Under a Wild Sky (33 page)

Audubon and Mason went back downriver to New Orleans, where Audubon cut his hair and bought more fashionable clothes in an attempt to make himself presentable in the city. Shocked at how altered his appearance was, Audubon wrote in his journal that he now resembled a handsome bird “robbed of all its feathering.” He said he would not miss Oakley Plantation, which he crabbed was an “abode of unfortunate Opulence.” But he was sorry to be parted from the woods around Bayou Sara, and wrote in his journal that he wished his lungs could somehow remain filled with their sweet air forever. Only two months after his leaving Oakley, Eliza Pirrie had passed by on the street in New Orleans
without deigning to acknowledge him. Audubon could console himself with the knowledge that he'd come away from the Pirries with a large cache of his best work yet.

Audubon continued to draw new species—including the black-bellied darter—and he added to his morphological notes on the brown pelican. Audubon had to think about how best to fit a full-sized swan onto his paper, finally solving the problem by turning the bird's neck to the rear as it glided on the water, as if it were about to eat something it had just swum past. A moth was later added to the background to fill that role.

Audubon could not decide which was worse—waiting anxiously for Lucy's next letter or receiving one filled with her annoyance, which left him even more depressed. Finally they agreed that Lucy and the boys would come south and join him.
After weeks of meeting one boat, then another, each vessel the one that he was sure they would be aboard, Audubon was at last reunited with his family when the steamboat
Rocket
arrived and they stepped ashore in New Orleans a week before Christmas in 1821. Together for the first time in more than a year, the Audubons walked to a little house he'd managed to rent for $17 a month.

Lucy had brought all of Audubon's earlier drawings with her, and as he compared them with his more recent ones, he realized how greatly his work had improved despite his gloomy frame of mind. Determined to start the new year on a better note, Audubon hired a local hunter to bring him new specimens—ninety-nine different birds in as many days—promising himself that he would paint them as fast as they arrived. With his schedule already crowded with drawing lessons, Audubon felt the weight of financial worries lift a little.

But a few months later, Audubon lost one of his most valued students. He decided to try his hand at commercial art in Natchez, where fewer artists vied for work. For the better part of the next two years, the Audubons bounced from place to place and job to job, up and down the lower Mississippi River with their boys and young Mason in tow.
Lucy got work as a governess in New Orleans, and once again the couple parted for a time. Audubon struggled to find work at Natchez, eventually landing the first of several jobs teaching drawing at local academies. He tried to learn to paint in oil. Mostly he hunted.
Lucy and the boys joined
him at Natchez and Lucy found another job as a governess. Audubon tried painting landscapes. Then he taught fencing. In the summer of 1822, Joseph Mason, homesick and weary of their hand-to-mouth existence, reluctantly went back north. Everyone was sorry to see him go.
Audubon gave Mason some paper and chalks and the gun he'd owned since 1805, thinking to himself that most of the birds he had killed from Philadelphia to New Orleans had fallen in front of it.

Then Lucy was offered a position by a wealthy widow in West Feliciana, at Bayou Sara, in the heart of the Louisiana country Audubon loved so much.
The woman, Jane Percy, lived on a plantation called Beech Woods, and ran a neighborhood school attended by her daughters and their friends. Lucy was to earn $1,000 a year and have the use of a cottage adjoining the schoolhouse. Audubon, who was still smitten with Bayou Sara, joined his wife there for a time. But rumors of his strained departure from nearby Oakley Plantation haunted him, and he soon had a run-in with Mrs. Percy—who didn't care for his portraits of her daughters when he attempted them in oils. Lucy, who had long since determined that Audubon needed to find a publisher for his birds, told her husband to get on with it. In October 1823, she handed over what little money she'd managed to save, and Audubon and Victor departed for Philadelphia.

In better days, when business was good at Henderson, Audubon had bought the first six volumes of Wilson's
American Ornithology.
After leaving them behind when he went to New Orleans, Audubon found it difficult to consult Wilson's work. It was hard to find anyone who owned
American Ornithology
, much less anyone willing to loan it to him.
Audubon attributed this unwillingness to the high cost of the book, which he believed was due to its rarity.

Actually, Wilson's work had become much more than a collection of pricey color drawings. Audubon probably did not comprehend how much American science had advanced in recent years—nor did he imagine the exalted place
American Ornithology
occupied in that world.
When George Ord was elected to the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1815, two years after Wilson's untimely death, his self-appointed mission to complete Wilson's work became inextricably linked with the
academy's emerging reputation as the country's leading scientific institution.
American Ornithology
conveyed a prestige and an authority to the academy that had been considerably augmented over the intervening years. As academy members traveled from one side of the continent to the other on government expeditions, and scientific papers began appearing in the academy's
Journal
in 1817, American science took on a rigor that had its center of gravity in Philadelphia.

Even as Audubon was preparing to depart on his journey to Philadelphia, the young French naturalist Charles-Lucien Bonaparte was hard at work on corrections to Wilson's taxonomy. Many of the corrections turned out to be wrong, but the point was being made that American natural history studies were now subject to peer review. And in a reversal of the long-standing practice of European scientists determining New World taxonomy from afar, Bonaparte had come to Philadelphia and was working on American birds in collaboration with Ord. Audubon, having never heard of George Ord and probably unaware that
American Ornithology
was still a work in progress, set off for Philadelphia believing it would be self-evident once he got there that his superior drawings made his ornithology preferable to Wilson's. He was wrong. Against Ord's energetic opposition to him throughout the city and the orchestrated campaign to prevent his election to the academy, Audubon never had a chance.

Audubon's humiliating defeat in Philadelphia, coming at the end of five years of financial and psychological torment, could well have destroyed his ambition once and for all. It did not. Audubon had struggled with the erosion of his wealth and status as both unwound over several years, but he remained amazingly resilient in a more acute crisis. Audubon departed from Philadelphia, forcing himself to look on the bright side, as he did throughout his life when sudden misfortune befell him.
In New York, to which he'd fled, Audubon amused himself for a day or two sitting as a model for his painter friend John Vanderlyn, who was now in New York and at work on a heroic full-length portrait of Andrew Jackson. Jackson, a busy man who would become president in a few years, had only time to sit for Vanderlyn's work on his face. The still trim and muscular Audubon, Vanderlyn realized, was a nearly perfect body double for Jackson. As a favor in return for his friend's help, Vanderlyn put Audubon's face on a soldier standing in the background of the painting. During the long hours he posed, Audubon had time to sort things out. He felt himself “strange to all but the birds of America,” and was eager
to get back to the woods and the comforting solitude of the wilderness. And he was thinking, too, of the next step after that. When Audubon reflected on what had happened in Philadelphia, it seemed that Ord had actually done him a favor. Audubon now understood that he would be better served taking his birds abroad, to Europe, where prospects for their publication and sale would be better. In London or Paris, he had been told, there were many talented engravers who could do justice to his drawings—and many wealthy people who might be able to afford such a lavish and costly work.

After a slow bird-watching detour across upstate New York and a brief visit to Shippingport—where he begged a few dollars from friends despite his wild appearance—Audubon made his way back downriver aboard a steamship. He arrived at Bayou Sara in a sorry state. Carrying a portfolio of drawings that would one day be among the most treasured of American artworks, Audubon was broke, dirty, and dressed in rags.
A skiff delivered him ashore at midnight in a driving rain. He'd been gone more than a year. It was now late November. St. Francisville was mostly deserted, owing to a recent outbreak of yellow fever, but Audubon managed to borrow a horse so he could ride to Lucy at Beech Woods. The night was warm, but in the rain and dark Audubon got lost. When he finally rode up to Lucy's cottage, it was morning. Audubon walked in, dripping and exhausted. Lucy, who was already busy giving a lesson to her pupils, stood and rushed to his arms.

Audubon was astonished to learn that Lucy was now earning almost $3,000 a year and had already put away $1,000 in savings. As the year 1825 began, Audubon could start making plans to travel to Europe. To stay out of the way at Beech Woods, where he was still at odds with the Percys, Audubon occupied himself by teaching dance.
One evening, he instructed a class of sixty young men and women. They were all but hopeless—Audubon could scarcely coax a graceful step from the lot. After lumbering around the floor to Audubon's fiddling for a while, the class demanded that he show them how it was done. Clearing a space for himself, Audubon began to dance alone, playing his violin and singing lustily. The class burst into wild applause. After the students were dismissed, the young men remained behind in hopes of a fencing lesson from their dance master. Audubon obliged. He went home that night exhausted.

Audubon and Lucy settled down to work and save toward his trip to
England. It was a pleasant time.
On hot afternoons, the Audubons would ride together to a small lake, where Lucy swam naked while Audubon lolled on the beach admiring her. Audubon continued his teaching, but he was also busy hunting and drawing and staying in touch with several of his newfound friends in Philadelphia—notably Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, with whom Audubon was eager to remain on good terms. This turned out to be hard at times.
Some field notes that Audubon had mailed the prince miscarried, causing Bonaparte to think briefly that Audubon had ignored his promise to send them. Audubon corrected the situation, but blundered badly in criticizing the first volume of Bonaparte's American bird studies. Although he was delighted to see that it included his drawing of the great crow blackbird—now known as the boat-tailed grackle—Audubon was not impressed with the book and particularly regretted sharing his intimate knowledge of the wild turkey with Bonaparte.
Thinking he was speaking confidentially, Audubon wrote to Reuben Haines, one of the academy members who had nominated him for membership, saying Bonaparte's book was riddled with mistakes and that Bonaparte had appropriated some of Audubon's observations without attribution. Audubon said he felt misled and betrayed.
Haines—rather stupidly, the prince said—forwarded this letter to Bonaparte, who was livid about it.

But the storm passed. Audubon did his best to please a number of people back East who had asked to be sent various plant and animal specimens. One request was for an alligator heart. Audubon thought he could do better.
Visiting a nearby pond he knew to be crawling with alligators, Audubon shot one small enough to be put in a barrel for shipping. His ball struck the animal atop its skull, seemingly killing it. Audubon and a few men from the plantation hauled it back to Beech Woods, where it attracted the attention of Lucy's students. When they asked Audubon to prop open its mouth and he started to oblige, the alligator, which was not dead but only stunned, suddenly became alert and began thrashing violently. Audubon coolly grabbed a rope tied around the animal's neck, threw it over a tree branch, and hauled the alligator into the air, where it continued to struggle and gasp, scratching at the rope with its forefeet. The next morning the alligator was still slightly alive. Audubon lowered it into a barrel filled with whiskey and hammered on the top as the alligator swished around dazedly in the spirits.

Audubon had an equally dicey experience with a live rattlesnake that
escaped several times from a tub in Lucy's kitchen before Audubon succeeded in quieting it in a bath of spirits. He had an easier time collecting insects—young John Woodhouse helped—to be sent to the entomologist Thomas Say.

In the spring of 1826, Audubon was at last ready to go. He packed up more than four hundred drawings, put $1,600 of his and Lucy's savings into his pocketbook, and headed off to New Orleans to find a ship to England.
Lucy, supportive but perhaps irked at the prospect of yet another long separation, earmarked part of the money for a new piano Audubon was to send home. He bought passage on the
Delos
.
Having some time before the ship was ready to depart, Audubon screwed up his courage and made several calls to ask for references.
He got in to see the governor, who wrote up a general letter of introduction, exaggerating the length of Audubon's residence in Louisiana while offering a slight understatement of Audubon's life's work, which the governor characterized as “procuring drawings and preparing manuscripts in relation to the birds of America.”

More valuable still was a letter of introduction Audubon received from a rich merchant named Vincent Nolte—the very same Vincent Nolte who had chuckled at his horse Barro when the two men met in the wilds of Pennsylvania more than a decade earlier.
Audubon had seen Nolte on the street when he first got to New Orleans with Joseph Mason, but had avoided him out of embarrassment. Nolte was wealthy and powerful and busy, and Audubon had been ashamed to be none of those things. Then one day, as the two men passed each other and Audubon tried to hide his face, Nolte had stopped and seized Audubon by the hands. Nolte told him to stop being ridiculous—he was more than glad to see him. Nolte insisted Audubon bring his portfolio around, and when he did, Nolte heaped praise on the drawings and, delighted to see Audubon after several years, said he was eager to be of service. He now gave Audubon two letters of introduction.
By far the more valuable of the two was addressed to a Mr. Richard Rathbone, a prominent cotton importer in Liverpool.