Under a Wild Sky (46 page)

The stirring composite portrait of Boone in these two episodes, as well as Audubon's claim of having prowled the Kentucky woods with the great man, was false.
Daniel Boone left Kentucky and resettled permanently in Missouri in 1799—while Audubon was still a naval cadet in
France. Although rumors of Boone passing through Kentucky after that occasionally circulated, the family and friends who knew him best insisted that Boone never again set foot in Kentucky. And even if he had, he would have borne no resemblance to the man Audubon described. When Audubon and Lucy first moved to Kentucky in the spring of 1808, Boone was almost seventy-four years old. Aged and increasingly frail, Boone by then was subsisting mostly on mush. No one who met him would have described Boone as “gigantic” at any point in his life. He was fit and trim as a young man, but of modest build—more wiry than powerfully put together. As an old man, Boone appeared gaunt.

The only contact Audubon likely had with Boone was a brief exchange of notes in the summer of 1813, during a trip Audubon made to St. Genevieve. Audubon wrote to Boone, asking if they might meet and go hunting together.
Boone, who was by then almost eighty, sent back a curt answer saying his hunting days were over, as he was weak and nearly blind.

It's not hard to imagine the temptation that led Audubon to take liberties with the truth in composing the episodes for
Ornithological Biography.
The contrast between his exquisite drawings and his he-man American persona had proved an intoxicating combination to the British. What's a little harder to conceive is what Lucy's role in crafting some of these stories may have been. Working alongside her husband, she had the chance to compare the Audubon portrayed on paper with the Audubon she knew. Was she a coconspirator? Perhaps, though it's unfair to judge her too harshly in this. There may well have been other, more far-fetched episodes that she talked him out of using. And it's more than likely that Lucy often didn't know what to question because Audubon had spent so much time away from her in his wanderings that she could not have said one way or another when he was telling the truth and when he was not. What can't be questioned is her loyalty to Audubon and to his work.
Lucy wrote to Mrs. Havell to say that so much “close writing” was giving Audubon headaches and worry. Audubon was not suited to such fretful, sedentary pursuits. What he really needed, she said, was exercise.

In the fall of 1831, the schooner
Agnes
, fighting contrary winds and climbing steep seas, made her way down the Atlantic coast between South Carolina and Florida. At night the ship pitched wildly in the gale,
and by day the frothing gray ocean turned hypnotically blue whenever the sky cleared.
Off to starboard the surf crashed against a succession of white beaches.
On November 20 the
Agnes
made port at St. Augustine, taking the better part of the day to thread its way through the hidden sandbars and treacherous currents that guarded the entrance to Matanzas Bay. Once ashore, Audubon walked through the town as his stomach settled.
It reminded him of “an old French Village” and seemed the poorest place he had ever been to in America.
Established in 1565 by the Spanish, St. Augustine was in fact the oldest European settlement in North America. There wasn't much to it. The city was dominated by a crumbling relic of a Spanish fort called Castillo de San Marcos. Constructed of an unusual limestone that was embedded with coquina shells, the fort had walls sixteen feet thick and had taken more than twenty years to build. Its sun-bleached hulk sat on the bay at the north end of a cluster of small, whitewashed houses and shops that huddled along a handful of narrow, sandy streets.

Audubon thought the people here were the laziest he had ever met with, completely unlike the pioneers who had settled the heart of the country with their sweat and blood. The Floridians he met in St. Augustine seemed to do nothing. When they were hungry they fished in the bay, or picked fruit from the orange trees that grew in profusion in the jungly forest that crept up to the backside of the town. There didn't seem to be any real “country” beyond that back border. Audubon, incredulous that this was the same region William Bartram and other naturalists had thought a near paradise, found it a flat, sand-blown, forbidding wasteland tangled with live oak and pine and razor-sharp palmettos.
The weather, too, was awful—oppressive heat and humidity alternating with a shocking cold that rode in on powerful northeast winds.
One day Audubon explored the long, blinding strand of shoreline on nearby Anastasia Island, where lovely dunes surmounted the beach and the scraggly trees were bent inland by the ocean winds. It was hot. He killed a couple of snakes and saw lots of birds and some butterflies. The next day turned gloomy and the barometer plunged.

All of this made Audubon perversely happy. Even in this forsaken tropical wilderness, it was exhilarating to be hunting and drawing again. With each day, Audubon felt more energized.
He wrote a series of cheerful letters to Lucy, who had gone to Louisville, telling her not to be depressed about anything lest her mood affect her health. He admitted that
he himself had been concerned again about the fate of
The Birds of America
almost as soon as they'd gotten to America.
He even devised a plan by which Victor would go to England to make arrangements for continuing the project in the event that Havell suddenly died.
But letters from Havell and some of the subscribers had convinced Audubon that Havell was doing marvelously with the engravings.
“Do not despond my Lucy,” Audubon wrote, “depend upon it we must yet see better days and I think as I believe in God that
he
will grant me Life and health to enable me to finish my tremendous enterprise and grant us happy Old Life. I feel as young as ever and I now can undertake and bear as much hardship as I have ever done in my Life. Industry and perseverance joined to a sound heart will cary me a great ways.”

Back in Edinburgh just months earlier, as Audubon finished correcting the galleys for the
Ornithological Biography
, it had suddenly occurred to him that with Havell now starting on the next twenty Numbers, he could afford to go back to America and resume his old plan of visiting Florida, and perhaps explore other parts of the Gulf of Mexico and the northeast Atlantic coast. He needed more drawings, more bird skins, more chances at finding new or undescribed species, especially water and sea birds.
The subscriber list seemed to have leveled off and was holding roughly between 130 and 140. Perhaps there were more to be had in America. Besides, Lucy needed to see the boys.
On August 1, 1831, after less than a year in England and Scotland, the Audubons had sailed for New York from Portsmouth.

From New York they had gone to Philadelphia, where four subscribers signed up. The astounding news was that these included the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, the city's other great learned institution.
Audubon declared, prematurely it turned out, that all his enemies in the city “were going down hill very fast.”
Victor met his parents at Philadelphia and they continued on down to Baltimore, where Victor and Lucy turned off for Kentucky. Audubon traveled south by steamship down the Chesapeake Bay, then via coach overland to Charleston, South Carolina.
He was accompanied again by the painter George Lehman, who was to help with background illustrations and drawings of plants, and also by a young man from England named Henry Ward. Ward was a taxidermist who would prepare the hundreds of bird skins Audubon planned to collect.

Audubon and his companions reached Charleston in mid-October.
Worn out, they checked into an expensive rooming house, heedless of the cost. But the next day, they moved to the home of a most remarkable man Audubon had met on the street. On hearing Audubon's name, the man had jumped off his horse, rushed over, and clasped Audubon's hand, saying how thrilled he was to make his acquaintance. The man's name was Bachman.

The Reverend John Bachman, a Lutheran pastor, was five years younger than Audubon. They had a lot in common, not least a shared enthusiasm for natural history. Bachman was originally from upstate New York, where he had learned about birds and animals from one of his family's slaves. At the age of twelve, Bachman had been sent off to school in Philadelphia, arriving in the city about a year before Audubon. Their paths did not cross there, but Bachman was acquainted with other naturalists who later figured in Audubon's career, including Alexander Wilson and George Ord. Bachman and Wilson had met at William Bartram's gardens. Wilson, in fact, got help from Bachman in learning to identify birds in the field. According to Bachman, he had skinned some jays during a vacation in New York and had given one or two specimens to Wilson on his return. These were apparently the same species that Wilson later claimed to have discovered on his trip to Niagara Falls.

Bachman took an instant liking to Audubon and his work. Whatever allegiance he may have felt to Wilson went unmentioned. Audubon, for his part, thought Bachman wonderfully knowledgeable and hospitable.
Bachman lived in a large, three-story house fronted with wide verandas.
The busy household hummed with the activities of a big family that included Bachman's wife, Harriet, their daughters Eliza and Maria, plus Harriet's unmarried sister, Maria Martin. Miss Martin, a gifted artist, thought Audubon altogether wonderful. Over time Audubon's friendship with the Bachmans would become the deepest and most enduring he would ever know.

Bachman insisted that Audubon and his companions remain in Charleston as his guests for at least three weeks before heading south to Florida, warning them that until a frost came the insects there would be unbearable. Three weeks sounded conservative, as they were then in the middle of a heat wave.
Audubon made good use of his time with Bachman, making fifteen new drawings and killing more than two hundred birds of sixty different species for Ward to skin and stuff.
They were well convinced of Bachman's advice about the bugs—Ward was so badly bitten
even in Charleston that his skin began to slough off and for a time he was sure he would die. While Ward recovered and they waited for a change in the weather, Audubon got news.
Seven years after he'd been blackballed in Philadelphia, word arrived that he had been elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Lucy had reached Louisville at about the same time Audubon got to Charleston. After her time in England, America seemed a bit rough around the edges.
“This is a wild country compared to yours,” she wrote to Havell. But she was happy that subscribers were signing up for
The Birds of America
and that Audubon, whose name was turning up with growing frequency in newspapers and magazines, was at last gaining a measure of fame. “They make much mention of him in America now,” she told Havell.

With Audubon in the field, it was left to Lucy to keep track of Havell's progress. This turned out to be a large and often worrisome task. No sooner did American subscribers begin receiving their Numbers than Lucy started hearing complaints. These mainly concerned the same sloppy or unnaturally bold hand-coloring that had disappointed subscribers in England and Scotland. It also came to Lucy's attention that Havell had begun offering unauthorized discounts on
The Birds of America
and had also sold some stray prints individually. Worse, Havell stopped keeping her informed. Unsure whether his letters were miscarrying and whether her own letters were in fact reaching him, Lucy launched a volley of increasingly short-tempered communications back to London.
From November through March—a winter so cold in Louisville that she scarcely went outside—Lucy sent one scalding letter after another, demanding that Havell correct the coloring problems, refrain from unauthorized transactions of any kind, and please, please begin writing back.
Havell, exasperated, finally did—mainly to say he was sick and tired of Lucy's badgering.

Overlooked in this long-distance friction was a regrettable decision Havell apparently made on his own that was much worse than anything Lucy complained of. Havell was by now quite used to assembling some of the plates from different drawings supplied by Audubon. These often included different views of male and female birds, and also background landscapes or botanical features drawn by Audubon's various assistants.
Audubon gave specific instructions about how to assemble these elements—the finished “drawing” was sometimes more of a collage—and he paid close attention to other aspects of the final engraving, like background colors, that Havell himself was to add. When Havell came to the plate for the Mississippi kite—a strikingly handsome gray-and-white raptor—he discovered he had only a single drawing of the bird for a composition that clearly required two birds perched together on a tree limb.
Inexplicably, Havell simply appropriated Alexander Wilson's drawing from
American Ornithology
, which happened to be about the right size. Carefully copying the image—a male bird that was erroneously labeled a female in Audubon's plate—Havell flipped the bird over, so that it faced the other way. When the plate was published, there was no mistaking where the “female” kite had come from—it was a perfect mirror image of Wilson's drawing. Whatever Audubon thought or said about this outright theft when he discovered it isn't known. The great work simply continued on.

Meanwhile, unaware of this transgression, Lucy had written Havell a somewhat conciliatory letter. “I am sorry any expressions of mine should have offended you,” Lucy wrote innocently. “That was not our intention.” Her point, she went on, was merely to provide a “check” on Havell's work, which he was perhaps too absorbed in to be fully competent to evaluate. She said she had never written to him in anger, but only in sorrow. “I assure you Mr. Audubon will thank me for pointing out to you those things which I have and on which his success and reputation so much depend,” Lucy wrote.
“Mr. A and I are of one mind.”