Under a Wild Sky (48 page)

But Lucy stopped short of an ultimatum. After their reconciliation, she seemed resigned to pleading with her husband but never insisting.

“If you
cannot
come up,” Lucy said, “or if you can write your plans, your wishes
decidedly
do so and promptly they will be obeyed depend upon it by your most Affectionate Sons and your true friend, adviser and affectionate Wife.”

Audubon, though not completely insensitive to Lucy's demands, chose to answer only her concerns about his own health and safety. He told her not to worry, that travel to the south of Florida aboard a heavily armed naval vessel was the safest thing in the world.
“I will be as prudent as need be,” he said, “and being constantly surrounded by the Sea breeze no harm can arise.”

In fact, a profound change was taking place in Audubon's outlook. He fretted less about the chances of his success and thought more about the logistics of completing
The Birds of America.
The idea of living out his life in Europe, where it once seemed hundreds of subscribers might be had, was fading. Audubon seemed content at the prospect of merely maintaining those subscribers he had in Britain.
Within the year he would
write to Victor in London, telling his son that he was not there merely to keep watch over
The Birds of America
, but to take full charge of the whole enterprise on that side of the ocean. Audubon would himself work on American subscriptions, which had been steadily increasing. It had taken only a few months to raise the number in America to more than twenty subscribers, and orders from the state legislatures in South Carolina and Louisiana were encouraging of many more. Audubon also gave up the plan of a permanent exhibition of his work in England.
Joseph Kidd, who had signed a contract to paint oil reproductions of the first one hundred plates from
The Birds of America
, had fallen behind and was instead making excuses and asking for loans. Audubon left it to Victor to deal with him—and with everything else.
“I have nothing to say to you about our Business in Europe,” Audubon told Victor. “It is given to you for the benefit of us all and we all feel so proud at knowing that you are all competent that should accidents take place we would feel contented at being assured that no fault can be brought home to you.”

Audubon wrote to Havell, urging his engraver to keep his work to the very highest standards, as
The Birds of America
would more and more be measured against itself.
“Now my Dear Sir,” Audubon said, “
you must be more careful than ever
about this great work of ours. The whole of the United States are on the watch & every plate that is turned out of your shop criticized here with a closeness which is astonishing.”

Audubon's growing sense of peace with himself and with the future of his work is most apparent in the drawings he made during his sojourns in South Carolina and Florida. Despite his repeated complaint that birds were scarce and hard to hunt there, the drawings he made from this period would later be seen as among his signature works. In the field, the vigor he felt returning to his bones after years of confinement in Britain seemed to flow into his paintings as well—especially in the magnificent portraits of wading birds, the egrets and herons with their fine long legs and wispy plumages, many of them posed against George Lehman's dreamy landscapes, and all of them exquisitely engraved by Havell. Many of these birds were widely distributed in America, but some were peculiar to the South and a few were quite unlike other birds more commonly seen. The roseate spoonbill, with its pink feathers and preposterous rounded beak, was strange and exotic. So was the brown pelican, which inspired one of Audubon's greatest paintings, a drawing that perhaps more than any other hinted at what Audubon himself thought and felt
about his life at the time. Audubon had first worked on the pelican in New Orleans, but the drawing of the bird that became part of
The Birds of America
was probably made while he was in the Florida Keys.
Audubon showed the great, awkward-looking bird in a moment of graceful repose, perching on a mangrove limb, its huge beak and pouch resting against its elegantly curved neck and a knowing, satisfied look in its eye.

And now the years flowed by in a steady, mostly uneventful way as
The Birds of America
moved inexorably toward completion. After leaving Florida by way of Charleston and arriving back in Philadelphia, Audubon was rejoined by Lucy and John Woodhouse.
In 1833, Audubon and John Woodhouse led an expedition north, along the coast of Labrador.
Here Audubon painted seabirds and cliff-dwellers of the colder regions, including puffins and grouse and buntings, though his drawing of the nearly extinct great auk had to be made later from a museum specimen in England.

Later that year, the Audubons went to visit the Bachmans in Charleston, where they remained for several months while Audubon painted and worked on another volume of the
Ornithological Biography
.
Audubon wrote to Victor that in the future, he hoped to spend as little time in England as he could manage. With luck, he thought there might be as many as one hundred subscribers to be found in America. This must have made Victor a little crazy, as much of his time was now spent trying to reconcile the confusing accounts of subscriptions that were maintained by himself, by Audubon, and by Havell.

But in 1834 and 1835, the Audubons were back in Britain. Much of their time was spent in Edinburgh, where they worked again with MacGillivray on the letterpress.
MacGillivray thought Audubon's prose style much improved, but offered the familiar complaint that Audubon always thought too big. MacGillivray believed
Ornithological Biography
should be shorter and snappier, like other best-selling natural histories. Audubon paid him no attention, and continued to slave away.
He wrote to Bachman that he would rather walk through a Florida swamp in mosquito season wearing no shirt than labor as he had “with the pen.” He said he looked forward to the not-so-far-off day when he could forget his work and his critics and “retire from the World encased as it were within the circle of a few friends such as yourself.” In the meantime, Audubon said, he planned to “write, draw, and finish all I can” before leaving
England again for America. As usual, he was concerned about what would ensue in the event that he died on the Atlantic crossing. Whatever happened, the most important thing now would be the completion of
The Birds of America
.
Audubon told Bachman that he was arranging all his affairs such that nothing would stop the production of “my great work.”

Audubon returned to America in 1836, leaving Lucy in London with Victor.
He managed to get his hands on bird skins collected by a recent government expedition to the Pacific Northwest, thus enabling him to cobble together descriptions and make drawings of a number of Western birds he had never personally seen.
The following year he traveled once more, this time making an expedition along the Gulf Coast of Texas. At the same time, the Bachman and Audubon families were becoming permanently entwined.
In May 1837 John Woodhouse married the Bachmans' daughter Maria.

Audubon complained about his detractors only rarely, and never engaged in public disputes. Instead, he took solace in his success.
Once, when Victor had expressed concern about Charles Waterton's criticism of his father, Audubon advised him to pay such rumors no heed. “I am sorry that you should trouble yourself about the attacks of Mr. Waterton,” Audubon wrote, “and more so that you should answer any of these attacks. Depend upon it, the World will Judge for itself.”
The Birds of America
, he often said, was the only rebuttal he needed to make to the “academicians” in Philadelphia who had denied him in his own country. Over time, the ranks of those who spoke against him dwindled until they became a small circle who talked among themselves about issues and slights that nobody else cared about.
Charles-Lucien Bonaparte called on Audubon several times during Audubon's visits to London, once even waking him up in the night and sitting by Audubon's bedside, prattling about birds.
Sometime later, when Bonaparte published another installment of his American bird accounts, Audubon believed it contained many of his own observations that Bonaparte had unfairly appropriated from their private conversations. Audubon vowed never to speak to the prince again.
Bonaparte, who was evidently likewise put out with Audubon, began telling people he had firsthand knowledge that Audubon had never studied painting with Jacques-Louis David.
Audubon eventually wrote to Bonaparte and offered to forgive and forget their misunderstandings.
Bonaparte did not answer, and Audubon never wrote to him again.

In Philadelphia, George Ord kept up his hounding of Audubon, though his only real audience now seemed to be Charles Waterton, the strange British naturalist of caiman-riding fame who was a whole ocean away. Ord must have been desperate to correspond with someone similarly ill-disposed to Audubon, as Waterton was surely Ord's complete opposite number.
Rich and eccentric, Waterton struggled with words and with natural history, Ord's specialties. Waterton never used the Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature, relying instead on the less “jaw-breaking” common names for birds and animals. Notoriously accident-prone, Waterton was also known for regularly administering therapeutic bleedings to himself and also for being unafraid of high places. Once, when visiting Rome, Waterton climbed to the top of St. Peter's Basilica and placed his glove atop its lightning rod. Supposedly the pope, convinced this rendered the lightning rod ineffective, ordered the glove taken down—but could find no one willing to make the ascent. Waterton finally obliged, climbing back up and retrieving his glove to the cheers of a crowd that had gathered to watch.

For Ord, however, it was enough that Waterton shared a distaste for Audubon. In a correspondence notable for its attention to minor details, Ord catalogued Audubon's many affronts to science.
These included his ridiculous account of the rattlesnake and his picture of the mockingbirds, which in addition to showing a rattlesnake up a tree also showed it with fangs that “recurved” to the front.
Actually, Audubon, though he exaggerated the amount of recurve, was correct. Most naturalists at the time simply didn't know that the fangs bent slightly forward at the tips. Audubon never argued the point, nor did he ever explain that the picture in question did not, in fact, depict the snake attacking the mockingbirds. It was the other way around.
The birds were harrying the rattler, a much more plausible scene.

On other matters—including Audubon's suspect experiments on the turkey buzzard and his “discovery” of the Bird of Washington—Ord was on firmer ground. As for the drawings—the horrible drawings!—these were the worst things of all in Ord's view. The whole affair was so awful, Ord said, that he could not even bring himself to denounce Audubon publicly.
“I have been repeatedly solicited to review Audubon's great work, and his history or biography of our birds,” Ord said, carelessly using
Audubon's own terminologies, “but I have forborn, for the sake of peace, as I am confident that I should have a swarm of hornets about my ears, were I to proclaim to the world all that I know of this impudent pretender, and his stupid book. His elephant-folio plates, so far from deserving the encomiums which are daily lavished upon them, are so vile, that I wonder how anyone, possessing the least taste or knowledge in the fine arts, can endure them.”

Audubon heard all this, directly or otherwise, and simply ignored it.
In 1836, he wrote to a friend that he felt it was his duty on earth to do as much good as he could and more particularly, to do as little harm as possible, “even by words.”

“To have enemies is no uncommon thing nowadays,” Audubon said. “To deserve them we must ever and anon guard ourselves against.”

In the fall of 1839, Audubon donated a complete five-volume set of the
Ornithological Biography
to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
Ord made off with it for an extended personal inspection, eventually bringing it back annotated with penciled comments written in his small, neat hand in the margins. Most of the entries are brief, disputing a small fact here and there, though usually in a nasty, demeaning tone. In a few of the notes, Ord's bitterness verges on a sour black humor. Coming upon Audubon's entry for “Maria's Woodpecker,” which he had named for Bachman's sister-in-law, Ord could not restrain himself, writing in the adjacent white space:

It is a fortunate circumstance for the credit of “American Ornithology” that the author of “Birds of America” had not more frequent opportunities of paying such compliments, or we should have had an introduction to all the old maids of his acquaintance with their pretty names affixed to peckers, cocks, and snipes.

Havell, racing against himself, had promised the final engravings for
The Birds of America
by the close of 1837. In the end, it took only slightly longer.
Number 87, the last set of five, was completed on June 20, 1838, bringing the total to 435 double elephant plates. It had taken just under twelve years from the time Lizars traced the first outline of the wild turkey onto copper in Edinburgh.
Audubon spent another year finishing the final volume of
Ornithological Biography
, leaving Edinburgh a last time
in the fall of 1839 to go home. On his landing in New York, the American press celebrated his triumphant return. In Boston, the
Atlas
proclaimed
The Birds of America
a masterpiece and its author a hero for the ages in decidedly extravagant prose:

The conclusion has been attained of an undertaking, which, unrivalled for the boldness almost amounting to temerity with which it was commenced, the perseverance and untiring zeal with which it was carried on, and the fidelity, industry, and celerity with which it has been completed, will remain an enduring monument to American enterprise and science.