Creation (40 page)

As Bayfield predicted, he returned, in what remained of his mind, to the shores of Labrador. He wanted to visit Mr. and Mrs. Jones and hear their player piano, to drink the good coffee in bowls in the cabins of the French-Canadians, and to see the Montagnais in their French liberty caps and striped leggings, the crucifixes at their necks.

Maria Martin did not find her wilderness. She continued to paint, but never with the intensity of her time with Audubon. Watercolours
of the plants and of the Snowy Egret survive in the Charleston Museum, as does an embroidered reticule on which she painted flowers. There is, as well, a piano stool given her by John Audubon. She never received full credit in her lifetime for her work, although she is thought to have contributed to at least twenty of the prints in
The Birds
. Audubon named a woodpecker for her: Maria’s Woodpecker. But the name did not survive. As the girl in Newfoundland had wondered, some birds, like this one, had a name already, and so even this gesture of acknowledgement was lost.

In 1839, Robert Havell closed the shop at 77 Oxford Street, which had been in the family for three generations, and emigrated to America. He fell out with Audubon over money, but found a new life in the country he had so long imagined. He settled in the Hudson River Valley, at Tarry Town, where he painted and sketched the area we know through the writings of Washington Irving. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Henry Bayfield continued to chart the coast of Labrador and the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, a task which ultimately took him fourteen years. His
Sailing Directions for the Gulf and River of St. Lawrence
was published in 1837, reprinted in 1840, and many times subsequently.

Five years after meeting Audubon, and at the age of forty-four, Bayfield married Fanny Amelia Wright. His wife was the daughter of a captain of the Royal Engineers, twenty-five years old at the time. The couple settled in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and had six children. Captain, later Admiral, Bayfield was very proud that Fanny was an accomplished artist: her watercolours of wildflowers (
Trillium, Blood Root and Dog’s Tooth Violet
is one plate) can be found in the Public Archives of Canada.

Bayfield lived to be ninety-three and died in his bed, having “worn himself out in the service of his country.” He was renowned but not famous and had given his name to scores of towns, inlets, and waterways in the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard of Canada. He never ceased trying to prevent loss of life from shipwreck. In his last years, his mind, too, rambled. When met abroad on the streets, he raved about the shores of Labrador, enumerating the distinguishing
features of the fogs which arose from the east, the southeast, and the north, their textures, thickness, heights and probable durations.

By the time of his death in 1851, Audubon had no control over his names. Having outlived most his enemies, he was at last more famous than reviled. But his name was given as Anderson in the death notice in New York’s
Evening Post
, which may account for the small group which gathered to bury him. (The press had already announced his death in 1831, mistaking him for Alexander Wilson, who had in fact died in 1813.) The cemetery in which he was buried was moved. Some fifty years later donors raised a tall cross over his grave; on it his birth date is wrong.

His granddaughter removed from his writings many personal references, presumably to his indiscretions, and also to his origins.

T
HE CHART ONLY GIVES ME
half the story, says Godwin. The water changes and the weather is unpredictable. The fog blankets us. I won’t endanger the ship on the strength of these measurements!

Audubon asks Bayfield, You believe that human life is sacred, while animals’ lives are for our use — but what if you are wrong? What if we are not better than nature? What if we are worse?

Bayfield answers, his thumbs in a perfect triangle under his chin. The wilderness is in us and in the world. It must be brought into our ken. In this way we may avoid savagery. We who are leaders have a duty to lead.

The fog swirls up, threatening to swallow the ship. Audubon speaks. You think so well of man. Can man be moved to pity the birds? To imagine their extinction?

Bayfield feels across his chest for the pocket, and pulls out his timepiece. Time will tell.

Now Bayfield asks Andubon a simpler, harder question. And you, sir, he says. Who are you?

I am a man sent from the future to catalogue the birds before they disappear. A reluctant prophet, a gate-crasher. Even when storming the doors I have to flout the rules. Even when proving myself worthy I must prove myself unworthy. I am a lie. I have stumbled into truth
by watching the creatures. Perhaps only I — born out of bounds, unable to be in bounds — could do that.

A
LIE IS A SPARK
, a break and a reconnection. A way of dissembling, of taking things to pieces.

Audubon was a vessel. On his midlife voyage, with his hopes and his premonitions of doom, he was boarded by an unwelcome idea: the idea of the death of nature at man’s hands.

The shoreline is a narrative.

The fog is fog, what we try to see through.

The wind has begun to move the ropes; both men can feel the ship nudging its anchors, ready to move. They stand.

I must get back to my birds, says Audubon.

H
IS BIRDS THAT SUMMER
. The Labrador Duck: last seen 1875, extinct. The Great Auk: last seen 1844, extinct. The Eskimo Curlew: observed by Audubon in Labrador arriving in dense clouds, “flock after flock increasing in number for several days,” last seen in 1964, presumed extinct. The Atlantic Puffin: successfully reintroduced to Maine and Eastern Canada through nesting pairs.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. In the event of an omission or error, please notify the publisher.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M
any, many people have helped me in the preparation of this novel. It is a book that has truly “taken a village” to be brought to life.

I would first like to thank David Kotin, Special Collections of the Toronto Public Library, for showing me the library’s copy of
The Birds of America
. The power of the images, now 170 years old, set me on this journey. The Toronto Public Library, through its friendly and helpful staff, made available to me its extensive collection of Audubon papers, and I passed many pleasurable hours reading in the Baldwin Room. The scholar and collector, David Lank of Montreal, expressed enthusiasm for the idea of a book based in Audubon’s time in Labrador, and read the final manuscript, sharing with me his broad knowledge of birds and birds in art. Joan Winnearls helped me unearth details of the aquatinting process, and John Pratt of St. John’s, Newfoundland, met with me to discuss bird facts.

I consulted a number of collections, chiefly the Memorial University of Newfoundland Library; the New-York Historical Society; the Charleston Museum in Charleston, South Carolina; and the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto. I acknowledge my debt to the many publications on Audubon, including Shirley Streshinsky’s
Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness
and Alice Ford’s
John James Audubon: A Biography
, as well as the journals and letters left by J. J. Audubon, and his
Ornithological Biography
. It was he who wrote, “Nature itself is perishing.” The account of Egging on the Funks in the nineteenth century comes from
The Newfoundland Journal of Aaron Thomas
, and was brought to my attention by John
Pratt. I first read an account of the fate of the
Granicus
and its survivors in Captain Bayfield’s
Journals
.

I spent an idyllic month at the Banff Centre for the Arts in July 2000, when I was in the early stages of writing this book. I am grateful to the Centre and to Michael Ignatieff and the members of the Cultural Journalism program for their careful reading and responses to my work, especially Mark Abley, whose special interest in birds was a bonus.

There are many others I want to thank: Mariama LeBlanc for research into sea shanties; Lannie Messervey for word processing; Kendall Anderson for picture research; Emily Honderich for her company on the trip to Labrador, and general research; Dr. George Govier for research into hydrographical surveying and instruments; Norm Letto of L’Anse-au-Clair, Labrador, who took us out to Île aux Perroquets in his boat … the list goes on. In a class of their own are my agent, Bruce Westwood, who has loved this novel since before it was written, and Anne Collins, whose efforts, as always, far exceed the call of duty. And finally, Nick Rundall, without whose happy engagement in my life I would be so much the poorer.

I cannot close without saluting the legendary surveyor Admiral Henry Bayfield, who put the waterways of eastern Canada on paper; and John James Audubon, frontiersman and artist, who drove himself against great odds to complete his enormous Work, and who left his name to a cause he was one of the first to understand, that summer in Labrador.

PRAISE FOR
CREATION

“
Creation
is a tour de force, a finely written historical account that plays, for a serious purpose, with the very nature of historical inquiry and humanity’s place in the natural order … It is a deeply convincing story
.”

—
B
RIAN
B
ETHUNE
,
Maclean’s

“
A sprawling novel, teeming with natural abundance, yet delivered in small, intimate scenes … the reward is deep engagement, the kind that promises a novel a lasting place in the affections of readers
.”

—
D
ONNA
B
AILEY
N
URSE
,
The Toronto Star

“
Rare is the work that transforms a reader so completely … a serious and contemplative look at a world that has already been lost to us
.”

—
M
ARGARET
M
AC
P
HERSON
,
The Edmonton Journal

“
An elegiac, entrancing web of fiction that sprawls across time and continents … Govier’s gentle, thoughtful, insightful prose … has created a universe that abounds with truth
.”

—
G
ARY
C
URTIS
,
Hamilton Spectator

“
Govier has crafted a novel of ideas, inseparably layering the ecological and personal. Redeeming both is that most human commodity, hope
.”

—
J.B. M
AC
K
INNON
,
National Post