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, Audubon 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.
As it turned out, Ord was right about a few things. Audubon was not exactly who he claimed to be. His father was not an admiral. He had not been born in Louisiana. He never studied with Jacques-Louis David. John James Audubon, in fact, was not even his real name.
Troglodytes hyemalis: The Winter Wren
The extent of the migratory movements of this diminutive bird, is certainly the most remarkable fact connected with its history.
—Ornithological Biography
At the end of the eighteenth century, the coastal settlement of Les Cayes looked out over a busy Caribbean harbor on the southwestern arm of Saint-Domingue—the island known today as Haiti. It is a poor country now, but in those days it was not. After Columbus landed there, the island was plundered
