JOHN JAMES AUDUBON
1780-1851
In the days when Louisiana was a province of Spain a little dark-eyed
boy used to wander among the fields and groves of his father's
plantation studying with eager delight the works of nature around him.
Lying under the orange-trees watching the mocking-bird, or learning
from his mother's lips the names of the flowers that grew in every
corner of the plantation, he soon came to feel that he was part of
that beautiful world, whose language was the songs of birds and whose
boundaries extended to every place where a blossom lifted its head
above the green sod. To him, as he said years afterward, the birds
were playmates and the flowers dear friends, and before he could
distinguish between the azure of the sky and the emerald of the
grass he had formed an intimacy with them so close and endearing
that whenever removed from their presence he felt a loneliness almost
unbearable. No other companions suited him so well, and no roof
seemed so secure as that formed of the dense foliage under which the
feathered tribes resorted, or the caves and rocks to which the curlew
and cormorant retired to protect themselves from the fury of the
tempest. In these words, recorded by himself, we read the first
chapter of the life history of John James Audubon, the American
naturalist and the author of one of the early classics of American
literature.
In those early days his father was Audubon's teacher, and hand in hand
they searched the groves for new specimens, or lingered over the nests
where lay the helpless young. It was his father who taught him to
look upon the shining eggs as 'flowers in the bud,' and to note the
different characteristics which distinguished them. These excursions
were seasons of joy, but when the time came for the birds to take
their annual departure the joy was turned to sorrow. To the young
naturalist a dead bird, though beautifully preserved and mounted, gave
no pleasure. It seemed but a mockery of life, and the constant care
needed to keep the specimens in good condition brought an additional
sense of loss. Was there no way in which the memory of these feathered
friends might be kept fresh and beautiful? He writes that he turned in
his anxiety to his father, who in answer laid before him a volume of
illustrations. Audubon turned over the leaves with a new hope in
his heart, and although the pictures were badly executed the idea
satisfied him. Although he was unconscious of it, it was the moment of
the birth of his own great life work. Pencil in hand he began to
copy nature untiringly, although for a long time he produced what he
himself called but a family of cripples, the sketches being burned
regularly on his birthdays. But no failure could stop him. He
made hundreds of sketches of birds every year, worthless almost in
themselves because of bad drawing, but valuable as studies of nature.
Meantime for education the boy had been taken from Louisiana to
France, the home of his father, who wished him to become a
soldier, sailor, or engineer. For a few hours daily Audubon studied
mathematics, drawing, and geography, and then would disappear in the
country, returning with eggs, nests, or curious plants. His rooms
looked like a museum of natural history, while the walls were covered
with drawings of French birds.
Learning mathematics with difficulty Audubon became easily proficient
in fencing and dancing, and learned to play upon the violin, flute,
flageolet, and guitar. His drawing lessons were his greatest delight,
the great French artist, David, being his teacher and critic. Once, on
the elder Audubon's return from a long sea-voyage, he was chagrined
to find that although his son had probably the largest amateur
natural-history collection in France, he had neglected his equations,
angles, and triangles, and the lad was sent to his father's station,
given one day to visit the ships and fortifications, and then set to
the study of mathematics, and mathematics only.
For one year he wrestled with problems and theorems, counting himself
happy if by any chance he could fly to the country for an hour to take
up his acquaintance with the birds; and then the father admitted his
son's unfitness for military pursuits and sent him to America to take
charge of some property.
Audubon was then seventeen years of age, and had but one ambition
in life--to live in the woods with his wild friends. As his father's
estate was rented by a very orderly minded Quaker there was little
for Audubon to do except enjoy himself. Hunting, fishing, drawing,
and studying English from a young English girl he afterward married,
filled the day, while he never missed the balls and skating parties
for which the neighborhood was famous. He was the best marksman in the
region, able to bring down his quarry while riding at full speed.
He was the best skater to be found; at balls and parties he was the
amateur master of ceremonies, gayly teaching the newest steps and
turns that obtained in France. In the hunt it was Audubon--dressed,
perhaps, in satin breeches and pumps, for he was a great dandy--who
led the way through the almost unbroken wilderness. Add to this
that he was an expert swimmer, once swimming the Schuylkill with a
companion on his back; that he could play any one of half a dozen
instruments for an impromptu dance; that he could plait a set of
picnic dishes out of willow rushes; train dogs, and do a hundred other
clever things, and it is easy to see why he was a general favorite.
His private rooms were turned into a museum. The walls were covered
with festoons of birds' eggs, the shelves crowded with fishes, snakes,
lizards, and frogs; the chimney displayed stuffed squirrels and
opossums, and wherever there was room hung his own paintings of birds.
It was the holiday of life for the young lover of nature, and he
enjoyed it with good will.
Here the idea of his great work came to him as he was one day looking
over his drawings and descriptions of birds. Suddenly, as it seemed to
him, though his whole life had led to it, he conceived the plan of a
great work on American ornithology. He began his gigantic undertaking
as a master in the school of nature wherein he had been so faithful a
student, for he now saw with joy that the past, which had often seemed
idle, had been in reality rich with labors that were to bear fruit.
He began at once to put his work into scientific form, and nothing
better illustrates his energy and ambition than the fact that he
entered on it alone and unaided, though none knew better than he the
toil and ceaseless endeavor necessary for its completion. Except in a
very immature form, American ornithology at that time did not exist;
it was a region almost as unknown to human thought as the new world
which Columbus discovered. Season after season, from the Gulf to
Canada and back again, these winged creatures of the air wended their
way, stopping to hatch and breed their young, becoming acquainted with
Louisiana orange-groves and New England apple-orchards, now fluttering
with kindly sociability round the dwellings of men and again seeking
lonely eeries among inaccessible mountain tops, pursuing their course
at all times almost without the thought and cognizance of man. It was
Audubon who was the conqueror, if not the discoverer of this aerial
world of song, of which he became the immortal historian. It was
his untiring zeal which gave thus early to American literature
a scientific work of such vast magnitude and importance that it
astonished the scientists of Europe and won for itself the fame of
being the most gigantic biblical enterprise ever undertaken by a
single individual. To do this meant a life of almost constant change,
and Audubon can hardly have had an abiding place after his first
serious beginning. The wide continent became his home and he found his
dwelling wherever the winged tribes sought shelter from the wind and
storm. His pursuit was often interrupted by occupations necessary for
the support of his family, for at his father's death he had given to
his sister his share of the estate and so became entirely dependent
upon his own efforts for a livelihood; but at all times, no matter
what his situation, his heart was in the wild retreats of nature.
Travelling through the West and South in search of fortune as well as
of specimens his experiences were often disenchanting. At Louisville
and New Orleans he would be forced to make crayon portraits of the
principal citizens in order to raise the money for family expenses.
Again he taught drawing; he served as tutor in private families, and
in order to secure funds for the publication of his work he earned
$2,000 by dancing lessons, the largest sum he had ever earned.
Many business speculations enlisted Audubon's hopes, but all failed
utterly. Once he embarked his money in a steam mill, which, being
built in an unfit place, soon failed. At another time he bought a
steamboat, which, proving an unlucky speculation, was sold to a shrewd
buyer who never paid the purchase money. Again he was cheated in the
clearing of a tract of timber. But his studies in natural history
always went on. When he had no money to pay his passage up the
Mississippi he bargained to draw the portrait of the captain of the
steamer and his wife as remuneration. When he needed boots he obtained
them by sketching the features of a friendly shoemaker, and more
than once he paid his hotel bills, and saved something besides, by
sketching the faces of the host and his family.
On the other hand, his adventures in search of material for his work
were romantic enough to satisfy the most ambitious traveller. From
Florida to Labrador, and from the Atlantic to the then unknown regions
of the Yellowstone he pursued his way, often alone, and not seldom in
the midst of dangers which threatened life itself. He hunted buffalo
with the Indians of the Great Plains, and lived for months in the
tents of the fierce Sioux. He spent a season in the winter camp of
the Shawnees, sleeping, wrapped in a buffalo robe, before the great
camp-fire, and living upon wild turkey, bear's grease, and opossums.
He made studies of deer, bears, and cougars, as well as of wild
turkeys, prairie hens, and other birds. For days he drifted down the
Ohio in a flat-bottomed boat, searching the uninhabited shores for
specimens, and living the life of the frontiersman whose daily food
must be supplied by his own exertions. Sometimes his studies would
take him far into the dense forests of the West, where the white man
had never before trod, and the only thing that suggested humanity
would be the smoke rising miles away from the evening camp-fire of
some Indian hunter as lonely as himself.
Once as he lay stretched on the deck of a small vessel ascending the
Mississippi he caught sight of a great eagle circling about his head.
Convinced that it was a new species, he waited patiently for two years
before he again had a glimpse of it, flying, in lazy freedom, above
some butting crags where its young were nested. Climbing to the place,
and watching like an Indian in ambush until it dropped to its nest,
Audubon found it to be a sea-eagle. He named it the Washington Sea
Eagle, in honor of George Washington. Waiting two years longer, he was
able to obtain a specimen, from which he made the picture given in his
work. This is but one example of the tireless patience with which he
prosecuted his studies, years of waiting counting as nothing if he
could but gain his end.
Some of his discoveries in this kingdom of the birds he relates with a
romantic enthusiasm. Throughout the entire work there runs the note
of warmest sympathy with the lives of these creatures of the air and
sunshine. He tells us of their hopes and loves and interests, from the
time of the nest-making till the young have flown away. The freedom of
bird life, its happiness, its experiences, and tragedies appeal to him
as do those of humanity. The discovery of a new species is reported as
rapturously as the news of a new star. Once in Labrador, when he was
making studies of the eggers, his son brought to him a great hawk
captured on the precipice far above his head. To Audubon's delight, it
was that rare specimen, the gerfalcon, which had heretofore eluded all
efforts of naturalists. While the rain dripped down from the rigging
above, Audubon sat for hours making a sketch of this bird and feeling
as rich as if he had discovered some rare gem.
After twenty years the work was published. Every specimen, from the
tiny humming-bird to the largest eagles and vultures, was sketched
life size and colored in the tints of nature. There were four hundred
and seventy-five of these plates, furnishing a complete history of
the feathered tribes of North America, for they showed not only the
appearance of the birds but represented also the manners and home
life of this world of song. The humming-bird poised before the crimson
throat of the trumpet flower, the whippoorwill resting among the
leaves of the oak, the bobolink singing among the crimson flowers
of the swamp maples, the snow-bird chirping cheerily among the
snow-touched berries of the holly, were not sketches merely but bits
of story out of bird history. So also are those pictures of the swan
among the reeds of the Great Lakes, of the great white heron seizing
its prey from the waters of the Gulf, and of the golden eagle winging
its way toward the distant heights that it inhabits.
The work was published by subscription in London in 1829 under the
title, "The Birds of North America." The price was eighty guineas.
Later on a smaller and cheaper edition was issued. The work now is
very rare. Audubon had the gratification of knowing that his labors
were understood and appreciated by the world of science. When he
exhibited his plates in the galleries of England and France, whither
he went to obtain subscriptions, crowds flocked to see them, and the
greatest scientists of the age welcomed him to their ranks. _The Birds
of America_ was his greatest work, though he was interested somewhat
in general zoology and wrote on other subjects.
Audubon died in New York in 1851. The great zoologist Cuvier called
_The Birds of North America_ the most magnificent monument that art
has ever erected to ornithology. The Scotch naturalist Wilson said
that the character of Audubon was just what might have been expected
from the author of such a work, brave, enthusiastic, self-sacrificing,
and capable of heroic endurance.