Under a Wild Sky (50 page)

After their meeting, Ord wrote to Waterton with the surprising news that he had recently been in civil conversation with Audubon, the effect of which had been quite remarkable. Ord found that he felt a grudging admiration for Audubon. He was still certain that Audubon's many scientific errors would cause his work to disappear from the history of ornithology over time. But in the end, Ord could not so easily dismiss Audubon's dogged determination, or the imposing man himself.

“The old gentleman has a very venerable look,” Ord wrote, “and appears, from his robust frame and agile step, to be yet capable of enduring fatigue. The industry he displayed in prosecuting to completion his great work is certainly worthy of all praise. If the fidelity of his narratives had corresponded with his perseverance, his fame would repose on a basis which time would not diminish.”

The linkage between the Audubon and Bachman families grew deep and tragic.
In 1839, two years after John Woodhouse married Maria Bachman, Victor married Maria's sister Eliza.
By 1841, both sisters were dead of tuberculosis.
In 1846 John Bachman's wife, Harriet, also died.
His own health declining, Bachman married his sister-in-law, Maria Martin.

Victor Audubon injured his spine while disembarking from a railcar in 1856. His condition worsened, and within a year he was an invalid.
He died on August 18, 1860, at the age of fifty-one.
John Woodhouse, always the more sensitive of the brothers, made a series of terrible business decisions, including an ill-fated trip to join in the California Gold Rush.
In 1858, he invested in a project to reproduce his father's double elephant folios by means of chromolithography. By 1860, more than one hundred stunningly beautiful plates were completed.
But the outbreak of the Civil War devastated the publishing business and erased many hoped-for subscriptions.
Exhausted, his fragile nerves in ruins, John Woodhouse fell ill just after the first of the year in 1862 and died within a month. He was forty-nine.

Lucy lived on. She had survived her husband and her children, and would soon outlast the meager residue of their lives together.
In 1863, awash in debt, Lucy sold Minnie's Land.
That same year she also sold Audubon's watercolor originals for
The Birds of America
to the New-York Historical Society, which paid her just over $4,000 for the collection.
The committee organized for this purpose congratulated themselves on having raised such a generous sum while the country was divided in wartime.
Two years after the purchase, Audubon's granddaughter Maria visited the society and found a handful of the paintings cheaply framed and indifferently hung on bare walls in a dingy room.

For a time, Lucy lived by herself in a boardinghouse in Washington Heights.
Spending most of her time alone, Lucy worked on a superficial, sanitized biography of Audubon adapted from his journals. It was eventually published in London in 1869, though Lucy was correct in her expectation that she would never make any money from it.
She said she seemed to herself “a stranger in the world.” Writing to a relative, Lucy bitterly measured her unhappy circumstances, as if she had lived a long dream and awoken in the hard light of a remorseless day:
“It does seem to me,” she wrote, “as if we were a doomed family for all of us are in pecuniary
difficulty more or less. As to myself I find it hard to look back patiently upon my great ignorance of business and the want of a wise adviser.”

In her eighties and in waning health, Lucy moved to Louisville to live with relatives.
She went by train, sitting and watching the countryside pass by. The train clattered along the hillsides and streams that she and Audubon had once galloped over on horseback.
She thought rail travel pleasant enough, more comfortable anyway than the flatboat that had long ago brought a young English girl and her handsome husband down a beautiful wild river and into the West.

Feeble and nearly blind, Lucy died near Louisville at her brother William's home in Shelbyville in June of 1874, at the age of eighty-seven. Her body was taken back East, traveling one last time over the mountains.
Lucy's ashes were buried next to Audubon in Trinity Cemetery in New York City.

In 1839, just a year after completing
The Birds of America
, Robert Havell Jr. retired and moved to America. He settled in upstate New York, where he painted and lived quietly until his death in 1878 at the age of eighty-five.
Before leaving England, Havell had complied with Audubon's request that he be sent the copper plates for
The Birds of America
.
According to one story, the vessel carrying them sank alongside the dock shortly after arriving in New York City, and the coppers sat at the bottom of the harbor for several months before being salvaged.
Somewhat corroded, they were recovered, a few “disappeared,” and the rest were stored in a Manhattan warehouse, where a fire in 1845 destroyed or badly damaged many of the plates.
Audubon had the surviving coppers removed to Minnie's Land, where for years they gathered dust in a shed. Lucy eventually attempted to auction them off. Failing at that, she apparently sold them for scrap.
The coppers ended up at the Ansonia Brass and Copper Company in Connecticut, where they were being fed into a furnace one day when the plant manager's teenage son realized what they were and saved as many as he could.

Fewer than eighty of the original coppers are known to still exist. In 2002, the John James Audubon State Park Museum in Henderson, Kentucky, which owns one, cleaned it up and struck two hundred and fifty uncolored prints from it. It's plate CCCVIII, the tell-tale godwit, or
snipe, which Havell engraved in 1836. In the drawing, two birds stand on the marshy fringe of Bulow Creek in east Florida.
As the prints were lifted from the copper the birds reappeared after 166 years, a little scratched and blurred, like ghosts.

No one knows with certainty how many complete sets of the original double elephant folio of
The Birds of America
were produced.
It was almost surely fewer than two hundred, although lapsed subscriptions and individual prints that were sold out of Havell's shop mean that there are more copies of some of the plates.
Victor maintained that there were about 175 finished sets altogether, roughly 80 of which were purchased in the United States. George Ord, who in so many ways saw through Audubon without being able to see what he had accomplished, was wrong in his belief that the prints would be worthless and fade from memory.
The Birds of America
is one of the most revered and highly valued of American artworks. The last time a complete set of the double elephant folio was sold at auction, it fetched $8.8 million.
The new owner was Sheik Hamad bin-Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I needed help bringing Mr. Audubon back to life. I got it from the librarians and archivists who guided me through the words and images he left behind. I am grateful for their assistance and their eagerness to find an answer for any question. A good librarian is hard to stump.

A collective thanks to the staffs at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Filson Club Historical Society in Louisville; the Ewell Sale Stewart Library and Archives at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Rare Books & Special Collections department of Princeton University Library; the New-York Historical Society; the Free Library of Philadelphia; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the St. Paul Public Library; the Guildhall Library in London; and the Royal Society Library in London.

Specific thanks to Earle Spamer, archivist at the Academy of Natural Sciences, for providing access to materials and a place to work during the early stages of my research. Likewise I want to thank Robert Peck, fellow of the academy, for his wise perspective on Audubon and the other naturalists of his day. Special thanks to Nate Rice, manager of the ornithology collection at the academy and birdman extraordinaire. When he wasn't in some far-off corner of the world collecting specimens, Nate answered my questions about birds and on one pretty morning in Philadelphia spent a couple of hours showing me how to skin a duck.

At the American Philosophical Society, also in Philadelphia, I got able and enthusiastic assistance from Rob Cox and Valerie-Anne Lutz. My
deepest thanks to them both. Thank you to Nathalie Andrews and Carol Ely of the Portland Museum in Louisville, who provided unique insights into Audubon's character and business acumen. And thanks also to Linda Boice and Alan Gehret, both at the Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary at Mill Grove, for help during my visit to Audubon's first American home.

Thank you to Alisa Gallant, at the United States Geological Survey EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, for researching North American bamboo distribution. Thanks also to Phoebe Lloyd, of the Art History Department at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, for her perspective on arsenic and heavy-metal toxicity. And thanks to Cole Rogers, artistic director at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, in Minneapolis, for a personal tutorial on the art of engraving.

Warmest thanks to my friends Paul Lombino and Leslie Schultz, of Somerville, Massachusetts, for their hospitality and good company while I was working at Harvard.

In London, Gina Douglas made me welcome at the Linnaean Society's splendidly musty old library. In Edinburgh, Tricia Boyd helped at the Edinburgh University Library. A special thank-you, as well, to John Chalmers, also of Edinburgh, for his gracious sharing of information. Dr. Chalmers, a retired surgeon and a student of Audubon's sojourn in Scotland, is the author of his own fine book,
Audubon in Edinburgh
.

It is believed that about 120 complete sets of the original double elephant folio still exist. I had the enviable task of inspecting several of them, and I want to express my gratitude to the people who made that possible. Thanks to Leslie Morris at the Houghton Library, and to Daniel Wong and John Rathe of the Rare Books Division of the New York Public Library. Many thanks also to Don Luce and Susan Stekel Rippley, at the James Ford Bell Museum and Library at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who granted my odd request to measure several eagles on Audubon's original plates.

Roy Goodman, at the American Philosophical Society, allowed me to spend time with their folio. A true gentleman scholar, Roy's encyclopedic knowledge of America in its formative years and his ability to recall the most obscure sources of historical information helped me time and again.

I doubt that anyone knows more about Audubon than does Don Boarman, museum curator at John James Audubon State Park in Henderson, Kentucky. Don's generosity in opening the museum's collection to me, in
loaning materials, and in sharing his own inexhaustible knowledge is much appreciated.

I owe more than thanks to Charlotte Porter of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. Dr. Porter's Ph.D. thesis, completed at Harvard University, helped clarify my thinking on the relationship between Audubon and Wilson, and between the two of them and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Her book,
The Eagle's Nest
, which expanded on her thesis, added immeasurably to my understanding of the struggle by American naturalists to free themselves from European domination. In a conversation we had under the Florida sun one late autumn day, she also reminded me of how brave and how lucky these men were—and of how fortunate we are to have the work they left behind. I am deeply in her debt.

Somebody had to keep track of me and my stuff. Thanks to Liza Bolitzer, formerly of Carlisle & Company. Special thanks to Stacia Decker of North Point Press for her tireless help in preparing the manuscript and tending to permissions.

Christy Fletcher, my agent, sent me off in search of a story about American naturalists. When the road led to Audubon, she was unstinting in her enthusiasm and sound advice. Thank you, Christy, for being right about so many things. And thanks, also, to Becky Saletan, my editor at North Point, who understood this story from the beginning and who shared my fascination with Audubon and his times. Becky has a knack for always knowing what it is I am trying to say, so she must know how much I appreciate her help and friendship.

They say that writing is a lonely, quiet life. Not at my house. I owe the biggest thanks of all to my wife, Susan, and to our four children, to whom this book is dedicated. Sometimes they left me alone to work. Mostly they didn't. For the hectic freight of everyday life they surround me with—the now that makes the past worth revisiting—I am lucky indeed. Whenever I aimlessly imagined myself drifting toward the early nineteenth century to walk a field or wade a slough with Audubon, I was abruptly hauled back to the present to cook a meal or find a dog or go to a soccer game. I don't often thank my family just for being there for me. But I should.