Books › Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941 › scan 6
Scan 6
Blue Book v073-n03 [1941-07], 1941
18 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Emerson. I am asserting only that while Cooper went to England while he wrote The Prairie (an unreadably dull book, to my ears), Audubon was the prairies; that where Emerson knew his Carlyle, Audubon knew his Mississippi squatters; and that while Thoreau was traveling around Concord, Audubon was traveling around North America. While Parkman was writing history, Audubon was making and witnessing it.
3And yet there has never before been collected into any one volume a general selection of the first-hand narratives of this shrewd and eager observer of all conditions and aspects of American men, manners, and scenes. He is seldom even quoted save in evidence for the unbelievable numbers of the passenger pigeons, or the destruction of the buffalo, or on some other point in natural history. This is due in part to the fact that his writings have remained scattered through a wide assortment of volumes, many of them accessible only in a few great libraries. Others, notably his unaltered diaries, and journals, have but recently been published and only in limited and costly editions.
5This volume is intended to make up in some measure for neglect of Audubon's precious testimony. As editor I have preferred to bring him forward less as the naturalist than as one who knew river captains and roustabouts, pioneers and men of letters, Indians and scientists. This without, of course, slighting his natural-history writings, but reducing them to some reasonable proportion to the whole. That whole is the America of his day, America as he, and perhaps only he, knew it: Audubon's America.
7John James Audubon gave many accounts of his own birthplace and parentage, and the date of that birth. Any one of them might have been fairly convincing, if they were not all more or less in contradiction, except on one point. And that point is his repeated assertion and implication that he was born in the New World, the Western Hemisphere.
9This should set at rest the preposterous claim that has recently (and only recently) been set up for him, that he was none other than the lost Dauphin, Louis XVII, majesty disguised as a wandering artist! This legend would be too far-fetched for notice if it were not, unfortunately, the one story about Audubon that sticks in many minds. Two women biographers of Audubon have recently taken it quite seriously, and thousands of words have been written in debate on this point. They can all be cut short by laying down a fact denied by nobody. The unfortunate little Bourbon prince had a deformed ear, while Audubon's ears were both quite normal. Who will seriously argue the point beyond this?
11All the documents in the case prove, to the satisfaction of most who have, examined them, that the great bird-painter was born April 26, 1785, at the port of Les Cayes or Aux Cayes on the south coast of what is now the republic of Haiti, though it was then called by the French, who were in possession of it, Saint-Domingue. The father, Jean Audubon, was a lieutenant in the French navy, with a record of distinguished courage and ability in battle. He was a rich sugar planter, a careful and successful business man, and an owner of properties in the West Indies, France, and Pennsylvania.
13But the mother of the future artist remains a mystery. She was a native of the island, a Creole of good birth. Her family name may have been either Rabin or Fougère; there is equal evidence for both, and the Fougères and Rabins were and still are distinguished families in Haiti. Probably somewhere in this woman's ancestry was the then locally well-known name of Laforest. She bore the lieutenant (so it seems in the light of latest researches) four sons, of whom Jean Jacques Audubon was the youngest.
15The infant was not, however, then called Jean Jacques Audubon, but, probably, Fougère Rabin. The reason for this was the bald fact that the seafaring planter could not marry his island love. He had a wife in France, a woman older than he, a woman of property. When the little Fougère was about one year old his mother died. Her place at the plantation was taken by another, by whom the lieutenant had a daughter, Muguet. From her mother he seems to have become separated, but the girl child remained with her father. So there, when at last he was obliged to return to France, was the sailor with a brace of tiny love-children, babes-in-the jungle who might reasonably have expected no other fate than to be abandoned there, at best to hired care.
17But Jean Audubon was conscientious. He took his children back to France, in 1789, probably crossing the United States on his way, and placed them in the tender arms of his childless wife in Nantes. Five years later Lieutenant Au-
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