Audubon, JOHN JAMES, an eminent American ornithologist, was born on the plantation of his father (an officer in the French navy), near New Orleans, Louisiana, May 4, 1780. His mother was a lady of Spanish extraction, who, after the birth of four children, accompanied her husband to St Domingo, and there perished in the great negro insurrection. Visiting France with his children, the elder Audubon soon married again, settled his family in the city of Nantes, and resumed his duties in the French navy; and it was chiefly through his stepmother's indulgence that young Audubon was enabled to gratify his taste as a naturalist. His father undertook to educate him for the army or navy; but music, drawing, and the collection of natural history specimens usurped the attention that should have been given to mathematics, until finally the lad was sent to America to occupy a property in Eastern Pennsylvania, which his father had previously purchased. Here he lived for some time a sort of Bohemian naturalist, and here he married in 1808 Miss Lucy Bakewell, the daughter of a farmer. Immediately after, he sold his land, bought a stock of goods, and, with his
Copyright 1888 in U.S.
by J. B. Lippincott
Company. wife and a French friend and partner, Rosier, migrated westward to engage in mercantile pursuits. A flat-bottomed boat conveyed the party down the Ohio from Pittsburg to Louisville, Kentucky, where they commenced trade, Audubon, however, spending his time principally away on expeditions with the neighbouring planters hunting birds, while Rosier 'stuck to the counter.' Business so conducted naturally proved unprofitable, and the firm removed first to Hendersonville, Kentucky, and next to St Genevieve, Missouri, where Audubon sold his interest to his partner and returned to Hendersonville. A succession of business misadventures speedily swept away all his funds, when, with 'his sick wife and his gun, his dog, and his drawings,' he returned to Louisville, and engaged in drawing portraits, whereby (here and subsequently in Cincinnati) he supported his family for a while in comfort. In 1820, however, he left Cincinnati, without a dollar, on an excursion down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, stopping at the principal towns and drawing portraits, and adding at every available opportunity to his already wonderful collection of coloured designs of birds. He records that in one instance he executed portraits of a shoemaker and his wife in payment for two pairs of boots, one of which he gave to a destitute fellow-traveller, reserving the other pair for his scarcely less destitute self. After a precarious existence of this sort for some three years, Audubon visited the cities of the Atlantic coast with the view of publishing his works; but meeting with little encouragement, he returned to Louisiana, and taught classes in dancing. Encouraged and assisted by his wife, who was receiving nearly 3000 a year as a teacher, he embarked for Europe in 1826, where he was received with great kindness by the leading scientists. Public exhibitions of his drawings in Liverpool and Edinburgh proved successful, and in 1827 he issued the prospectus of his great work, <i>The Birds of America</i>, to appear in numbers at two guineas each—each number to consist of five plates. He canvassed the British towns for subscribers, meanwhile painting and selling pictures to defray his current expenses, and in 1828 visited Paris, where his work received the highest encomiums—a report from Cuvier to the Paris Academy of Sciences declaring it 'the most magnificent monument which has yet been erected to ornithology.' The work embraces coloured figures of 1065 species of birds (natural size), the publication of which occupied some ten years, and is said to have cost £20,000 (100,000). In the meantime, Audubon visited America, and explored the least known regions of the Atlantic coast from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico, returning to London, in the interest of his work, in 1837. In 1839 he settled with his family in New York city, visited the Yellowstone River in 1843, and subsequently, assisted by his sons, he published The Quadrupeds of North America, largely from materials prepared some years prior by himself and Dr John Bachman of South Carolina. He died 27th January 1851.
See a Life by Mrs Horace St John (1856); that by R. Buchanan from materials supplied by his widow (1869); but especially Audubon and his Journals, by his daughter, Maria R. Audubon (2 vols. 1898).