was difficult to swallow. Audubon claimed to have been born in the territory of Louisiana. His father, he said, served as an admiral in the French navy and had also been a hero in the American war of independence. His mother was a Creole of Spanish extraction, who was courted and married by his father at her sprawling plantation near New Orleans. After her untimely death, Audubon was taken to France, where he was adopted by his father’s second wife and developed an interest in nature and painting. One of his teachers there, Audubon boasted, was the great portraitist Jacques-Louis David. At eighteen, Audubon had come to America to manage his father’s property, a large farm called Mill Grove, just west of Philadelphia. From there, he said, he had traveled far, seeing much of the country while devoting himself to the study of birds, acquiring a knowledge of their ways and appearance that he felt sure was unequaled by any other ornithologist.
And that is how the real trouble started.
Audubon was on safe ground in his airy dismissal of European naturalists as “cabinet ornithologists” who studied American birds by looking at moth-eaten stuffed specimens, never setting foot in America. Beginning with Thomas Jefferson—who had identified more than one hundred new bird species and who feuded with scientists in France over the vigor and uniqueness of New World fauna—American naturalists had been eager to gain authority in their own country. In Philadelphia, especially among members of the academy, any informed opinion against European views of American natural history was enthusiastically received.
But Audubon threatened the legacy of Alexander Wilson, America’s preeminent ornithologist and a hero in the cause of New World scientific independence. Wilson, who had come to Pennsylvania from Scotland in 1794, was a poet and naturalist. A lonely man, Wilson was repeatedly troubled by political and romantic intrigues. He supported himself as a weaver and peddler, and later by teaching school and working as a book editor. Wilson discovered an interest in birds after he was befriended by William Bartram, an eminent botanist whose well-stocked library in Philadelphia became Wilson’s favorite retreat. In 1804, the year he was granted citizenship, Wilson had set out to draw and write about all the birds of North America. He was advised against it. He had limited artistic ability and the large, lavishly illustrated book he had in mind—what we would today think of as a coffee-table book—made little financial sense. It was almost sure to cost him more to publish than he could ever hope to earn back.
Wilson never did get rich. But he did publish American Ornithology. When he died suddenly in 1813 at the age of forty-seven, he had completed seven volumes and was working on the eighth. By any measure, it was the most handsome, the most expensive, and one of the most important works yet published about America. At the Academy of Natural Sciences, Wilson was revered as the “father of American ornithology”—a true giant in American natural history—and American Ornithology was regarded as an almost sacred text, the first major scientific publication produced in America by an American.
Audubon failed to be suitably impressed. He may have mentioned what he believed were mistakes in Wilson’s taxonomy and drawings. He may have alluded to his later claim that he had actually met Wilson—in Kentucky. As Audubon recalled, Wilson had shown up in Louisville some years back, selling subscriptions to his book and looking for new birds. According to Audubon, Wilson had been flustered and then dismayed when Audubon, who seemed ready to purchase American Ornithology, instead got out his own bird drawings, which on comparison were decidedly superior to Wilson’s. In an attempt to make his visitor feel better, Audubon said, he took Wilson hunting the next day and even helped him locate and bring down a new species of warbler—a bird Audubon now claimed Wilson had included in American Ornithology without acknowledgment.
All of this—the sketchy story of where he was from, the frontiersman posturing, and especially the casual disparagements of Wilson—was in the air when Audubon at last made his way to the Academy of Natural Sciences on a Saturday evening sometime between May and the middle of July. He arrived with Bonaparte in the prince’s carriage, stopping before a narrow, two-story brick building with high, arched windows. They walked down a sidewalk that skirted a courtyard and mounted a steep flight of stairs. Audubon, portfolio pressed to his side, was naïvely convinced that he stood on the threshold of acclaim.
Although the members of the academy were in the end divided in their feelings about Audubon and his birds—a few were enthusiastic about the drawings—the mood at the academy would swing against him. It was not entirely his fault, since there was little Audubon might have done differently that would have prevented the opposition of the long-faced man presiding over that evening’s session.
The son of a rich ship chandler and rope maker, George Ord was only four years older than Audubon. He was a doughy, sharp-tongued man who had spent more time tending the family business and going to academy meetings than he had tramping the woods. His only serious attempt at field research was an abbreviated expedition to Florida with several academy colleagues in 1817. The explorers got as far as St. Augustine, where rumors of Indian unrest forced them to retreat. What Ord had that Audubon didn’t was a reputation as a zoologist. Ord was also an influential promoter of American science—in particular the science of Alexander Wilson. Ord had been a close friend of Wilson’s and was the executor of Wilson’s estate—not that it amounted to much. Wilson died with many more liabilities than assets, but Ord construed his responsibility in larger terms. He’d completed Wilson’s unfinished eighth volume of American Ornithology and had started on the ninth and final installment. Ord was protective not only of American Ornithology but also of Wilson’s role in earning respect for American science, and he took an instantaneous dislike to Audubon that would congeal into lifelong hatred.
Ord dismissed Audubon’s drawings, which he found gaudy and ridiculous. They were simply too, too much. Audubon, he said, had twisted his subjects into attitudes never seen in nature. The images were too big and too busy with extraneous elements like trees and flowers—Audubon had commingled zoology with botany! Ord did not limit his observations to Audubon’s art and science. In the weeks following Audubon’s appearance before the academy, Ord denounced him as a man without honor—an imposter and a liar who misrepresented himself and traduced the reputation of Alexander Wilson. Ord was delighted when he learned that a young artist named Joseph Mason, now working in Philadelphia, claimed to have collaborated with Audubon in Louisiana, painting background plants and flowers under the false impression that he was to be given credit for these contributions.
Audubon, who could well have wondered why he was set up for this abuse, evidently didn’t. He never questioned Bonaparte’s motivations, which must have been complex, in bringing him to the academy. Bonaparte, who didn’t have the same investment in “American” science as other members of the academy—and who did not share their reverence for Wilson—may have been insensitive to the politics of the situation. More likely, he wanted to see what would happen when Audubon’s brash new interpretation of North American birds came up against Wilson’s. Bonaparte hinted at a future partnership with Audubon. But he was already engaged in a delicate business of collaborating with Ord on the continuation of American Ornithology while at the same time drafting a series of papers for the academy disputing many entries in the Wilson classic. His loyalties divided, Bonaparte sided with nobody, steering a middle course that Audubon—hungry for the prince’s approval—went along with.
Bonaparte was circumspect as well, carefully avoiding asking Audubon too many questions. But he could easily have checked out his new friend’s story. Jacques-Louis David, Audubon’s supposed teacher, had recently painted portraits of Bonaparte’s wife and sister-in-law. And Louisiana was not the faraway place to Bonaparte that Audubon assumed it was in claiming it as home. Bonaparte’s father had negotiated the 1801 treaty with Spain that ceded the territory to France—two years before his uncle Napoleon sold it to Thomas Jefferson.
Audubon’s company stole some of the luster from Bonaparte’s reputation around Philadelphia. They seemed an odd, guileless pair—one compact and neat, the other a hulk fresh out of the woods, both of them so animated and eager, so French. Their manners were foreign and their instincts for doing the wrong thing infallible. After the disastrous visit to the academy, Bonaparte had another idea. He took Audubon to see Philadelphia’s most accomplished engraver, a man named Alexander Lawson. Lawson, who had engraved the plates for American Ornithology