Beloved Boy
Hot sun and hummingbirds. Orange trees with dark green leaves. These were some of John James Audubon’s earliest memories. He was born a little French boy named Jean Rabin on April 26, 1785, in Haiti. Haiti, then a French colony called Saint-Domingue, forms a part of the island of Hispaniola, set in the warm Caribbean Sea. Jean never knew his mother, Jeanne Rabin. She had come from France to Saint-Domingue to work as a maid and died a few months after Jean was born. His parents had not been married to each other—a fact that he would try to hide all his life—so he was given his mother’s last name.
The boy’s father, Jean Audubon, was a French sea captain who owned a large sugar plantation on the island. He also bought and sold African slaves. But enslaved Africans far outnumbered white landowners, and during the 1780s, rumblings of an uprising against the brutal system were growing louder every day. So Jean Audubon brought his son and a daughter, Rose, back to his home base in France. There they would be raised by his wife, Anne, who had no children of her own.
2. Ruby-throated Hummingbird. Audubon described this bird as a “glittering fragment of the rainbow.”
Anne loved them as if they had been hers from the start, and she especially doted on Jean. “She therefore completely spoiled me,” he later recalled, “hid my faults, boasted to every one of my youthful merits, and, worse than all, said frequently in my presence that I was the handsomest boy in France.”1 She gave him plenty of pocket money, too, and allowed him to buy whatever he wanted at the candy stores in town. After a few years, the Audubons formally adopted the children. Now Jean had not only a new mother but a new name—Jean-Jacques Audubon.
The family had a home in the city of Nantes in western France and a country house called La Gerbetière in the village of Couëron. Both places were on the banks of the Loire River. In the countryside, young Audubon first learned the joys of rambling. Every morning, his mother packed his lunch basket for school, but he often played hooky instead, running off with his friends to explore meadows and marshes and the banks of the river. After he had eaten his lunch, he would load his basket with “curiosities”—birds’ eggs, flowers and mosses, interesting stones.2 His bedroom began to look like a miniature natural history museum, crammed with small treasures. He felt a bond with nature that grew stronger every year until, as he put it, it bordered on a “frenzy.”3
Most of all he loved birds. The “feathered tribes,” he called them.4 His father shared this love, and together the two went bird watching, studying the creatures’ habits, admiring their graceful flight. When Captain Audubon showed his son a book of bird illustrations, the boy was inspired to draw.
He made pencil outlines and filled in the colors with pastels. At first his birds were just stick figures with heads and tails, and he became frustrated with his “miserable attempts.”5 Even as his work improved, he thought it was never good enough. “How sorely disappointed did I feel. . . . My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples.”6 Every year on his birthday, he threw hundreds of pictures into a bonfire and vowed to do better.
3. La Gerbetière, photograph of Audubon’s country house in France.
“A vivid pleasure shone upon those days of my early youth,” Audubon would one day remember.7 Yet there was another side to French life during his childhood. The French Revolution, which had begun in 1789, turned into a nightmare known as the Reign of Terror. In 1793, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were beheaded on the guillotine. One year later, the Terror came to the Audubons’ own city, Nantes, and it was worse there than almost anywhere else. The revolutionaries set out to exterminate their enemies, the royalists. Mass shootings and beheadings were common, and the streets came to smell like death. Hundreds of people, many of them priests, were tied up, thrown onto barges, and drowned in the river. In later life, Audubon would write little about these dark days except to say, “The Revolutionists covered the earth with the blood of man, woman, and child.”8
4. Marsh Wren by John James Audubon.
One day in 1796, Captain Audubon, who was now in the French navy, came back from a long sea voyage. What had his children learned while he was away? he asked. Rose showed how well she could play the piano. Jean-Jacques, who in addition to his school classes was taking private lessons in drawing, fencing, dancing, and music, had almost nothing to show. He hadn’t even bothered to put strings on his violin. “I, like a culprit, hung my head,” he wrote.9 His father usually had a temper “like the blast of a hurricane.”10 But this time, he just kissed Rose, hummed a little tune, and left the room.
Early the next morning, Jean-Jacques found himself in a horse-drawn carriage with his suitcase and violin. His father sat silently beside him. As the horses trotted farther and farther from home, Captain Audubon still said nothing, and Jean-Jacques did not know where they were going. After several days they reached the surprise destination—the naval academy in the town of Rochefort. The captain had decided that Jean-Jacques should follow in his father’s footsteps and train for a career in the navy. The boy was only eleven years old, but Captain Audubon himself had first gone to sea at age twelve. “My beloved boy, thou art now safe,” he said. “I have brought thee here that I may be able to pay constant attention to thy studies.”11 Unlike his wife, he was a practical person and wanted his son to get an education and prepare himself for the future.
5. Off the Maine Coast by Thomas Birch, 1835. In Audubon’s time, ships like these crossed the ocean.
Jean-Jacques, expert hooky player and adventurer, quickly learned how to shoot, sail, and climb the masts of ships. But he rebelled against the military discipline at Rochefort and the long hours of study. Mathematics, especially, was “hard, dull work.”12 One morning, he decided to escape from his strict math teacher. “I gave him the slip, jumped from the window, and ran off through the gardens.”13 He felt like a young bird fleeing the nest. But in no time he was caught and punished. Later, when he flunked the qualifying test for officer training, his father gave up. The elder Audubon retired from the navy, and father and son returned home.
The Audubons now spent all their time at their country house. Jean-Jacques was a teenager, but he had not forgotten his boyhood passions. “Perhaps not an hour of leisure was spent elsewhere than in woods and fields, and to examine either the eggs, nest, young, or parents of any species of birds constituted my delight.”14
In 1799, the French Revolution ended, but this did not bring peace to France. A general named Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power, and, mad with dreams of empire, he plunged the weary country into war with the rest of Europe. In the spring of 1803, Napoleon was preparing to invade England, and his already enormous army would need a fresh supply of young men. Audubon was now eighteen. He had survived the revolution, and his father was determined that he should survive Napoleon’s wars, too. In his travels, Captain Audubon had stopped in America and bought an estate called Mill Grove in the state of Pennsylvania. He decided to send his son there to escape Napoleon’s draft and to start a new life.
That summer Audubon boarded a ship bound for America. “I received light and life in the New World,” he wrote, and now he was heading back.15 His mother cried when the ship sailed away, and the young man watched as the coastline of France faded into the distance. “My heart sunk within me. . . . My affections were with those I had left behind, and the world seemed to me a great wilderness.”16