Under a Wild Sky, page 8
Travels was an instant sensation, though it was better received in Europe, where it quickly went through nine editions, than in the United States, where reviewers complained about Bartram’s ornate style and his high regard for Florida’s Indians. Bartram undeniably overcooked his prose, but in recounting his many adventures with the people and animals of the southeastern United States, he was often hugely entertaining. In one of his most talked-about escapades, Bartram described his killing of a large rattlesnake. In a momentary rage after nearly stepping on the angrily coiled specimen while hiking through a swamp near St. Augustine, Bartram whacked the animal with a stick and then cut off its head. He was instantly overcome with guilt—Bartram regarded the rattlesnake as a marvelous example of natural form and function—though he felt a different sensation after dragging it back to camp and being served a portion of its flesh when the local governor had it cooked up for dinner the same evening. Bartram admitted he could bring himself to taste the meat, but not swallow it.
This kind of adventure was riveting to casual readers, but Bartram earned even more respect for his enlargement of what was known of the country’s natural history. Bartram drew sketches of and described snakes, frogs, turtles, and many sorts of mammals, bringing them to life with sometimes startling immediacy. He reported that Florida swamps in the springtime reverberated with the bellows of male alligators, and that when these reptiles issue their calls, “vapor rises from their nostrils like smoke.” Bartram discovered a great many species not previously known to science, from the gopher turtle to the Florida panther. Among his most significant contributions were observations on bird migration. Bartram noted the transitory appearance in Florida each fall and spring of the many birds that bred in the North and overwintered in the South. And he assembled a new list of American birds—215 in all—that nearly doubled Jefferson’s compilation. Bartram probably had even more bird data than he included in Travels, and his use of unconventional naming schemes in place of Linnaean binomials denied him full credit for many species he was certainly the first to formally describe. But later naturalists came to regard Bartram’s Travels as the true starting point of American ornithological study. Three years after the book first appeared, Bartram was the only American named to an international list of “all living zoologists.”
Bartram was sixty-three when Alexander Wilson came to Gray’s Ferry, and was busy drafting illustrations for Elements of Botany, the first botany textbook published in America. Wilson’s schoolhouse was less than a mile from Bartram’s Garden, which he soon discovered. Long devoted to rambling before and after his teaching day, Wilson loved hiking among the unusual and stately trees and shrubs that abounded in the garden. He was more quickly acquainted with Bartram’s cypresses and azaleas than he was with Bartram himself, as it apparently took the shy schoolteacher the better part of a year to become a regular visitor at the old stone house built by Bartram’s father three-quarters of a century earlier.
But by the spring of 1803, Wilson was corresponding with Bartram and was spending time in the famous naturalist’s library, where he was learning plant and animal classification. He had also begun taking drawing instruction from Bartram’s niece. Wilson regretted not having more free time to pursue these new interests, and remarked how difficult it was to draft proper images when he was forced to work by candlelight. In March, he sent a note to Bartram thanking him for his letters of encouragement, which he said were like “Bank Notes to a Miser.” Wilson worked on images of birds and flowers, and drew an interesting shrub Bartram had pointed out to him, sending the picture—which he deemed a “feeble imitation”—to Bartram with a request that he supply its Linnaean and common names.
One of the works Wilson studied in Bartram’s library was an age-mellowed copy of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands that the book’s author, the English naturalist Mark Catesby, had presented to Bartram’s father. It was, before Bartram’s Travels, the most complete and the most beautiful zoology of North America. The two-volume book consists almost entirely of 220 etchings of plants and animals that Catesby had observed and drawn during two lengthy expeditions to the New World between 1712 and 1726. The pictures depict animals familiar now in North America, but also some that were completely unknown to Wilson. The schoolteacher’s head, for years preoccupied with grammar lessons and the figures of the calculus, now filled with colorful images of fishes and reptiles and mammals and, especially, birds. The first volume was devoted to birds. Wilson saw birds that he knew and some that he didn’t, many depicted in ways suggesting their personalities. In Catesby’s most ambitious drawing, a bald eagle with wings outstretched and talons flaring dives high above a river to capture a fish that has just fallen from the grasp of an osprey seen hovering helplessly in the background. The complexity of this drawing—it is one of only two in which Catesby drew a landscape as a backdrop—is remarkable, and the fact that most of the rest are much simpler indicates how expensive and time-consuming engraving and coloring prints could be. Some of Catesby’s animals are posed against neutral backgrounds; most are either perched on or standing by trees or shrubs that are carefully classed and named.
Catesby had a soft style—the original drawings were made in water-color—but he used bold, saturating colors. There is an arresting degree of detail in the engravings, with the lines of even the softest feathers clearly delineated. His blue jay is typical. The bird stands on the limb of a smilax bush in a scolding posture, its tail cocked high and its head canted upward with its beak open to reveal a wagging tongue. The bird’s signature crest is erect, and the fine feathers along its belly stand out excitedly.
Wilson found Catesby’s book irresistible, and he seemed to begin thinking almost immediately about undertaking a project to expand on it. With only a hundred species of birds represented, the Natural History wasn’t even close to a comprehensive catalogue of North American species. But Catesby had found the right approach in using the available printing techniques and figuring out how to market such a book.
There were several ways of reproducing drawings or paintings. All were labor-intensive and expensive. Images were typically traced and then cut into wood or engraved on stone or metal, usually copper. When these templates were inked and pressed onto paper, a black-and-white copy of the original image resulted. Depending on how rapidly the wood-cut or engraving wore down, it could be reused many times to mass-produce copies.
If the finished image was to be in color, however, this added another demanding step—hand painting. Using the original as a guide, a colorist—or sometimes a team of colorists—painted over the black-and-white print, filling it in one color at a time, like a paint-by-numbers. When well executed, a hand-colored print was almost indistinguishable from the original and from its sibling prints—even though each reproduction was, in truth, a unique work of art.
Printmaking thus involved several skilled disciplines, with the engraving in particular requiring talent often equal to that of the original artist. This meant that the biggest obstacle facing any illustrated book was the cost of making it. Catesby did his own engraving, partly so he could control the quality of the prints but mainly because he couldn’t afford to hire an engraver. Even then, the finished book figured to be so expensive—not to mention the normal risk of less-than-hoped-for sales—that Catesby had had to ensure in advance that the project would pay for itself. He did this by producing the Natural History in installments and selling subscriptions to buyers who agreed to pay for each batch of “birds, beasts, fish, serpents, insects, and plants” as it was received. He also decided to make the book available in black and white. One uncolored installment, or “Number” as it was called, cost one guinea—a pound and a shilling (about $4.80). Catesby then advertised a luxury version. “For the Satisfaction of the CURIOUS,” he stated in a prospectus, “some Copies will be printed on the finest Imperial Paper, and the Figures put in their Natural Colours from the ORIGINAL PAINTINGS, at the Price of Two Guineas.”
Catesby’s Natural History made a terrific impact. It was widely reprinted and translated for many years, and found its way onto the shelves of several royal families. Virtually all of Europe’s most influential naturalists regarded it as the definitive work on North American wildlife. Linnaeus himself based many of his taxonomic listings of New World plants and animals on Catesby’s observations. Like William Bartram decades later, Catesby was struck by the coming and going of the birds through the South each fall and spring. At the time, there was still much uncertainty about migration, and many myths about where birds went in the winter persisted. It was thought that some spent the winter in the deep recesses of caves. Another surprisingly durable theory was that some species, such as swallows, dived to the bottoms of lakes and remained there until the return of warm weather.
Catesby was humbled by his success, and was at pains to apologize—quite unnecessarily—for his primitive style. He took more pride, it seemed, in having endured the rigors of his expeditions, which were considerable. Catesby made all of his drawings in the field, working whenever possible from live-caught specimens. He traveled in unsettled areas, hauling his kits of paints and papers and dissecting instruments, and often lived in the open. He was impressed by the many species he encountered—and by the violence they perpetrated on one another—as he advanced deeper into the tropics. In South Carolina, he lived through a powerful hurricane that left the carcasses of deer and bears hanging from tree limbs, and watched snakes feasting on animals fleeing ahead of the deluge. Inevitably, Catesby experienced the heart-stopping run-in with a rattlesnake that seemed obligatory among early American naturalists. After awaking at an inn in Georgia one morning, Catesby had just sat down to tea in the next room when he heard the maid who’d gone to make up his bed start to scream. She had discovered a rattler between the sheets that Catesby had vacated only minutes before. Catesby concluded that the snake had climbed into bed with him to warm up—it was February—but he couldn’t guess how long they’d kept one another company. In any case, the snake did not care to be disturbed at this point, as Catesby noted when he investigated the scene and found the serpent “full of ire, biting at everything that approached him.” Tellingly, Catesby’s painting of the rattlesnake included a separate close-up of one of its fangs.
For the first time since the days when he had dreamed of being a poet, Wilson felt he’d found an objective—and a means of achieving it. He continued to work at his drawing, routinely submitting his renderings of birds and plants to Bartram for correction and advice. He got to know the Philadelphia engraver Alexander Lawson, a fellow Scot, who provided additional instruction. In the spring of 1804, Wilson sent Lawson a note explaining his frustration at not having more time away from his teaching duties to tend to his “itch for drawing,” which he said he’d gotten from Lawson. He then told Lawson of his idea for an ornithological study of America, confessing that he was famous for having big ideas that came to nothing, but saying he would appreciate his friend’s backing just the same. “I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America,” Wilson wrote. “Now I don’t want you to throw cold water, as Shakespeare says, on this notion, Quixotic as it may appear. I have been so long accustomed to the building of airy castles and brain windmills, that it has become one of my earthly comforts.”
Wilson had taken lodgings near his school with a family named Jones, and in this, too, he was fortunate. The Jones house stood between two creeks that merged into a pool at the base of a low cliff in a thicket a short distance away. Wilson spent hours before and after school lazing atop this hill, reading poetry and studying the sunlight filtering through the beech trees overhead, or looking down at the water, which reflected the laurel branches hanging beside the pond. The grove was full of birds in the spring and summer—so many species that Wilson’s observations there would become the basis for much of his ornithology. He kept track of the intermittent appearances of hawks and orioles, goldfinches and whipporwills. Once, while walking in Bartram’s woods not far away, he saw a species of woodpecker he was sure was new.
Wilson was sometimes joined in his poolside bower by Bartram’s niece. Her name was Nancy, though Wilson called her by her nickname, Anna. Whether they were ever more than the closest of friends is unclear. A few lines in several of Wilson’s poems hint at a greater affection. Wilson seemed, in any event, content and focused on his future—even when Lawson ignored his plea for support and instead tried to talk him out of attempting to publish an illustrated ornithology. Given the more than two hundred birds already known, plus the many more Wilson intended to add to the list, Lawson calculated that the cost of engraving, coloring, and printing such a work—in which Wilson also planned to include a scientific narrative giving the natural history of each species—would easily run to several thousand dollars a copy. No one would pay so dearly, Lawson said, and no publisher would risk investing in a book that might end up costing as much as a small farm.
Wilson never shared these reservations. He kept at his drawing undeterred. Within two years of his coming to Gray’s Ferry he had assembled a fair collection of drawings of the larger birds in the area and was hard at work on the warblers and other small species. His students, amused by his interest in nature, constantly brought Wilson all sorts of plants and animals for his enjoyment. He received a whole basket of ornery crows from a boy in his class, and wondered if the child would next turn up with a load of live bullfrogs. One day a student caught a mouse in the schoolhouse and turned it over to Wilson, who considered how best to pose the animal for drawing. He finally decided to kill the mouse and mount it in the claws of his stuffed owl, but as he watched the animal struggling against a string with which he’d tied it up, Wilson’s heart melted. When he accidentally spilled a few drops of water near it, the mouse quickly drank them up and then, to Wilson’s mind at least, looked up at him with terror in its eyes. He let the mouse go.
Wilson’s perpetually erratic mood stabilized during this time, or at least its extremes subsided in his new, invigorating surroundings. But he still had his moments. Bartram and his niece had promoted Wilson’s interest in birds and drawing partly as a way of pulling him out of the tail-spin he was in when he arrived. They understood that his long walks in the woods were not entirely about his devotion to nature, but were in fact Wilson’s way of escaping his tormented thoughts. On one of these walks, he had accidentally dropped his gun—which shockingly went off. Stunned by the concussion of the blast and the whoosh he felt as the shot charge narrowly missed his chest, Wilson had gone home badly shaken. He confided to Bartram how ironic it would have been if his life, so amply punctuated by times when he almost wished he were dead, had ended in an accident that looked like a suicide. Bartram didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried sick.
And while the birds seemed to lift Wilson’s spirits, his work held his mood in check. Wilson was better paid at the Union School than he ever had been, but he knew now that teaching was not for him. He hated its confinement above all. Indeed, he was now convinced that the grinding repetitiveness of the classroom was killing him. “Close application to my profession, which I have followed since November 1795,” he wrote to a friend, “has deeply injured my constitution, the more so, that my rambling disposition was the worst calculated of anyone’s in the world for the austere regularity of a teacher’s life.”
5
A BEAUTIFUL PLANTATION
Troculus colubris: The Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
I ask of you, kind reader, who, on observing this glittering fragment of the rainbow, would not pause, admire, and instantly turn his mind with reverence toward the Almighty Creator, the wonders of whose hand we at every step discover?
—Ornithological Biography
While Wilson walked in the woods and practiced his draftsmanship, drawing and redrawing his owl, someone else was watching the birds thirty miles away. The eighteen-year-old who now called himself John James Audubon had arrived at his father’s estate, Mill Grove, in late summer of 1803. The final leg of his journey from France had proved more difficult than the ocean crossing. Two weeks earlier, Audubon had left his ship the instant it docked in New York and walked all the way into Greenwich Village, where his father had arranged a line of credit with a bank. Audubon, excited by the city, perhaps failed to notice an uneasy quiet in the streets. Yellow fever had broken out in New York that summer, and by the time Audubon made his way back to the docks he was feeling unwell. His condition deteriorated so quickly that the captain, a man named John Smith, hired a carriage and hurried him out of the city. He ended up at a boardinghouse run by two Quaker ladies who cared for him as his condition first turned grave and then, amazingly, improved just as rapidly.
Audubon’s first weeks after finally reaching Mill Grove were awkward. His English was all but nonexistent, and his exact status at the estate was ambiguous. The elder Audubon was having trouble managing his property from France, and was at odds with both his American agent in Philadelphia (who, among other things, evidently was to handle John James’s modest allowance) and with François Dacosta, the man he’d sent over from Nantes to develop the lead mine on the property. Audubon’s father and Dacosta had entered into an agreement for shared ownership of Mill Grove that was a continually evolving tangle of bonds, mortgages, and promises to split future proceeds from the mine. To the extent that anybody was actually running the place, it seemed to be the tenant farmer, a Quaker named William Thomas. Thomas tilled the land, tended the livestock, operated the lumber and grist mill, and took care of the large house. Audubon, apparently oblivious to these arrangements, assumed he was in charge of Mill Grove. But he showed little interest in accepting any daily responsibilities. Instead, he went hunting.
