Audubon John James - John James Audubon : the making of an American

CONTENTS

FOR DON BOARMAN

In the beginning, all the world was America.

JOHN LOCKE

Part One

THE MAKING

OF AN

AMERICAN

One

MIGRATION

T HE SHARP CRIES OF GULLS wheeling above the East River docks welcomed the handsome young Frenchman to America. Crossing from Nantes in late summer, he had been a month and a half at sea and he was grateful for the solidity of New York cobblestones. That August 1803 he was four months past his eighteenth birthday, barely fledged, but the United States was hardly older: Lewis and Clark were just preparing to depart for the West. His father owned a plantation called Mill Grove on Perkiomen Creek near its junction with the Schuylkill River northwest of Philadelphia, close above Valley Forge, and that was where he was going. His father was a former sea captain and retired French Navy officer who had commanded a corvette in the final battle of the American Revolution. Jean Audubon had sent his cherished only son to America to escape conscription into the forces Napoleon was mustering for his war with England, joined the previous May.

Wherever the young man went he watched the birds. Birds moved through the human world at will. In their large freedom they lived rich lives in parallel with people and people hardly knew. On his passage from Nantes, at the Grand Banks off Newfoundland where his ancestors had fished for cod, far out at sea, he had scattered ships biscuit on the deck and drawn migrating brown titlarks (American pipits)on board wearied, he would remember and write thirty years later, and so hungry that the crumbs of biscuit thrown to them were picked up with the greatest activity.

He studied birds for the fables they enactedhe carried La Fontaines Fables with him as a guideand beyond fable he studied them to learn their habits, the patterns and systems of their lives. Studying birds was how he mastered the world, and himself. Leaving his friends, his father and his country had disheartened him. The long hours of sailing brought deep sorrow or melancholy musing.... My affections were with those I had left behind, and the world seemed to me a great wilderness. Then the New World rolled across the horizon, a real and physical wilderness beyond its settled rim. He had begun drawing birds in France. Now, prompted by an innate desire to acquire a thorough knowledge of the birds of this happy country, I formed the resolution, immediately on my landing, to spend, if not all my time in that study, at least all that portion generally called leisure, and to draw each individual of its natural size and coloring. This is retrospect, of course, but it catches the eighteen-year-olds excitement and bravado.

Manhattan from the East River. Aquatint engraving (detail) after Robert Havell, Jr.

His namehis new name, his name as of the day he had boarded shipwas John James Audubon. In France for the previous ten years he had been Jean-Jacques Fougre Audubon. (Fougrefernwas an offering to placate the Revolutionary authorities, who scorned the names of saints.) From his birth on April 26, 1785, until 1793 he had been Jean Rabin, his fathers bastard child, born on Jean Audubons lost Caribbean sugar plantation on Saint Domingue (soon to be renamed Haiti) to a twenty-seven-year-old French chambermaid, Jeanne Rabin, who had died of infection within months of his birth. His fathers wife in France, Anne Moynet, a generous older widow whom Jean Audubon had married long before, had welcomed her husbands natural son to Nantes and raised him as her own, but his stigmatic birth was a secret John James was sworn to hide: in France bastard children were denied inheritance.

To complicate his identity further, he began using the name LaForest, enlarging on Fougre: John James LaForest Audubon.

He was taller than the average of his day, lean and athletic, unself-consciously vain:

Five feet nine is nearer the truthtaller than his father, who was five feet five. His hair was chestnut, his beak of a nose certifiably French. But without question women found him handsome. He is the handsomest boy in Nantes, his adoptive mother had written her husband once, but perhaps not the most studious.

Captain Jean Audubon, John Jamess father

He could sing, dance, play the flute, the violin and the recorder-like flageolet, fence, hunt, shoot and ride and draw. He was volatile, excitable and vivacious. Young as he was, people already liked to be around himmen and women both.

Before he could learn American birds he had to learn English. His father had asked the captain of his ship of passage, John Smith, to watch over him. Leaving the ship to cash the letter of credit his father had given him, striding along Greenwich Street above the Battery, John James was staggered by the first symptoms of a life-threatening fever. He remembered it as yellow fever, and it may have been; the jaundicing and frequently deadly infection was a common summer scourge. In 1793 an epidemic that refugees had carried from Saint Domingue had killed nearly five thousand people in Philadelphia, and it had struck again that summer of 1803 in New York as well. Audubons illness made Smiths mission imperative. The captain saw his charge delivered to a boardinghouse outside Philadelphia operated by two good Quaker women and left him in their care. Nursing him back to health, the women taught him Quaker English. He theed and thoud his intimates ever after.

WHEN JOHN JAMESS NURSES thought he was well enough to travel, they sent word to his fathers agent in Philadelphia, and soon a prosperous Quaker lawyer carriaged to their boardinghouse to fetch the young man away. Miers Fisher had negotiated the purchase of Mill Grove for Jean Audubon in 1789. Twenty-three hundred English pounds in gold and silverroughly $200,000 todaybought 284 acres of fair Pennsylvania farmland and woods with a two-story dormered fieldstone mansion set high on a steep lawn, stone barns and outbuildings and working water-powered flour and sawmills down the lawn beside the broad Perkiomen. The property was meant to be an investment. Jean Audubon had begun his maritime career at twelve as a cabin boy on his fathers merchant ship out of Les Sables-dOlonne downriver from Nantes on the west coast of France below the Loire. He had advanced to apprentice sailor and eventually captained ships of his own, fishing on the Grand Banks and hauling cargo. Many profitable voyages later, he had acquired a sugar plantation and refinery on Saint Domingue, Frances most prosperous colony, where sugar and indigo worked by half a million African slaves supplied two-thirds of pre-Revolutionary Frances overseas trade. But slave uprisings in Guadeloupe and Martinique and the first stirrings of revolution in France and on Saint Domingue itself had alerted the shrewd