John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
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constitution.” He existed, he said, “on milk, fruits, and vegetables, with the addition of game or fish at times, but never had I swallowed a single glass of wine or spirits until the day of my wedding.”16 Not many Frenchmen could make that claim, nor could many citizens of early nineteenth-century America, a bibulous country that one scholar has called the “Alcoholic Republic.”17 But Audubon had left one nation behind and was just getting his footing in the other, and he took personal pride in making the transition on his own terms. Still, boastful though he could be about the “iron constitution” of his youth, he could also later look back at the time and see himself as a work in progress: “I had no vices, it is true, neither had I any high aims.”18
High aims or not, he still had birds. For all the time he spent hunting and fishing and riding and dancing and wooing Lucy, he always turned his attention back to his growing avian obsession. In the short time he first lived in Pennsylvania, he began a new project, “a series of drawings of the birds of America, and … a study of their habits.” The term “study” seems especially apt, because it was in the account of his time at Mill Grove that Audubon described a now-famous but then-novel experiment in bird banding, which still stands as a much-respected contribution to American ornithological practice. In early April of 1804, finding a pair of Eastern Pewees in one of the many caves above Perkiomen Creek, Audubon visited the cave day after day until “the birds became more familiarized to me, and, before a week had elapsed, the Pewees and myself were quite on terms of intimacy.” Audubon soon observed one of the most intimate moments of the pewees’ relationship: the laying of six eggs and the feeding of the five young birds that survived. By that time, he said, “The old birds no longer looked upon me as an enemy,” and they made no fuss when Audubon handled their young and “fixed a light silver thread to the leg of each, loose enough not to hurt the part, but so fastened that no exertions of theirs could remove it.” Sure enough, the next year he caught some of the banded pewees in roughly the same area, and he thus determined that they migrated back to the neighborhood of their birth.19 Audubon had not yet developed the systematic practices that might constitute a true scientific method, but with his persistent field observation and his innovative approach to bird identification, he was clearly taking some useful first steps toward becoming a serious naturalist.20
Audubon also wrote of using thread to make an innovative approach in his drawings of birds, an artistic technique that he would employ throughout his life. While again observing a pair of pewees and their “innocent attitudes,” he wrote, “a thought struck my Mind like a flash of light”—the idea that the only way to capture nature on paper would be to represent the birds as they were in life, “alive and Moving!” If alive, most birds are indeed moving, and they don’t tend to stay in place for long, so trying to draw them as they fly or flit from branch to branch could be frustrating, all but impossible, work for anyone. Audubon admitted he “could finish none of my Sketches.” He knew how to draw dead birds, of course: “After procuring a specimen, I hung it up either by the head, wing, or foot, and copied it as closely as I possibly could.”21
But dead birds just hung there, looking dead, and Audubon wanted to bring them back to life. He kept pondering the problem until early one morning, well before dawn, he had his “aha!” moment. He leapt out of bed, saddled his horse, and rode a fast five miles to Norristown, where, given the hour, “not a door was open.” Having time to kill and being too agitated just to wait, he went on to the Schuylkill River, jumped into the water and took a chilly bath, and then retraced his ride back to Norristown. This time he found an open shop, and he bought what he needed: thin wire. Racing back to Mill Grove, he grabbed his gun, rushed down to Perkiomen Creek, and shot the first bird he could find, a Belted Kingfisher. Using the wire he had just purchased, he fixed the dead bird to a board and got its head and tail looking just right, and then he drew it on the spot. “Reader this was what I Shall ever call my first attempt at Drawing actually from Nature,” he explained, “for then Even the eye of the Kings fisher was as if full of Life before me whenever I pressed its Lids aside with a finger.”22
Drawing from nature—or at least recently deceased specimens put in a natural-seeming pose—became an important part of Audubon’s artistic signature: “I have never drawn from a stuffed specimen.”23 In the end, that claim did not turn out to be altogether true, but it still served as a proud declaration of artistic independence.
Moving on from Mill Grove
Banding birds and arranging them in lifelike poses might have been fine ornithological and artistic activities, but neither one did much for the management of Mill Grove. Audubon’s father already knew his teenaged son didn’t yet have the talent and temperament to take on that sort of responsibility. When the boy was growing up in France, Jean Audubon had been mildly tolerant of his boy’s fascination with nature—“so pleased to see my various collections,” the younger Audubon wrote, “that he complimented me on my taste for such things”—but the father also wanted him to study something more practical, perhaps even more manly, like seamanship and engineering.24 When young Audubon failed at those things, Jean Audubon had good reason to feel exasperated by his son’s aversion to schooling and unprofitable-seeming predilections. Not surprisingly, when he sent the boy off to America for safekeeping, the elder Audubon also had good reason to feel that his son still needed adult supervision.
That came most immediately in the person of Francis Dacosta, one of Jean Audubon’s allies from Nantes, whom the elder Audubon had enlisted to go to Pennsylvania to oversee both his lead mine and teenaged son. Young Audubon and Dacosta turned out to be a bad match, however. “This fellow was intended to teach me mineralogy and mining engineering,” Audubon later wrote, “but, in fact, knew nothing of either.” Indeed, Dacosta quickly found a place on Audubon’s life list of much-despised enemies, becoming a useful villain in Audubon’s narrative of his early life, representing the sort of treachery that could lead a young innocent astray. When Dacosta tried to curry a bit of favor by complimenting the young man’s early work—“he assured me the time might come when I should be a great American naturalist … and I felt a certain degree of pride in these words even then”—the flattery faded fast. Instead, Audubon came to characterize Dacosta as a “covetous wretch, who did all he could to ruin my father, and indeed swindled both of us to a large amount.”25
What Dacosta did most to ruin were Audubon’s prospects for marrying Lucy, speaking “triflingly of her and her parents” and telling young Audubon it would be beneath him to marry into the Bakewell family.26 In that regard Dacosta may well have been reflecting the feelings of the father, Jean Audubon, who also had doubts about the wisdom of his son’s rushing into marriage. “My son speaks to me about his marriage,” the elder Audubon wrote to Dacosta. “If you would have the kindness to inform me about his intended, as well as about her parents, their manners, their means, and why they are in that country, whether it was in consequence of misfortune that they left Europe, you will be doing me a signal service, and I beg you, moreover, to oppose this marriage until I may give my consent to it.” Jean Audubon probably cared more about the Bakewells’ means than their manners, and like all fathers trying to size up the prospects of the potential in-laws, he wanted to be sure they wouldn’t be marrying into the family for the money: “Tell these good people,” he concluded, “that my son is not at all rich, and that I can give him nothing if he marries in this condition.”27
Young Audubon bristled at this intrusion into his love life, and he blamed it all on Dacosta. For a while, he fell into a “half bewildered, half mad” fury and thought about killing Dacosta, but an elderly lady “quieted me, spoke religiously of the cruel sin I thought of committing,” and eventually talked him out of it. Thanks to those wise words, Dacosta stayed alive, and Audubon stayed out of jail and off the gallows. Instead, Audubon decided to head back to France, where he would make his case to his father. After a storm-tossed Atlantic crossing in the spring of 1805, Audubon arrived at La Gerbetière, his father’s home near Nantes, where he happily fell into “the arms of my beloved parents.”28 Wasting no time, he spilled out his accusations against Dacosta—who, as it turned out, had already lost credibility in his relationship with Jean Audubon anyway—and the much-despised supervisor essentially ceased to be an issue.
Then,