Under a Wild Sky (4 page)

On the long way back, Audubon had weighed his options. He would have to find the means to go to Europe to publish his work. That seemed certain. Audubon was less sure how to deal with the most widely shared criticism of his drawings—their size. It had never occurred to him to scale down his birds from their natural dimensions. He had invented his own technique for posing freshly killed specimens against a grid so that he could copy them exactly. To accommodate larger birds like turkeys and eagles, Audubon used the largest available papers—a size called “double elephant” that measured nearly forty by twenty-seven inches—and even then long-necked birds like cranes or swans had to be bent into somewhat contrived positions to make them fit. Publishing these large color images would be, Audubon had been assured, utterly impractical. It would cost a fortune to produce, and even if it could be managed who would want to buy such a huge and expensive book?

Floating downriver under the stars, traveling by day with the birds once again going in his direction, Audubon decided there was no answer to those questions other than to try anyway. Audubon had many gifts, but perhaps none was more valuable than his short memory for hardships and reversals. He forgot about his critics in Philadelphia and reflected instead on his luck at having met there a few people who were more encouraging. Thinking about his drawings, Audubon had a sudden insight. He didn't want to change their scale—but he could put them in a more appealing order. There were large birds, medium birds, small birds—a crude visual phylogeny.
Audubon began to imagine his drawings produced in groups, each composed of one large image accompanied by several smaller ones.

While Audubon drifted back into the wilds of America, in Philadelphia George Ord sniffled back into his work on
American Ornithology
, hoarding new species and descriptions, feeling himself well rid of a would-be usurper of Alexander Wilson's legacy. It had been a nasty job, but a necessary one. Ord was not about to let American science lose the ground it had gained in recent years by endorsing Audubon's substandard work. Besides, the man was obviously a fraud—as dishonest as his drawings
were worthless. Audubon, he was sure, was headed back to the swamps of Louisiana where he belonged, unlikely to be heard from again.

As it turned out, Ord was right about a few things. Audubon was not exactly who he claimed to be. His father was not an admiral. He had not been born in Louisiana. He never studied with Jacques-Louis David. John James Audubon, in fact, was not even his real name.

2

COMING ACROSS

Troglodytes hyemalis
: The Winter Wren

The extent of the migratory movements of this diminutive bird, is certainly the most remarkable fact connected with its history.

—Ornithological Biography

A
t the end of the eighteenth century, the coastal settlement of Les Cayes looked out over a busy Caribbean harbor on the southwestern arm of Saint-Domingue—the island known today as Haiti. It is a poor country now, but in those days it was not. After Columbus landed there, the island was plundered and its native Indian population destroyed. For more than two centuries Saint-Domingue was home to wild cattle and pigs and an equally unruly assortment of English, Spanish, and French colonists and freebooters. By the late 1700s, the western portion of the island was under French control and had grown far richer than the Spanish part to the east. Sugar and coffee plantations, built on the blood and sweat of African slaves, prospered. At night, a ribbon of lights from towns and sugar mills along the coast traced the line of the sea, and Saint-Domingue was known throughout Europe as a thriving and bountiful colony, ripe with opportunity.

On April 26, 1785, a twenty-seven-year-old chambermaid named Jeanne Rabin, recently arrived from France, delivered a baby boy after a difficult two days of labor at a plantation just outside of Les Cayes. Rabin, already weak from the effects of unremitting tropical illnesses, never fully recovered after the baby arrived. Despite frequent medical attention brought to her by the baby's father, a French sea captain from Nantes named Jean Audubon, Rabin died a few months later.

Audubon's mulatto housekeeper Sanitte, with whom he already had two children and would soon have another, took charge of the infant. This tangled domestic arrangement—Audubon also had a legal wife back in France—relied on unstated conventions between whites and people of color, but it was a relatively uncomplicated situation in the loose social climate of the island. Audubon and Rabin had met on board ship from France. Sanitte stepped aside when the captain's new love showed up at the plantation—and then resumed her position as lady of the house after Rabin died.

They called the little boy Jean Rabin. His early childhood was happy. Saint-Domingue was lush and mountainous, with thick forests and a warm, hypnotic sea close by. The abundant wildlife delighted Jean, who showed a curiosity about nature as soon as he could talk. Though his father was often absent and his mother had died before he knew her, the boy had the run of the plantation and several half-siblings to play with. Yellow fever and malaria were epidemic on the island, and European settlers complained of Saint-Domingue's oppressive heat and torrential rains. But the climate suited Audubon's children.
Young Jean's eyes were often turned upward, looking to the trees and across the wide tropical sky for birds, which were everywhere in dizzying profusion.
Pelicans, sandpipers, frigate birds, herons, parrots, cuckoos, trogons, gulls, terns, plovers, and owls were common.
In winter months they were joined by eagles, swallows, warblers, shearwaters, grosbeaks, and hosts of other species from the north.

Jean Audubon continued a hard life at sea. He first sailed at the age of thirteen, and at fifteen was wounded and captured when his ship was attacked by the British. After a year and a half in an English prison, Audubon returned to France and again went to sea, eventually gaining command of his own merchant ship.
Seeking his fortune in the New World, Audubon acquired the plantation at Les Cayes and was soon trading in cargoes of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and slaves. In 1779, with the American Revolution in progress, he was again captured at sea by British forces and this time imprisoned in New York. After his release, he briefly commanded a French naval corvette just as the war was ending.

In the spring of 1789, with another revolution brewing in France, Audubon looked to diversify his assets. He sailed to America with a shipload of sugar, which he traded for a farm called Mill Grove, twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. But the deal was no sooner done than Audubon
had a new worry. The colonists in Saint-Domingue had become alarmed at mounting unrest among the slaves—unrest being the simmering final stage before open rebellion.
With only 35,000 French colonists on the island and close to a half-million black slaves, the civil order of Saint-Domingue was balanced on a knife's edge of colonial privilege and racial oppression. Nervous authorities there declared white control “in imminent peril.”
They blamed the sudden instability on whites who were, in the words of one official communiqué, “drunk with liberty” and sympathetic to blacks demanding enfranchisement. In fact, Saint-Domingue was on the brink of a fifteen-year struggle toward independence that would produce a general evacuation of the French colonists.
Those who didn't leave were eventually massacred.

For a time Audubon believed his family in Les Cayes was more or less safe, as long as he stayed away. But as the situation deteriorated he worried about six-year-old Jean, who was white, as well as his younger mixed-blood half-sister, Rose, who was unusually fair.
Finally, he arranged passage to France for the two children. They arrived in June of 1791, eyes wide open at this strange country an ocean away from their home, and thrilled at being reunited with their father and at meeting his wife Anne.
Three years later, the Audubons corrected the children's ambiguous status by adopting them.

Jean Rabin became Jean Audubon.
He was sent to school, where he showed an interest in making pencil sketches of birds, but was otherwise an indifferent student. At the age of eleven, he was enrolled at the naval academy at Rochefort. There he became an accomplished musician—he played the flute and the violin—and learned to dance and fence. He was also known for his swimming prowess. All of which was somewhat beside the point. Young Audubon did miserably in his military training, and also demonstrated a propensity for seasickness. After three years, he was dismissed for failing several classes. His disappointed father, who was about to retire after reaching the mid-level rank of commander in the French Navy, began to think his son needed a change of scenery and occupation.

In March 1803, the elder Audubon received unexpected news from America. The tenant farmer living at Mill Grove had discovered lead ore on the property. Lead, with its many uses in munitions and paints, was a valuable commodity.
Audubon dispatched an agent from Nantes to open a mine at Mill Grove, and turned his attention to his now-eighteen-year-old
son. Napoleon was conscripting an army on the eve of declaring himself emperor. The Audubons were not eager to see their son drafted and thought his prospects would be brighter in America. In August, they put young Jean on a ship bound for New York—but not before extracting a promise from him that he would never reveal his illegitimate birth.
When he walked down the gangway at the piers on the East River in Manhattan a few weeks later, Jean carried documents stating that he was from Louisiana—the sprawling western territory the United States had just acquired from France. The papers gave his name as John James Audubon.

While Audubon was a toddler being dandled in the gentle surf at Les Cayes, a book of poetry was causing a sensation on the other side of the world, in Scotland. Its author, a peasant farmer named Robert Burns, had gained overnight celebrity for a slim volume of earthy verse treating everyday subjects.
Despite a modest first printing of six hundred copies,
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
stirred readers of every kind, from the literati in Edinburgh to field hands and tradesmen who saw their own lives and passions reflected in Burns's lines about love and work. Imitators appeared across the country.
One of them was a twenty-year-old weaver named Alexander Wilson, who lived in the town of Paisley.
It seemed that everyone in Paisley was either a weaver or a poet. Many fancied themselves both.

Now a suburb of Glasgow, Paisley was then the fastest-growing city in Scotland. Situated on the pretty White Cart River in a region known as “the Seedhills,” the town was a model of the new industrial and trading prosperity.
It was also a hub on the smuggling routes from America and the Far East. Goods moving between the beaches on the Firth of Clyde and Glasgow regularly passed through Paisley. Sugar and tobacco were smuggled, as was a large quantity of tea, all in avoidance of British taxes.
As much as half the tea consumed in England entered the country illegally, principally by way of Scotland.

But it was cloth making—in particular its trademark patterned silk gauzes—for which Paisley was better known, and to which its comfortable middle class was indebted. Weavers endured tedious, physically exhausting hours at their looms but earned good money.
Many of them belonged to after-hours clubs, associations of fellow workers who shared pastimes such as fishing, hunting, political debate, and especially golf. In
the summer, when twilight lingered late in western Scotland, the weavers of Paisley could be seen heading out for rounds of golf long after their workdays and dinners were done.

As a boy, Wilson was called Sandy—short for Alexander—a gentle, fair nickname for a child who was neither. Wilson had dark hair and eyes.
He was thin, but grew tall and passably handsome, with sharp, solemn features.
The Wilson family fortunes were up and down. His father traded smuggling for weaving and respectability when he married, and for a time the family's prospects were sunny.
Young Sandy, who was bright and bookish, was sent to school in preparation for joining the clergy. But his mother's death when he was only ten changed everything.
His father quickly remarried, and Wilson's stern new stepmother ended his studies and sent him to work as a cowherd on the windswept moors between Paisley and the coast. The solitude and the countryside appealed to him, but Wilson was not good at this work.
He much preferred reading and contemplating nature to tending the herd, which often strayed.

At thirteen, Wilson accepted a three-year apprenticeship as a weaver.
When his father renewed his smuggling activities, the family moved about ten miles west of Paisley, to an ancient, half-ruined castle called the Tower of Auchinbathie, leaving Wilson behind to learn his trade.
Nobody knew for sure how old the tower was, but local legend held that it had once been owned by the father of William Wallace, the national hero of Scottish independence, in the thirteenth century.
Wilson visited his family there on weekends.
He took up hunting and was often out with his gun, chasing grouse across the fields near a well-known hilltop called Misty Law, the highest place in the county.

Wilson was a distractible young man.
He developed a love of poetry, memorizing the mock epic poems of Alexander Pope, and often reciting verse or composing his own while he worked at his loom.
He took a job in a weaving shop near Edinburgh, and began spending part of his time on the road peddling the cloth he helped to make. He traveled from one end of Scotland to another on foot, calling at farmhouses and in towns.
When business was good, he stayed in inns and wrote to his friends from fashionable addresses. His letters often included poems or fragments of poems. Sometimes the whole letter was in verse. Wilson was moody, and he walked through a land of moods. With midnight approaching on New Year's Eve in 1788, Wilson wrote to a friend back in Edinburgh from
St. Andrews, on the dark threshold of the North Sea, reflecting on the universal human failure to take advantage of a short life on Earth: