by lithography that made him rich.

These facts should lay to rest once and for all the enduring canard that John James Audubon was “not a good businessman.” His retail business failed in Henderson in 1819, like nearly every other business in the trans-Appalachian West, in the wake of an economic disaster that was beyond his control. When he set out to create a monumental work of art with his own heart and mind
and hands, he succeeded—a staggering achievement, as if one man had singlehandedly financed and built an Egyptian pyramid.

He did not leave Lucy languishing in West Feliciana all those years, but before he could return to America for the first time to collect her, their miscommunications, exacerbated by the uncertainties and delays of mail delivery in an era of sailing ships, nearly wrecked their
marriage. Lonely for her, he wanted her to close her school and come to London; she was willing once she had earned enough to sustain their adolescent sons at school. But a round of letters took six months, one ship in six (and the letters it carried) never made port, and by 1828 Audubon had convinced himself that Lucy expected him to amass a fortune before she would leave Louisiana, while she feared her husband had been dazzled by success in glamorous London and didn’t love her any more. (London was fouled with coal smoke; Audubon hated it.) Finally she insisted that he come in person to claim her, and after finding a trustworthy friend to handle a year’s production of plates for the
Birds
, he did, in 1829, with results that can be read in
Part III
of this book. The marriage survived and went on to thrive; when Audubon died in 1851 he and his Lucy had been husband and wife for forty-three years.

If Audubon’s life sounds like a nineteenth-century novel with its missed connections, Byronic ambitions, dramatic reversals and passionate highs and lows, nineteenth-century novels were evidently more realistic than moderns have understood. Besides his art, which is as electrifying on first encounter today as it was two centuries ago—no one has ever drawn birds better—Audubon left behind a large collection of letters, many of them unpublished; the five volumes of the
Ornithological Biography
; the
Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
; two complete surviving journals, fragments of two more and a name which has become synonymous with wilderness and wildlife preservation.

I have selected from most of these sources. I tried to minimize overlap with the selections in the Library of America
Audubon
so that more of Audubon’s work might be returned to print. Whenever possible I have drawn on the original printed or handwritten text. The episodes and bird biographies are taken from a facsimile edition of the
Ornithological Biography
published in 1985
to accompany the Abbeville Press/National Audubon Society facsimile edition of
The Birds of America
. The
Labrador Journal
comes from an 1897 two-volume anthology,
Audubon and His Journals
, edited by Audubon’s granddaughter Maria R. Audubon. Originals of Audubon’s
letters and those of family and friends are held in the manuscript collections at Harvard’s Houghton Library, Princeton’s Firestone Library, Yale’s Beinecke Library, the library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas, the library of the Musée Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, the Liverpool Public Library, the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, and the John James Audubon Museum of the John James Audubon State Park in Henderson, Kentucky. I searched all these sources for selections and thank them for allowing me access. Some letters are taken from two volumes edited by Howard Corning and published by the Club of Odd Volumes of Boston in 1930, a source for which I have been unable to locate a copyright holder. John Bachman’s correspondence is reproduced in part from Catherine Bachman,
John Bachman
, published in Charleston by Walker, Evans and Cogswell Co. in 1888. Head notes and this introduction are based on my 2004 biography
John James Audubon: The Making of an American
, published by Alfred A. Knopf, to which I refer readers interested in a full recounting and assessment of Audubon’s life. Since this collection is intended for general readers, I have modernized Audubon’s somewhat eccentric spelling, capitalization and punctuation and deleted material of only specialized interest, such as the formal anatomical descriptions that conclude each bird biography, which were prepared for Audubon by his Scottish associate
William MacGillivray.

“All but the remembrance of his goodness is gone forever,” Lucy Audubon wrote sadly of her husband’s death from complications of dementia in January 1851. For Lucy all was gone—she lived on until 1874—but for the rest of us, wherever there are birds there is Audubon:
rara avis
.

Richard Rhodes

No complete edition of Audubon’s works that includes his surviving journals and letters has yet been published. Selections may be found in this volume and in:

Please note: Text is repeated below at a larger size.