It was in the salmon-pink light of one of Key West’s fabled sunsets, on an evening early in May, that Dr. Benjamin Strobel—surgeon for the army post, physician at large for the community, member of the town council, and editor and publisher of the Key West Gazette—strolled to the docks with a number of friends to welcome the sixty-foot United States revenue cutter Marion, which was under the command of an acquaintance of his, one Lieutenant Robert Day. Dr. Strobel had recently received a letter from a Lutheran minister in Charleston, Reverend John Bachman, a fanatical amateur ornithologist and botanist, who for some time had kept begging Strobel for exotic plants, unusual shells, and pretty bird skins, to add to what must have been a bizarre collection of natures oddities; the letter urged Dr. Strobel to keep a lookout for the Marion, because aboard her would be a good fellow named John James Audubon, a hunter of birds for the purpose of making paintings of them, who intended to spend some time in the lower Keys.
When the Marion was warped in, made fast to bollards, and secured for the night, Lieutenant Day and his crew and passengers disembarked in order to pacify their sea legs. Lieutenant Day, who knew Strobel as one of Key West’s leading citizens, introduced him to Audubon, a stocky, vigorous-looking man with a broad face, long wavy hair, arrogant eyes, and a chin thrust forward like a dare. On hearing Strobel’s name, Audubon took him aside and with considerable urgency whipped out a letter of introduction from Reverend Bachman and said he required an immediate conversation with the doctor.
Strobel took him to his house, where Audubon asked for advice about where to hunt for birds. The two men hit it off at once. Through the remainder of Audubon’s stay, during the few hours each day when he was not at his visitor’s side, Dr. Strobel made entries in a diary he was in the habit of keeping. In them he recorded, along with his amazement at the beauty and eloquence of the drawings and paintings that Audubon dashed off with breathtaking speed, his equally great surprise at something else he observed. Here are some excerpts from the diary:
MAY 6. We had provided Audubon with a smart pair of shallow-draft cutters, manned by half a dozen of the Marion‘s sailors at the oars of each. Preston, our guide, a grizzled old manatee hunter and conch diver who used to sail to Havana to sell the meat and hides he’d harvested, has marked with his eye, I believe, every nest of every bird on every tangle of mangrove here in the lower Keys. He is better acquainted with what is on these many islets than most learned square-toes are with the contents of their desk drawers. This morning he pointed us in under a Key where an entire congress of Magnificent Frigatebirds had started to build their nests. Audubon, Preston, each man Jack of our crew, and I—all were armed with artillery, and at a nod from Preston we uttered a bombardment which brought down a heavy downpour of those splendid creatures. Audubon cheered. A few of those “men-o’-war birds” had survived and had taken to wing, and the sharp-eyed Preston raised his weapon, named “Long John,” fully charged with “groceries,” as he called his shot and powder, and brought several more birds down which, thinking themselves safe, had begun soaring about, trailing their streaming forked tails after them, at a height of at least one hundred feet.
Audubon soon had all of us, even including the Navy men, skinning the carcasses. When we were done, he heaped the entire take of skins in the bilge of a cutter. At home, that afternoon, he stuffed one skin—one skin out of the many—why had he needed so many?—and in short order made a dazzling drawing of Fregata magnificens.
MAY 7. Rowing round the brow of an island thick with a wild hair of mangroves, we suddenly came, at the leeward side, on a vast number of our most familiar creatures—ungainly Brown Pelicans—perched all together in a harmony of satiation, looking like a retreat of complaisant, elderly preachers. How peaceful their ruminations were!—until our heathen infantry suddenly fired its repeated salvos. At once the water around us was crowded with fleets of the dead, the dying, and the maimed, while others flocked away screaming over the sea.
“Did you ever have such sport?” says Preston.
“It’s a joy,” says Audubon. “Out with your knives, boys!”
We bagged twenty-eight skins.
MAY 8. Our men rowed fourteen miles this morning, till we came to an island with a wide bay rimmed with a white shelly beach and with long pale sandbars reaching out into the shallows. The flocks of birds there, running on the beach, whirring up in sudden wheeling flights, wading, floating, sleepily perching, were so various and so numerous that we wondered if we were dreaming. Sooty Terns and Noddy Terns and Roseate Terns and Cayenne Terns dived for their breakfasts; Great Marbled Godwits strutted by the score under the mangroves; Great White Herons paraded primly on their stilts; here were Wood Storks, Mangrove Cuckoos, Reddish Egrets; I heard Audubon exclaiming in ecstasy at the sight of a flock of Zenaida Doves. We were not so ravished by wonder, however, as to forget to raise and aim our guns. The very first volley was amongst a mob of Godwits. We went ashore and counted sixty-five corpses on the sand. The cargo of the many kinds of skins at the end of the morning were like to sink one of our dories.
MAY 9 AND 10. On successive days Audubon had what he called “two frolics” of hunting for ospreys as they soared and dived for prey near their great nests of sticks scattered on old dead trees along the islands on the ocean side. He killed seven of those elusive eagle-like marvels in forty-eight hours. With flashing eyes he said to me, at the end of the second day, “I never saw a sportsman who could do better than that. Did you ever?”
MAY 13. We sailed out to the Tortugas, where, at anchor, we made the acquaintance of some hearty wreckers. The next morning these men rowed us in three longboats, with full strokes and a good run of the hull between pulls, as whaling oarsmen are wont to ply, heading for “Booby Island,” some ten miles from the lighthouse, where the wreckers said wed have capital shooting.
It was early, and we were hungry, and we stopped off en route at a. small island that might well have been named “Ibis Island,” for every bush on it held several nests of that graceful bird. The men took up from the boat lockers their tin and wooden plates that they used for mess kits. Each nest held a clutch of three handsome eggs, and fanning out, we raided all the nests—the birds flying off in sullen deference to us—and soon we had built fires and cooked ourselves a wondrously hearty and delicious breakfast.
As our little flotilla rowed on with renewed energy, the captain sang rhythmic chanteys to pace the men’s strokes, and now and then the three boats would race short sprints against each other. It was all most cheery. All the men, and Audubon with them, grew even cheerier at the sport that ensued when we reached “Booby Island.” Like Audubon, the wreckers were all first-rate marksmen, and they were armed with the best of guns. In a very few minutes very nearly the entire flock of boobies which had colonized the island met its Armageddon.
MAY 17. By way of relaxation, today, taking a recess from drawing in the sun-room of my house, he sortied out into the town with his gun and right amongst the startled citizens shot a dozen Key West Quail-Doves. They were, he said, “easy pickings,” on account of their habit of “bathing themselves,” as he put it, “with fluttering wings, in the dust of the roadways.”
MAY 19. “Gentlemen,” says Preston, “get ready to have some fun. The tide is making up to flood.” We were out in what has come to be known as “the backcountry”—the vast area of shallows to the west’ard of the Keys. At dead low tide, the multitude of birds on the exposed flats and in the merest shallows is uncountable. With the wash of the new tide, building a foot or two of depth, however, all, even those with legs like tall reeds, are driven toward roosts in the Keys, and behold!—here they came! Each of us was ambushed, in what seems to me the true sense of the word—hidden in a bush—and soon the thronged wings beat their way into the hail of lead Audubon’s army threw at them. After our work of flaying the corpses, we gathered the feathery skins all together, and they made a sight not unlike that of a summer haycock.
MAY 21. Carefully packing a foot-locker and some wooden boxes—for tomorrow the Marion sails away—this fiery, affable man, who has quite worn me out with his habit of rising at three o’clock every morning to prepare for a day of hunting and drawing, nourished by nothing but birds eggs and biscuits and molasses and never a drop of ardent spirits; packing, as I say, he turned to me with a beaming face and exclaimed, “I’ve made a tally. I’ve bagged four hundred and seventy-two skins in fifteen days!”