John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

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      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, like any young man coming back home on what amounted to an extended vacation, Audubon took full advantage of the family largesse: “In the very lap of comfort my time was happily spent,” he wrote. “I went out shooting and hunting, drew every bird I procured, as well as many other objects of natural history and zoology.”²⁹ He also studied taxidermy with a family friend and physician, Charles Marie D’Orbigny, developing a skill that would become professionally useful in the decades to come.

      But in addition to his further bird research, Audubon’s trip to France in 1805–1806 produced two important results that would shape his return to the United States. First, he got his father’s tentative permission to marry Lucy Bakewell. Despite Jean Audubon’s initial doubts about the possible gold-digging ambitions of the Bakewells, he yielded on the marriage question, insisting only that young Audubon find some means to support a wife. Second, the elder Audubon arranged for young Ferdinand Rozier, the son of a family friend, to form a business partnership with his own son, whereby the two would go to the United States, try to make the Mill Grove lead mine a viable venture, deal with Dacosta, then seek out whatever other sort of business they could find to turn a profit.³⁰

      All the two young Frenchmen had to do, then, was to get out of France before Napoleon conscripted them. Rather than let the young men get snatched away into the military, the elder Audubon used his pull to help them get passports (albeit somewhat bogus-looking ones) and book passage on an American ship, the Polly, bound for New York. After a handful of harrowing oceanic adventures—enduring a ransacking at the hands of a British privateer, then making a close escape from a pair of British frigates, and finally running aground during a violent storm in Long Island Sound—the Polly managed to make it safely to New York Harbor in late May 1806. And there the two young Frenchmen disembarked and set out to begin what Audubon would later call “a partnership to stand good for nine years in America.”³¹

      Audubon in Business

      As in many partnerships, the first few years were the most uncertain, but in some ways also the best. Audubon and Rozier initially had ambitious intentions of taking up residence at Mill Grove, making a go of the mining operation and the farm as well, and perhaps ousting Dacosta in the process. Unfortunately, neither had any experience in operating a lead mine, and neither had any interest at all in doing the difficult field labor that the farm required. They did, however, still have the obstacle of Dacosta, who, as a result of his earlier arrangement with Audubon’s father, also held title to a large portion of the whole Mill Grove estate. He would be hard to move. Realizing they would probably not be able to beat Dacosta, then, and certainly not wanting to join him, the two young Frenchmen decided to sell him the remainder of Mill Grove.

      That decision also led them in slightly different directions for a while: Rozier, who was not at all fluent in English, became a clerk in a French-owned importing business in Philadelphia, while Audubon went to New York to work for another wholesale import house, this one owned by Benjamin Bakewell, the uncle of Lucy Bakewell, the young beauty Audubon already knew he wanted to marry. Audubon stayed with the Bakewell business for about a year, from the fall of 1806 until the late summer of 1807, and he did a good-enough job to stay in Bakewell’s good graces, a useful boon to Audubon’s matrimonial aspirations. Since the elder Audubon needed some assurance that his son could support himself and a wife, the job with Bakewell certainly helped. It also helped Audubon pursue his other passion. During his time in New York he spent what free time he could away from the countinghouse, scouring the shoreline and wooded areas of the city for birds to draw. He also developed a friendship with Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, a New York naturalist who allowed Audubon to practice taxidermy on his specimen collection, stuffing birds and mammals. On the whole, Audubon’s brief stint in New York seemed reasonably well spent. Bakewell provided both income and indulgence, helping Audubon learn something about business, but also letting him roam the streets in search of birds.³² Indeed, trying to balance business and birds became the main theme of Audubon’s early days in the United States.

      In August 1807, he and Rozier decided to go back into partnership again, this time getting away from the main East Coast cities and setting up a retail shop in the distant river town of Louisville, Kentucky. Having arranged for a starting stock of store goods, bought from Benjamin Bakewell on generous terms, they headed west by stage on August 31. By the latter part of September, they had started in business—but, as luck would have it, just before Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act of 1807 disrupted trade everywhere, even for small-time operators like Audubon and Rozier.

      Audubon couldn’t do much about the bigger picture, and he had other business on his mind anyway: He wanted to marry Lucy. In March 1808, after he had been in Louisville for just over six months, he took the trek back to Pennsylvania to ask Mr. Bakewell for Lucy’s hand, and on April 8, 1808, they were married at Fatland Ford. With that, the young couple headed off for Louisville, following the same rough route Audubon and Rozier had taken the previous year. After enduring almost two weeks of stagecoach bumps and flatboat exposure, they arrived in Louisville and settled in an extended-stay hotel, the Indian Queen. Surveying СКАЧАТЬ