John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

Audubon explained, “there existed within me a tendency to follow Nature in her walks.” Follow them he did, eventually beginning to make pictures of birds until he had, by his own count and artistic estimation, “upward of two hundred drawings, all bad enough, my dear sons, yet they were representations of birds, and I felt pleased with them.”³⁰ (Audubon would later claim to have studied painting with the great French artist Jacques-Louis David, but there seems to be no definite evidence of his having done so. As in so many other aspects of Audubon’s autobiographical “facts,” this tutelage under his “honoured Mentor” seems to be a fiction of his self-fashioning.³¹)

      Audubon’s stepmother may have allowed him the latitude to pursue his early passion for nature, but her place in the narrative paled in comparison to an even greater parental influence in Audubon’s life: “But now, my dear children, I must tell you somewhat of my father.” When Audubon wrote his wife, in 1827, about his notion that his own life might be “still more wonderful and extraordinary than that of my father,” he acknowledged the standard that he would explore more fully for his sons eight years later, in “Myself.” The story Audubon spins there about his father, Jean Audubon, is an almost classic rags-toriches tale, some of it true, some not, but all of it useful for giving Audubon—and his sons—a way to locate the family lineage in an eighteenth-century success story.

      Born into a household of twenty-one children, all of them boys except for one girl, young Jean had to leave home at twelve, Audubon wrote, sent off by his father with “a shirt, a dress of coarse material, a stick, and his blessing.” Thus cast into the world, Jean went to sea on fishing boats, soon rising to the level of able seaman at age seventeen, and eventually coming to own several of his own ships by the time he was twenty-five. His fortunes improved dramatically three years later, in 1772, when “at twenty-eight [he] sailed for Santo Domingo with his little flotilla heavily loaded with the produce of the deep.” At that point in the tale, Audubon shifts to a direct quotation from his father: “I did well in this enterprise,” Audubon père tells his son, “and after a few more voyages of the same sort gave up the sea, and purchased a small estate on the Isle à Vaches; the prosperity of Santo Domingo was at its zenith, and in the course of ten years I had realized something very considerable.” Left unsaid—probably because it hardly needed saying—was that the prosperity of Saint-Domingue as a whole, along with the Audubon estate in particular, reached its zenith on the backs of enslaved black workers on the sugar plantations.³²

      While accumulating wealth in the West Indies, Audubon’s father also went to war. While serving with the French forces in the American Revolution, Audubon claimed, the elder Audubon was presented with a portrait of George Washington by the general himself, “a few days only before the memorable battle of Valley Forge.” The battle is hardly memorable, of course, because it never took place. More to the point, while Washington and his ragged troops were shivering through the frigid winter at Valley Forge in 1778, Jean Audubon was still basking in the warmth of Les Cayes. He sailed away from there in the spring of 1779, only to be captured and imprisoned by the British. Once French officials had negotiated his release a year later, he did assume command of a French fighting ship, and he happened to be on hand, although presumably on the water, when the combined French and American forces surrounded Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 and extracted from him the surrender that effectively ended the British war effort.³³ Perhaps Jean Audubon met George Washington somehow in the process; perhaps he received a gift portrait from the general, but perhaps not. And perhaps his son got his military history confused or, like so many other people of the era, simply invented an encounter with Washington that never took place. For his sons’ sake, however, Audubon’s story of his father’s favor with Washington helped establish an early and certainly valuable-seeming association with the creation of the United States.

      Slaveowning, seafaring, and military service made the elder Audubon an absentee parent for much of the time, but when he did come home, he seemed an imposing presence in the eyes of his young son. Indeed, the son saw an impressive image of himself in the father: “In personal appearance my father and I were of the same height and stature,” Audubon wrote, “say about five feet ten inches, erect, and with muscles of steel.” He also saw something of his own personality: “In temper we much resembled each other also, being warm, irascible, and at times violent; but it was like the blast of a hurricane, dreadful for a time, when calm almost instantly returned.”³⁴

      The contrast of violence and calm in his father’s character seemed to reflect the turbulence of the times, and the father’s experience in the revolutions of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world seemed to have lodged deep in the son’s memory. “The different changes occurring at the time of the American Revolution, and afterward that in France, seem to have sent him from one place to another as if a foot-ball.” For all that bouncing around between revolutions, however, the Audubon holdings in Saint-Domingue kept increasing in value—until, Audubon noted, “the liberation of the black slaves there.” Audubon even quoted his father directly about the impact of revolutions, which, the elder Audubon told his son, “too often take place in the lives of individuals, and they are apt to lose in one day the fortune they before possessed.” In writing to his own sons much later in “Myself,” Audubon described the “thunders of the Revolution” in France, when “the Revolutionists covered the earth with the blood of man, woman, and child.”³⁵

      He could just as easily have been writing about the revolution in Saint-Domingue, where, as he had already said in the previous pages, his mother “was one of the victims during the ever-to-be-lamented period of negro insurrection on the island.” She wasn’t, but his mulatto half sister was: Marie-Madeleine, Sanitte’s first daughter with Audubon’s father, still lived at Les Cayes with her mother when the slave insurgents ransacked the Audubon estate in 1792, and she died in the violence. Perhaps neither Audubon, father or son, ever learned of her death.³⁶ At any rate, Audubon the son abruptly dropped the topic of revolutions altogether in writing for his own sons and turned away from saying anything more: “To think of those dreadful days is too terrible, and would be too horrible and painful for me to relate to you, my dear sons.”³⁷

      Still, whatever the “horrible and painful” elements of his father’s experience, Audubon seemed to be able to recall the deeds, achievements, and, on occasion, the exact words of his father with considerable clarity. This apparent memory for detail stands in sharp, perhaps surprising, contrast to the vague, secondhand, somewhat offhand information he offered his sons about his own mother and the circumstances of his birth. Again, he claimed to rely on his father for information about the “enigma” of his origins, but in conveying that information he gave it almost no authority, leaving it shrouded in the mystery of hearsay: “I can only say what I have often heard my father repeat to me,” or “I have been led to understand.” On the whole, in writing “Myself,” Audubon used his father as a valuable narrative device. When he needed a way to illustrate the virtues of strong character, the vicissitudes of life, or the violence of revolutionary times, he had his father for that. When he needed a way to evade the personal details and social disadvantages of his West Indian origins, he had his father for that, too.

      The Specter of Saint-Domingue

      Perhaps most important, he had his father to orchestrate his exit from France and his entrée into the United States, allegedly as a lad from Louisiana. Audubon’s father “greatly approved of the change in France during the time of Napoleon,” his son wrote, but the elder Audubon’s admiration of Napoleon apparently stopped short of committing his teenaged son to the First Consul’s military service. Because Napoleon had become determined to reverse the direction of the insurrection in Saint-Domingue—and to restore slavery there in the process—he began pouring upward of thirty thousand troops into Saint-Domingue in late 1801. In short order, about half of them quickly succumbed to the island’s most deadly disease, yellow fever, and thousands more fell to the revolutionary forces.³⁸ Then, needing more and more money to fund this desperate military effort, he decided to sell a huge swath of North American territory he had recently acquired from Spain, and at the end of April 1803, France concluded the Louisiana Purchase with the United States. What those high-level decisions might mean to ordinary people in France seemed a bit unclear at the time, but Jean Audubon knew that he didn’t want his