Under a Wild Sky (44 page)

In October they arrived in Edinburgh, and to Audubon's delight were able to rent rooms in the very same building on George Street where Audubon had first stayed four years earlier. Audubon continued having some success in restoring subscriptions, in a few cases by promising to replace substandard plates. The latest Numbers, meanwhile, seemed to impress everyone. Havell was preparing to relocate his shop down the block and around the corner. The new location was on Oxford Street, a busy West End avenue, in a narrow, three-story brick building.
In addition to engraving, printselling, and publishing, Havell advertised art supplies and an extensive collection of zoological specimens “stuffed & preserved in the highest perfection.”
Audubon asked Havell to display plates from
The Birds of America
prominently in the front windows. Satisfied that Havell was again on track and would put the engravings right, Audubon turned to a different task: composing and publishing his ornithological observations.

Alexander Wilson had been an author who taught himself to draw. For Audubon, it was the reverse. He was at ease drawing, but turned into an anxious lump when he sat down to write. Despite years of journal-keeping and nearly manic letter-writing, Audubon recognized the limitations of his vocabulary and the confusing effect of a wobbly syntax that bumped along in everything he wrote. His habit of underlining words he wished to emphasize, seemingly at random, didn't help. Nor did his punctuation—an idiosyncratic spray of dashes, apostrophes, periods, and haphazard or missing commas. The result almost tracked, but usually not quite, as in this excerpt from a letter to Lucy in 1829:

My letter will be through necessity of interest either in facts or of their nature a short and dull one but I like to write to thee
regularly
—when Sunday comes I have measuring its distance since the one just gone to speak to thee—I have no other pleasures—I live alone and see scarcely anyone besides those belonging to the house I am at—I raise before day, take a walk, return and set to my work untill night fall—

From the beginning of his time in England, Audubon had been working on written descriptions of the birds depicted in the plates for
The Birds of America.
Audubon envisioned these bird “biographies” as the backbone of a multivolume text that would accompany the engraved plates as a separate publication. There were practical considerations behind the division of words and pictures into two distinct works. Audubon, of course, had to pay his engravers, first Lizars and then the Havells, as he went. He had started selling subscriptions as soon as the first Number—only five pictures—was complete. There was no time to prepare a finished text and no way of incorporating one with each Number as it was produced. Unlike Alexander Wilson, whose smaller-scale drawings could be easily bound with text, Audubon had chosen a format for his illustrations—the double-elephant-sized folios—that was impractical for text.
Another factor in the decision to separate the words from the pictures was the copyright law in Britain, which required that an author deposit any copyrighted work at no charge with each of nine major public libraries throughout the United Kingdom. This would have been prohibitively expensive if the work included Audubon's plates. No similar provision applied to an uncopyrighted collection of engravings.

Audubon's hesitancy about his writing wasn't only about his command of the language.
Audubon confided to Charles-Lucien Bonaparte on a number of occasions that he knew his formal education was inadequate, that he was really no scientist. Scientific descriptions of more than four hundred species of birds would require a sophistication and breadth of knowledge he did not possess. He was particularly uneasy about describing bird morphologies in a rigorous way, and early on he had looked for someone to help him.
Audubon had thought initially of William Swainson, and had written to him proposing that he and Lucy should stay with the Swainsons at their country home while they worked together on the bird biographies. Slightly delirious at the prospect of such a comfortable and collegial collaboration, he had made the ridiculous offer to supply wine for himself and Lucy during their stay.

It was an offer Swainson couldn't refuse fast enough.
He told Audubon that their coming to stay with him was out of the question. If he still wanted Swainson's help on technical issues in his books, Swainson would supply it—but at a charge of twelve guineas—nearly $60—for each sixteen-page “sheet,” plus a stipulation that Audubon credit his contribution
with a byline as coauthor. Although Audubon never hid the fact that other people helped with his work and at one time or another hinted that he would be willing to partner with Bonaparte—an idea Bonaparte never encouraged—he was unwilling to have anyone's name next to his. And in any case, he could not afford Swainson's fee.

Havell was starting work on the twentieth Number about the same time the Audubons arrived in Edinburgh. This meant subscribers would soon have the first one hundred engravings—roughly the number Audubon planned to write about in each volume of what he called the letterpress. Determined that publication of the letterpress parallel production of the engravings, Audubon renewed his search for someone to assist him.
One of the people he talked to was James Wilson, a naturalist and a contributor to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, which was published in Edinburgh. Wilson suggested a man named William MacGillivray.

Eleven years younger than Audubon, MacGillivray was a compact man, with a high, domed forehead and lively eyes. He was born in Aberdeen, but had been raised on the remote, wind-battered coast of South Harris Island in the Outer Hebrides, and he occasionally undertook long, solitary hikes across Britain. MacGillivrary had learned both Greek and Latin at an early age, and had studied various branches of natural history, including geology and botany. But his special passion was ornithology. Like Audubon, MacGillivray was crazy for birds and had spent a fair amount of time shooting and drawing them. He was also plainspoken and rather unrefined—qualities that appealed to Audubon. Unlike Audubon, MacGillivray was a trained taxonomist and a close student of Linnaeus. He was also a meticulous anatomist. As a young man MacGillivray had carefully measured and then dissected a walrus that had been killed on the beach near his home. Another time he shot and dissected a bear, which he later stuffed.
When Audubon met him, MacGillivray was between jobs, having most recently worked as a special assistant and specimen curator for Professor Robert Jameson, Audubon's patron at the University of Edinburgh.

Toward the end of 1830, MacGillivray agreed to become Audubon's editor and scientific adviser on the letterpress—for one-sixth the fee Swainson had asked and with no demand for credit. Feeling it was urgent to get started, Audubon at once began to feed copy to MacGillivray, and they soon fell into a work pattern that would continue on and off for the next eight years.
Audubon, rising at dawn each day, wrote until
dark, sometimes continuing on by candlelight until he was exhausted.
MacGillivray matched Audubon's manic pace, though he preferred to do most of his work late at night. This was reassuring to Audubon, who considered nocturnal scribbling the mark of a serious author.

Lucy worked alongside her husband.
Prone to rheumatism, Lucy found Edinburgh pretty but disagreeably cold and damp after years of living in the swelter of Louisiana.
Audubon, whom she observed was “still fatter” and in the pink of health, supplied her with heavy woolens against the bone-chilling mists and the chattering winds off the North Sea.
It was so foggy in Edinburgh, Lucy said, that they often had to light their candles by four in the afternoon. Outside their windows, the streetlamps on George Street illuminated the pale nighttime fogs. After their long and sometimes angry separation, Audubon and Lucy were once again of the same mind and mood in all matters. No doubt Lucy contributed many corrections and amendments to Audubon's composition of the letterpress. More important, she became his deputy in dealing with everything and everyone else in the world as he was more immersed in writing.
Anyone having business with Audubon had to get past her. She corresponded with Havell on a regular basis, providing chatty updates on the weather in Edinburgh and what they had seen or done of late—but also to keep the wheels turning in London.
She told Mrs. Havell that they were far too busy to go out and rarely accepted invitations from anyone—the implication being that Mr. Havell should be so industrious. Audubon, she said, often wrote until eleven o'clock at night. In the thin gray light of morning, they would shiver and begin again.

In a burst of headlong writing, Audubon and MacGillivray with their steel-nibbed pens and low-burning candles completed the first volume of the letterpress between December 1830 and March 1831.
The typeset version ran to over five hundred pages. Audubon titled it
Ornithological Biography
. It would be followed by four more volumes in the same format and tone. Descriptions of bird species followed the order of the birds depicted in the engravings for
The Birds of America.
These descriptions, or “biographies,” varied in length and detail, depending on Audubon's familiarity with and fondness for the species. He devoted more than fifteen pages to the first one—his loving account of the turkey. In cases where his observations were limited—or where the descriptions were received entirely from other naturalists whose travels took them places not visited by Audubon—the accounts were as brief as a single short paragraph.

Audubon affected a breezy style, speaking directly to the “kind reader” and including rollicking tales of his exploits in the field. He also carefully described a bird's flight, its song, its feeding and reproductive habits, its nest building and what its eggs look like—as well as where and how he had found it, shot it, and probably ate it. At the conclusion of each account, MacGillivray added a scientific description, including precise measurements, plumage characteristics, and taxonomic designations. Close attention was paid to features distinguishing males from females, and juveniles from adults. In the case of new species, Audubon provided both scientific and common names of his choosing. He named a number of species for friends and colleagues. For known species, the taxonomies of Linnaeus, Wilson, and Bonaparte, among others, were used to identify the bird. Later in the series, MacGillivray—especially after Audubon began supplying him with bird skins from America—also included occasional black-and-white sketches he made of specific body parts and internal organs. In his introduction to Volume I, Audubon stated his debt to MacGillivray:

I feel pleasure here in acknowledging the assistance which I have received from a friend, Mr. William MacGillivray, who being possessed of a liberal education and a strong taste for the study of the Natural Sciences, has aided me, not in drawing the figures of my Illustrations, nor in writing the book now in your hand, although fully competent for both tasks, but in completing the scientific details, and smoothing down the asperities of my Ornithological Biographies.

Audubon planned to sell the
Ornithological Biography
to his subscribers at a nominal additional cost, but he eventually gave it to them free. Non-subscribers were to pay twenty-five shillings—about $5. For its bird accounts alone,
Ornithological Biography
would have been an amazing document. As a picture of the American wilderness, it was breathtaking. Audubon had nearly doubled Alexander Wilson's inventory of American birds. For some species that would soon be swallowed in the dust of extinction—like the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet—Audubon's descriptions preserved a lost, far richer world.

But Audubon did not limit himself to birds in
Ornithological Biography
. From the time he began to think seriously about the text for
The Birds of
America
, he had imagined something more wide-ranging. For him, the birds were inseparable from their context—from the woods and swamps and river bottoms on the frontier of a boisterous young nation. Audubon wanted to describe the places he had been and the people and things he had seen.
And so he interspersed the bird accounts with his own vivid Americana in a series of sidebars, or “delineations of American scenery and manners,” as he called them, which eventually numbered more than sixty. Most of these vignettes were highly autobiographical, with Audubon as the featured player and frequent hero. Some of them were even true.

As he had done his whole adult life, Audubon carefully calculated his audience and what it wanted to believe, then blended fact, exaggeration, and outright lies into a mélange of self-promotion. He seemed to take for granted that his subscribers, hungry for tales of derring-do, would accept a larger-than-life version of his experiences in the New World, so that's what he gave them.

In many of the “episodes,” as they were later called, Audubon stuck to simple narratives that were almost certainly the truth or close to it. Several gave accounts of his travels on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. These included entertaining studies of weather, navigation, pioneer settlement, fishing, and, of course, hunting. Audubon told about his and Lucy's travels between Pennsylvania and Kentucky, as well as the time he lost his portfolio in Natchez.
In “Kentucky Barbicue on the Fourth of July,” he gave a lively description of raucous pioneers partying on Independence Day.
He wrote a devoted remembrance of the mustang Barro. Audubon also reported his encounters with men like Alexander Wilson and Constantine Rafinesque. Although he worried that the clearing of the great forests for farmland would someday reduce bird populations, Audubon was mightily impressed by settlers who scraped out an existence all along the American frontier.
He wrote enthusiastically of “squatters” on the move across the continent in search of land and a future. A collector of local lore and myth wherever he went, Audubon also devoted a few of his episodes to tales others had told him. Some were more credible than others.
There was a pioneer family's recollection of their harrowing escape from a deadly forest fire, and a man's account of having been lost for forty days in a swamp only a few miles from his home.
Then there was the ghastly—and suspiciously well rehearsed—story told by a sailor who'd kept watch through a long night as a mortally injured pirate died from his wounds.