Under a Wild Sky Read online

  In January 1824, Bonaparte submitted a paper on his new petrels to the academy, where it was read to the members and later accepted for publication. On February 24, while Audubon was shivering on the docks and saving his pennies in Shippingport, the academy elected Bonaparte as a member. He was received warmly a week later at his first meeting. Bonaparte’s new colleagues doubtless respected his ornithological work, but they were probably influenced by his glamorous connection with Europe as well. Born in France and raised in Italy, Bonaparte had wealth and a title of sorts. He was the prince of Musignano, which was neither a country nor even a locality, but merely his father’s house on a hill overlooking the Italian town of Canino, not far from Rome. Still, Bonaparte was an aristocrat, even if he wasn’t a very impressive one physically. He had dark hair and eyes, and he was short and plump. Everyone agreed he was the spitting image of his late uncle Napoleon, the emperor of France.

  When Mease took Audubon to meet Bonaparte a few days later, the two naturalists saw at once that they were quite different, though they had much in common. Audubon, obviously, was French. But he was poor and only marginally educated, and seemed uncomfortable in his surroundings after years away from civil society. For his part, Audubon regarded the little man before him as scarcely more than a boy—though he was literate and precocious and displayed the easy assurance of the upper class. Both men must have found their meeting in this way the kind of odd circumstance that could only happen in America.

  Bonaparte brushed aside the awkwardness of the moment. Like most naturalists, he was insatiably curious. Bonaparte invited Audubon to show him his drawings and made space on a table where the portfolio, which seemed unusually large, could be opened. As Audubon fumbled with the string, Bonaparte may have allowed himself to hope the portfolio contained a bird or two he could add to a list he was making of undescribed or misidentified North American species. The New World was full of taxonomic opportunity. Bonaparte, who’d pored over rare illustrated texts and investigated European specimen collections of birds from around the world, expected that he knew more about these matters than almost anyone alive. And Bonaparte had a good idea of what Audubon’s paintings might look like. With luck, they would be proper scientific renderings—clean, two-dimensional studies of the birds in static profile, wings demurely folded alongside their bodies, the plumages neatly colored against a white background. Such work required not only skill, but also discipline and a patient attention to detail—not exactly qualities that Audubon projected.

  Bonaparte stepped nearer the table. Audubon opened his portfolio.

  It is unclear at which meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences Audubon first appeared after that. But word of everything else that happened in Philadelphia that summer traveled far and for a long time, as is usually the case with bad news.

  Bonaparte had been amazed by Audubon’s drawings. In his brief time in the city, Audubon had met a few painters Mease knew, and they had praised his work. But Bonaparte was the first person who truly understood the significance of what Audubon had brought out of the wilderness—and also the first to share Audubon’s passion for his subjects. The paintings were unlike anything the young prince had seen, though they depicted something he loved deeply—the terrible life-and-death struggle that is nature itself. Aububon’s birds were breathtakingly beautiful. And huge—even the largest were painted to full life-size, some filling Audubon’s enormous sheets of paper from edge to edge. But it was the aliveness of the images that startled and delighted Bonaparte. Instead of showing only what the birds looked like, Audubon had captured how they lived. Wheeling beneath storm-wracked skies, clamoring in bushes and trees, recoiling from attacking animals, or ripping flesh in bloody gobbets from freshly killed prey, Audubon’s ferocious birds looked as if they might fly screeching off the page. This was not good form, not the accepted style at all. It was something totally new. To Bonaparte, the birds looked truly wild, much like the strange, nervous man standing next to him.

  With Bonaparte as his patron, Audubon rushed through the city over the next several weeks, being introduced to artists and scientists. Meanwhile, his new acquaintances developed a fascination with the artist—an inquisitiveness Audubon met with a Kentucky storyteller’s penchant for exaggeration. Audubon was quite a piece of work—shy and awkward one minute, a blustery braggart the next. Everyone wanted to know who he was and where he came from. His account of himself, even alongside the slight support Dr. Mease could offer, was difficult to swallow. Audubon claimed to have been born in the territory of Louisiana. His father, he said, served as an admiral in the French navy and had also been a hero in the American war of independence. His mother was a Creole of Spanish extraction, who was courted and married by his father at her sprawling plantation near New Orleans. After her untimely death, Audubon was taken to France, where he was adopted by his father’s second wife and developed an interest in nature and painting. One of his teachers there, Audubon boasted, was the great portraitist Jacques-Louis David. At eighteen, Audubon had come to America to manage his father’s property, a large farm called Mill Grove, just west of Philadelphia. From there, he said, he had traveled far, seeing much of the country while devoting himself to the study of birds, acquiring a knowledge of their ways and appearance that he felt sure was unequaled by any other ornithologist.

  And that is how the real trouble started.

  Audubon was on safe ground in his airy dismissal of European naturalists as “cabinet ornithologists” who studied American birds by looking at moth-eaten stuffed specimens, never setting foot in America. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson—who had identified more than one hundred new bird species and who feuded with scientists in France over the vigor and uniqueness of New World fauna—American naturalists had been eager to gain authority in their own country. In Philadelphia, especially among members of the academy, any informed opinion against European views of American natural history was enthusiastically received.

  But Audubon threatened the legacy of Alexander Wilson, America’s preeminent ornithologist and a hero in the cause of New World scientific independence. Wilson, who had come to Pennsylvania from Scotland in 1794, was a poet and naturalist. A lonely man, Wilson was repeatedly troubled by political and romantic intrigues. He supported himself as a weaver and peddler, and later by teaching school and working as a book editor. Wilson discovered an interest in birds after he was befriended by William Bartram, an eminent botanist whose well-stocked library in Philadelphia became Wilson’s favorite retreat. In 1804, the year he was granted citizenship, Wilson had set out to draw and write about all the birds of North America. He was advised against it. He had limited artistic ability and the large, lavishly illustrated book he had in mind—what we would today think of as a coffee-table book—made little financial sense. It was almost sure to cost him more to publish than he could ever hope to earn back.

  Wilson never did get rich. But he did publish American Ornithology. When he died suddenly in 1813 at the age of forty-seven, he had completed seven volumes and was working on the eighth. By any measure, it was the most handsome, the most expensive, and one of the most important works yet published about America. At the Academy of Natural Sciences, Wilson was revered as the “father of American ornithology”—a true giant in American natural history—and American Ornithology was regarded as an almost sacred text, the first major scientific publication produced in America by an American.

  Audubon failed to be suitably impressed. He may have mentioned what he believed were mistakes in Wilson’s taxonomy and drawings. He may have alluded to his later claim that he had actually met Wilson—in Kentucky. As Audubon recalled, Wilson had shown up in Louisville some years back, selling subscriptions to his book and looking for new birds. According to Audubon, Wilson had been flustered and then dismayed when Audubon, who seemed ready to purchase American Ornithology, instead got out his own bird drawings, which on comparison were decidedly superior to Wilson’s. In an attempt to make his visitor feel better, Audubon
said, he took Wilson hunting the next day and even helped him locate and bring down a new species of warbler—a bird Audubon now claimed Wilson had included in American Ornithology without acknowledgment.

  All of this—the sketchy story of where he was from, the frontiersman posturing, and especially the casual disparagements of Wilson—was in the air when Audubon at last made his way to the Academy of Natural Sciences on a Saturday evening sometime between May and the middle of July. He arrived with Bonaparte in the prince’s carriage, stopping before a narrow, two-story brick building with high, arched windows. They walked down a sidewalk that skirted a courtyard and mounted a steep flight of stairs. Audubon, portfolio pressed to his side, was naïvely convinced that he stood on the threshold of acclaim.

  Although the members of the academy were in the end divided in their feelings about Audubon and his birds—a few were enthusiastic about the drawings—the mood at the academy would swing against him. It was not entirely his fault, since there was little Audubon might have done differently that would have prevented the opposition of the long-faced man presiding over that evening’s session.

  The son of a rich ship chandler and rope maker, George Ord was only four years older than Audubon. He was a doughy, sharp-tongued man who had spent more time tending the family business and going to academy meetings than he had tramping the woods. His only serious attempt at field research was an abbreviated expedition to Florida with several academy colleagues in 1817. The explorers got as far as St. Augustine, where rumors of Indian unrest forced them to retreat. What Ord had that Audubon didn’t was a reputation as a zoologist. Ord was also an influential promoter of American science—in particular the science of Alexander Wilson. Ord had been a close friend of Wilson’s and was the executor of Wilson’s estate—not that it amounted to much. Wilson died with many more liabilities than assets, but Ord construed his responsibility in larger terms. He’d completed Wilson’s unfinished eighth volume of American Ornithology and had started on the ninth and final installment. Ord was protective not only of American Ornithology but also of Wilson’s role in earning respect for American science, and he took an instantaneous dislike to Audubon that would congeal into lifelong hatred.

  Ord dismissed Audubon’s drawings, which he found gaudy and ridiculous. They were simply too, too much. Audubon, he said, had twisted his subjects into attitudes never seen in nature. The images were too big and too busy with extraneous elements like trees and flowers—Audubon had commingled zoology with botany! Ord did not limit his observations to Audubon’s art and science. In the weeks following Audubon’s appearance before the academy, Ord denounced him as a man without honor—an imposter and a liar who misrepresented himself and traduced the reputation of Alexander Wilson. Ord was delighted when he learned that a young artist named Joseph Mason, now working in Philadelphia, claimed to have collaborated with Audubon in Louisiana, painting background plants and flowers under the false impression that he was to be given credit for these contributions.

  Audubon, who could well have wondered why he was set up for this abuse, evidently didn’t. He never questioned Bonaparte’s motivations, which must have been complex, in bringing him to the academy. Bonaparte, who didn’t have the same investment in “American” science as other members of the academy—and who did not share their reverence for Wilson—may have been insensitive to the politics of the situation. More likely, he wanted to see what would happen when Audubon’s brash new interpretation of North American birds came up against Wilson’s. Bonaparte hinted at a future partnership with Audubon. But he was already engaged in a delicate business of collaborating with Ord on the continuation of American Ornithology while at the same time drafting a series of papers for the academy disputing many entries in the Wilson classic. His loyalties divided, Bonaparte sided with nobody, steering a middle course that Audubon—hungry for the prince’s approval—went along with.

  Bonaparte was circumspect as well, carefully avoiding asking Audubon too many questions. But he could easily have checked out his new friend’s story. Jacques-Louis David, Audubon’s supposed teacher, had recently painted portraits of Bonaparte’s wife and sister-in-law. And Louisiana was not the faraway place to Bonaparte that Audubon assumed it was in claiming it as home. Bonaparte’s father had negotiated the 1801 treaty with Spain that ceded the territory to France—two years before his uncle Napoleon sold it to Thomas Jefferson.

  Audubon’s company stole some of the luster from Bonaparte’s reputation around Philadelphia. They seemed an odd, guileless pair—one compact and neat, the other a hulk fresh out of the woods, both of them so animated and eager, so French. Their manners were foreign and their instincts for doing the wrong thing infallible. After the disastrous visit to the academy, Bonaparte had another idea. He took Audubon to see Philadelphia’s most accomplished engraver, a man named Alexander Lawson. Lawson, who had engraved the plates for American Ornithology and who had stood by Wilson during the arduous years of its production, had already heard all about Audubon from George Ord. Bonaparte and Audubon called at Lawson’s shop one morning early enough to wake him up.

  Lawson could not believe that Bonaparte took Audubon seriously. Flipping through Audubon’s portfolio, Lawson repeated Ord’s complaints about the drawings. They were too big. The images were mushy and in some cases wrong. The birds looked unnatural. He told Audubon he could understand why some people liked his work—it really wasn’t bad for a self-taught amateur. But ornithology, Lawson said, was about “truth” and “correct lines.” When Audubon mentioned his training under David, Lawson was incredulous. He was even more put out when Bonaparte suggested that he wanted to publish some of Audubon’s drawings. “You may buy them,” Lawson said, “but I will not engrave them.”

  Audubon was not without supporters. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, a fellow French expatriate and illustrator who had discovered more than two thousand new species of fish on a daring expedition to the South Pacific, considered Audubon’s drawings brilliant. But he suggested that Audubon would be more likely to find a publisher for them in Europe. Lesueur cosponsored Audubon’s nomination to the academy. Although the bylaws stipulated that election of a new member required a unanimous vote, this was not normally a great obstacle. Admission to the academy after being nominated was almost automatic. So the vote on Audubon, in the face of stiff opposition to his election, was an unusual one. Members cast their votes by dropping either a white (yes) or a black (no) marble into a small wooden box. Ord, though he could have blocked Audubon’s election by himself, lobbied against Audubon’s suitability and expected support from his colleagues. He got it. When the vote for Audubon was counted on August 31 he had been officially blackballed.

  Audubon was, by then, long gone. Sensing that the situation in Philadelphia was hopeless, he decided not to wait out his rejection at the academy and instead left for New York at the start of August. He found the city empty in the heat of late summer—and learned that word of his failure in Philadelphia was already spreading. Facing dim prospects of finding a publisher for his drawings, Audubon visited the Lyceum, New York’s version of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. His work was so admired there that he was invited to deliver a paper and was hastily elected a member. But he continued to feel uncomfortable in these gatherings, and grew increasingly “cloudy and depressed” in the city. Audubon entertained the contradictory thought, reflecting his doubt and ambition all at once, that he had wasted his life and might “die unknown.” After a few weeks he decided to return to Louisiana. He took his time, traveling through upstate New York, earning a few dollars sketching landscapes as he went. He idled for weeks watching the waterfowl massing ahead of their migrations before making his way to Pittsburgh, where he managed to buy a skiff and head downriver. Unshaven and wearing moccasins, he visited Victor at Shippingport, where he endured the stares of townsfolk appalled at his appearance. By the time he got home it was late fall. He had been gone for more than a year.

  On the long way back, Aud
ubon 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.