Under a Wild Sky, page 21
This was Audubon’s lowest moment. For the first time since he’d arrived in America, he had nothing. No money. No property. No job. No home. His father was dead and he was disinherited. His adopted mother was on the other side of the world. Audubon had nothing to look forward to but another mouth to feed.
And so he started drawing. Looking at a pair of chalk portraits he’d made for his hosts years earlier when he lived in Louisville, Audubon thought he might now try to earn a few dollars doing portraiture, possibly even taking on students in drawing. He was startled when a number of people responded to an advertisement for his services. Soon Audubon had a fair business going, painting and teaching. One of his specialties was portraying the dead. People liked to have deathbed portraits of their loved ones, and word spread that Audubon was good at them. He later even claimed that a Louisville clergyman had his recently deceased young daughter disinterred so that she could be drawn by Audubon. How this kind of work affected Audubon’s already depressed mood can only be imagined.
After a few weeks of painting, Audubon had enough money to rent an apartment in Louisville. Fall was on the way. But before they could move, Lucy gave birth—this time to another daughter. They named her Rose. While Audubon waited for Lucy to get back on her feet, it seemed to him that the world looked a little brighter. He was earning a living again. His family would shortly be in its own home once more. Watching his new daughter nursing at Lucy’s breast, he told himself she was the most beautiful little girl he had ever seen. She lived for seven months.
By the time Rose died, Audubon had also run out of portraits to paint. Shippingport and even nearby Louisville needed only so many chalk likenesses of their citizens, and people didn’t die fast enough for Audubon to make a living off that end of the business. A friend told Audubon about a temporary opening for a taxidermist at the new Western Museum of Cincinnati College. The job paid $125 a month. Audubon applied and was hired. For a few months the grieving Audubons lived something approximating a normal life in Cincinnati. Audubon liked his work stuffing fish and birds. More significantly, his portfolio of bird drawings—now virtually his only possession—was much admired by people at the college. Audubon was assured that it was a thing of great value, something that would one day bring him fame and fortune. Unfortunately, praise for his work was all Audubon received for his tenure at the museum. After repeatedly promising him his pay, the curator instead let him go in April of 1820. Lucy, who’d anticipated this, had already opened what amounted to a small private school where she taught a handful of students. Audubon’s attempt to become a teacher at a local girls’ school didn’t work out, so he, too, advertised for his own students. A number enrolled, but the one whose talent caught Audubon’s eye right away was a boy named Joseph Mason. Audubon thought he was “about 18 years of age.” In fact, Mason was only thirteen years old. But he had a prodigious knowledge of botany and was a brilliant flower painter. Audubon admired Mason’s work so much that he experimented with it, adding birds to the flowers and shrubs the boy willingly drew for that purpose.
Spring moved into summer. Audubon’s thoughts—for the first time in a long time—turned to the future. His course seemed at last inevitable, or at least unavoidable. He began planning a trip through the country, one not unlike the expedition Alexander Wilson had been on when he had paused in Louisville a decade earlier. Audubon was determined now to complete his drawings and observations of American birds. He expected this would take him down the Mississippi, through Arkansas, into Louisiana, eventually over to the Florida Keys, and then up the East Coast. The precocious Joseph Mason was to go along, as company and as a collaborator. Lucy, whose suffering must have been all but unendurable with two dead children and a bankrupt husband in the space of only a few years, grimly agreed to stay on in Cincinnati, where she would continue teaching and try to collect some of the salary Audubon still had coming. With no money to pay his fare, Audubon spent months looking for a boat captain who would give him passage in exchange for his services as a hunter and scout. At last one said yes. His name was Jacob Aumack. Aumack, a plainspoken man much accustomed to the hardships of frontier travel, was a prudent skipper known for the care he took on passages downriver. He was in command of a large flatboat bound for New Orleans with cargo and a slightly motley crew of four, as well as a handful of passengers. Late in the afternoon of October 12, 1820, Audubon and Mason stepped aboard and the boat was pushed out into the current. Audubon, writing in his still groping English, confided to his journal that the outcome of this enterprise was far from certain—though he would do his best:
If God will grant us a safe return to our families our Wishes will be most Likely congenial to our present feelings Leaving Home with a Determined Mind to fulfill our Object=
Without any Money My Talents are to be My Support and My enthusiasm my Guide in My Dificulties, the whole of which I am ready to exert to meet keep, and to surmount.
One more time, Audubon set off down the Ohio River in the hope that something was out there for him in the vastness of the American frontier. Only now he traveled chastened and without pretense, dressed in buckskin and homespun, carrying with him only his gun, his drawing kit, and his precious portfolio, plus several letters of introduction. These he and Lucy had managed to obtain from prominent Kentuckians whose names and reputations might open doors far away. Such letters were then a common way of establishing contacts in new, sometimes remote places. One of Audubon’s letters was from Henry Clay, the future secretary of state in the administration of John Quincy Adams. Clay, who had been elected to the House of Representatives from Kentucky, had also helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812. He would eventually run (three times) for the presidency, but at the moment was better known as one of the brokers of a deal in the Congress to give equal representation to free and slave states—an arrangement dubbed the Missouri Compromise. Clay was one of the most famous men in America.
In his short letter, Clay stuck to the most general sort of endorsement, “recommending” Audubon to government officials and private citizens, while rather pointedly mentioning neither birds nor painting. He stated that he was personally acquainted with Audubon, and had also the assurances of many who had known him longer and better, that he was a man of outstanding character. Audubon, Clay wrote, was now embarked on an expedition to what was then the American southwest in pursuit of “a laudable object connected with Natural History.” Audubon was well qualified in this undertaking, Clay said.
The river was low as they set out—Captain Aumack managed only fourteen miles in their first day. The next morning, Audubon and Mason led a hunting party ashore and returned after a short foray having killed a woodcock, twenty-seven squirrels, a barn owl, a turkey buzzard, and thirty partridges. Audubon also knocked down what he thought was a yellow-rumped warbler still in its juvenile plumage, a bird he was “perfectly convinced” had been misidentified by Alexander Wilson as the “autumnal warbler.” (Actually, Wilson was correct, as Audubon later conceded.) As the hunters relaxed on deck cleaning their guns, flocks of ducks and meadowlarks streamed by overhead on their way south. Signs of the season were afoot. A couple days later, the passengers awoke to find the woods heavy with frost and saw deer swimming in the river.
Audubon fell into a routine, hunting at first light, then dissecting birds, making drawings, and writing in his journal during the day as the boat coasted on. It was unseasonably cold. Audubon felt ill the first week out, and working in the cramped cabin to stay out of the icy wind gave him headaches. In early November they put ashore near Evansville, Indiana. Audubon persuaded Mason and one of the passengers to take the skiff across the river to Henderson and retrieve his hunting dog, Dash, who’d been left behind in the Audubons’ hurried departure many months before. Despite a fierce wind that made the trip far chancier than it should have been, they were successful. Audubon, delighted to have his dog back, was in a bleak mood all the same. He made a morose sketch of the place and reflected that it was almost inconceivable that he had lived there for eight years and thought himself happy. When they shoved off the next morning and the current swept them past the blank walls of the mill, he hoped he would never see it again.
The weather was slightly better that morning, a scarlet sunrise hinting that an interlude of Indian summer might be on the way. But the effect was partly due to thick smoke that filled the air and had Audubon blinking back tears. It was said in Kentucky that smoke sometimes drifted in from prairie fires set by Indian hunting parties to the west. Puzzlingly, Audubon observed that the wind had been from the east—always a portentous direction—for days. It grew chilly again. This cold spell lingered, and a string of rainy days made everyone cranky. Audubon was uncharacteristically annoyed by a fellow passenger named Shaw, who owned a fair portion of the cargo. Audubon thought him weak and self-centered, and said he reminded him of “some Jews” who live well at the expense of others. Audubon’s feelings about the man were undoubtedly inseparable from his bruised ego, as Shaw’s conspicuous wealth must have offered an unhappy contrast with his own circumstances.
Audubon consoled himself with his daily hunts and with many new observations of birds, which he carefully recorded. One evening, just before sunset, he watched a barred owl that had been chased from its roost by a flock of crows. The owl rose rapidly into the sky “in the manner of a Hawk” until it disappeared from sight. When the owl came back into view, it was flying erratically, “as if Lost.” It then flew in circles and crazy zigzags until darkness came and Audubon could not tell what became of the bird. This was, he said, highly unusual and fascinating behavior that he had never seen before.
Summer seemed to have turned almost overnight into winter. The cold continued, and the leaves were all gone from the trees. Rain and sluggish currents slowed the travelers’ progress. One day, they floated only seven miles. They ran aground from time to time, forcing the crew over the side and into the frigid river to free the boat. As nerves frayed, Audubon came to doubt the wisdom of the trip altogether. Out of the blue in mid-November, Captain Aumack grew testy and apparently had a falling-out with Audubon. Without giving any of the details of what had happened, Audubon hinted in his journal that he had been grievously mistreated by the captain, who, among other complaints, had developed misgivings about the arrangement for Audubon and Mason’s free passage. Evidently their disagreement raged through the better part of the night. Audubon wrote a note to his sons—in the unlikely event they ever happened to read his “trifling remarks”—advising them that they should never permit themselves to take on obligations to men who are “not Aware of the Value or the Meaness of their Conduct.” They should also, he warned, be wary of understandings with “owners” and “clerks,” and they should avoid ever accepting anything they couldn’t pay for.
The next day at dawn, Audubon, exhausted and in an agitated state, went ahead by himself in the skiff to the confluence with the Mississippi. Studying the eddies where the clear water of the Ohio was subsumed by the muddy surge of the Mississippi, Audubon was overcome by emotion. He tried to think casually about his previous visits to this place, but the roiling waters held his gaze, and anxious thoughts came unbidden. Despite his awkwardness with language and his frequently rough manner, Audubon was sometimes capable of expressions of surprising sensitivity. Audubon thought he perceived that the pretty, transparent Ohio tried to resist as it disappeared into the Mississippi’s southbound murk. And then it occurred to him that he was staring into a watery metaphor for his own life:
The meeting of the Two Streams reminds me a little of the Young, Gentle, man Youth who Comes in the World, spotles he presents himself, he is gradually drawn in to thousands of Dificulties that Makes him wish to keep to himself apart, but at Last he is over done and mixed, and lost in the Vortex—
Later that day, as the flatboat came into the Mississippi and they turned toward New Orleans, Audubon again felt a foreboding, noting in his journal that he had become the victim of an “involuntary fear” he could not shake as “every moment” carried him farther away from his family.
One morning when it was too rainy to hunt, Audubon sat down and composed a long journal entry seemingly addressed to Victor, though he obviously meant it for both his sons. It amounted to a brief autobiography, offering a carefully edited version of his birth at Saint-Domingue, his removal to France, and his eventual arrival in America. In a confessional tone that revealed his uneven state of mind, Audubon admitted to contradictory feelings about his time in Henderson. It was, on one hand, the place that saw his best and happiest days. John Woodhouse had been born there—a great blessing. Business had been good too, and for years he and Lucy had felt close and certain of themselves and their future. But it was also the place where disaster had befallen him. Audubon wrote of having too many partners and taking on too much debt, and of confronting too many unforeseen events that “reduced” and “divided” everything the family had achieved. Now he was embarked on a new chapter in his life, one forced upon him by bad luck but also by a disposition that he believed made it necessary for him to pursue his only abiding passion. His confession was sharply at odds with his later claims about when the idea of publishing his work first formed:
Ever since a Boy I have had an astonishing desire to see Much of the World & particularly to Acquire a true Knowledge of the Birds of North America, consequently, I hunted when Ever I had an Opportunity, and Drew every New Specimen as I could, or dared steel time from my Business and having a tolerably Large Number of Drawings that have been generally admired, I Concluded that perhaps I Could Not do better than to Travel, and finish My Collection or so nearly so that it would be a Valuable Acquisition—My Wife Hoped it might do Well, and I Left her Once More . . .
Audubon found the passage south painfully tedious, largely because the weather forced the travelers to remain in the cabin so much of the time. Yet scarcely a day passed that he did not record observations of birds—as well as the occasional geological feature or some aspect of the lives and characters of the settlers and Indians the party encountered. Audubon began seeing bird species with which he was unfamiliar. Some of these he drew and later included in his published works; others, like the “fin-tailed duck” and the “imber diver,” disappeared among many future corrections of his taxonomy. Sometimes the stormy weather so retarded the boat’s progress that Audubon had time to hike the woods. One day, after a bone-chilling and sleepless night during which everyone aboard had gone repeatedly over the side to keep the wind from pushing the boat hopelessly aground, Audubon discovered a small, quiet lake where he shot several geese and ducks and found the largest mussels he had ever seen, recording them as “muscles” in his journal. Later that afternoon he caught a catfish that weighed over sixty pounds. Audubon reported happily that such a large fish was easily dispatched by “stabbing it about the Center of its head.”
But a day later, having caught another, smaller catfish, Audubon wrote that this one survived for over an hour during the same stabbing treatment. Apparently in a brutal mood, Audubon tied a line around the foot of a bald eagle Captain Aumack had wounded, lashed the other end to a large pole, and pitched both the bird and the pole overboard to see what would happen. Surprisingly, the eagle swam off rapidly, flailing the water with its huge wings and dragging the pole along with it. As he amused himself watching a frightened Mason attempt to recapture the eagle with the skiff, Audubon noted the bird’s mate circling overhead and crying out with “true sorrow.” An hour later the eagle accepted a fish from Audubon, but the next day it hissed at him whenever he came near.
As they passed through the Arkansas territory, the flora and fauna began to change. Audubon wrote to the territorial governor imploring him for assistance in exploring the region, but heard nothing back. Spanish moss now hung in the trees. Audubon was on the alert for alligators and was eager to see them—though the chilly weather did not cooperate. Ivory-billed woodpeckers became a common sight, and their calls reverberated through the forest. Dash, it turned out, was pregnant. Audubon referred to her in his journal as “my slut Dash.” After she finally gave birth to a litter of pups, Audubon and Mason decided to perform a gruesome experiment. It was said that the flesh of the Carolina parakeet—or “parrokeet” as Audubon wrote in his journal—was toxic to a dog’s heart. Audubon and Mason shot ten parakeets, boiled them, and fed them to Dash—who showed not the slightest ill effect.
For many weeks, Audubon had been seeing numbers of large, long-necked black birds he took to be a species of pelican unfamiliar to him. Above Natchez, Mississippi, at the mouth of the Yazoo River—a beautiful, clear stream flanked by willows and cottonwoods—Audubon spotted a whole flock of the strange birds roosted near the water. Audubon and Mason took the skiff and floated past the birds, then went ashore and crawled back toward them. When they were finally in range, about forty-five yards away, Audubon carefully picked out a group of three perched on a dead branch and stood and fired at them. All three birds fell.
But when he and Mason rushed forward to retrieve the birds, they discovered them swimming off with the larger flock. All the birds dove at the approach of the two men, and on resurfacing took to the air after running over the surface of the water for a good fifty yards. Audubon was fascinated—and then noticed that one bird, obviously wounded, could not fly. He and Joseph raced back to the skiff and went after the bird, which swam ahead up the river, diving repeatedly. After a mile of inching closer to the bird, Audubon sensed it was tiring, as each dive lasted a shorter time than the last. Finally Mason readied his gun as Audubon pulled on the oars. The bird came up again, close by now, its head and neck like a snake. Mason fired, killing it. Audubon, nervous and exhausted from the chase, was flummoxed once he brought it over the side. The bird looked something like an albatross, but Audubon could not even guess at the genus to which it belonged. And while Audubon surely determined the bird’s identity later, exactly what it was remains uncertain, since he never mentioned this incident again.
