three days’ walking, the group topped a hill early in the morning and saw a vast forest spread out before them. The rising sun lit the frost on the trees. Mile by mile, Audubon coaxed the party onward while thinking to himself that this must be among the most beautiful places on earth. The season was turning. They found ripe peaches in an orchard and saw wood ducks fattening themselves on the acorns collecting in the river bottoms. At the end of an arduous day, Audubon took Victor for a swim in the wide Ohio. As the sun went down, they lazed in the glassy current and watched as robins flying south filled the sky overhead.
They had marched six days, the fifth in a driving rain, when they came at last to a decent road, where the others in the group decided they must slow down. Two hours after reluctantly leaving the rest of the party behind, Audubon and his son reached the Green River ferry, just above Henderson, where they hired a wagon to take them on to Louisville. On the crossing, they dangled their feet in the cool water as the river slipped quietly by on its way into the heart of the untamed country.
Audubon and Victor stopped a few days later at Shippingport, a trading community on the south bank of the Ohio, just below the falls at Louisville. Audubon had barely enough money remaining—$13—to rent a room. They called on old friends, and as Audubon and Lucy had hoped, Victor was placed as an apprentice in their family’s counting house. Audubon spent the winter saving for the remainder of his trip. He occupied himself dodging old creditors and painting portraits, signs, and even murals on the interiors of steamboats. In March he had booked passage for Pittsburgh. He brought with him only a few possessions, including a kit of watercolors and an unusually handsome double shotgun with fine engravings on its breech. Firmly clutched under one arm was an oversized portfolio tied with string.
In Philadelphia Audubon found lodging in one of the inns on tavern row. The noise and activity was disorienting. Rooms were cramped but cheap—$10 a week, which included two heavy meals a day featuring slabs of meat, eggs, fowl, and cheese, accompanied in the evenings by wine and ale. In his small room with its rough bed and whitewashed walls echoing with the woozy laughter of taverngoers until late at night, Audubon made his plans. Within a few days he had bought a suit of clothes, and readied himself for introductions to some of the city’s influential citizens. He decided against cutting his hair or even buttoning his shirt collar. He hoped his rough style marked him as a true backwoodsman—an image Audubon was convinced would lend credibility to his claim as a naturalist. He also felt his curling locks recalled the city’s foremost figure, Benjamin Franklin, in an appealing way.
Audubon called first on Dr. James Mease. Mease was a prominent physician and part of Philadelphia’s growing community of intellectuals, many of them doctors, who had developed an interest in their young nation’s natural history. And Mease was an acquaintance. He’d known Audubon as an adventurous, undisciplined teenager who once lived close to his friends the Bakewells, in the country outside Philadelphia near Valley Forge.
The Audubon who appeared at Mease’s doorstep in a prosperous section of Chestnut Street had changed considerably. He was now a middle-aged man, rough-looking and obviously nervous. His English—muddled when Mease had known him as a recent immigrant from Europe—was improved, despite a still noticeable French accent. Mease, taken aback at seeing Audubon after such a long absence, was even more surprised when Audubon came inside, loosened his inexpensive new coat, and untied his portfolio. Awed by Audubon’s paintings, Mease suggested they get the opinion of a knowledgeable ornithologist. And he had one in mind—a young visitor to the city named Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, who was himself engaged in the study of American birds.
Only twenty-one years old, Bonaparte was already an accomplished naturalist. Aboard ship to the New World—a trip that lasted fifty-one nervous days, during which the ship encountered several terrible storms en route from Plymouth to New York—Bonaparte had collected an assortment of fishes and turtles, and had shot and studied many birds, including several unknown species of petrels. Upon landing in America, Bonaparte was immediately smitten with the young republic, which he declared “the most perfect of all those that have ever existed, without excepting those of Athens, Sparta, and Rome.” He set about investigating the many strange animals new to his experience. Like all European newcomers, he was fascinated by the American rattlesnake. He was at the same time naïve about certain New World fauna, like the small black-and-white quadruped he encountered one day while out riding. Dismounting, Bonaparte chased the animal hoping to catch and examine it. He got close enough to the skunk to learn what it was.
Bonaparte had been welcomed into Philadelphia’s scientific and social circles after arriving there in the fall of 1823, about the same time that Audubon had left New Orleans. At first, he stayed at Point Breeze, his relatives’ New Jersey estate on the Delaware River, about twenty-five miles north of Philadelphia. That winter Bonaparte and his pregnant wife moved to the city not far from Dr. Mease and Bonaparte began corresponding with the Academy of Natural Sciences. The academy, formed only eleven years earlier by a handful of amateur naturalists who met weekly above an apothecary, had become one of the country’s leading learned institutions. Its monthly Journal, first published in 1817, was an important scholarly publication. In 1819, four members of the academy had been chosen for Stephen Harriman Long’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains—the first scientists to accompany such a government-sponsored endeavor. Meetings now took place every Saturday evening in the academy’s own building, which also housed a large library, as well as an overflowing collection of natural specimens.
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.
