comedy about an argument between a husband and wife titled “Watty and Meg.” It sold unexpectedly well. But not well enough. Wilson was soon broke again and back among the “wretches.” Jail, he said, was a daily horror show. He felt entombed by “the rumbling of bolts, the hoarse exclamations of the jailor, the sighs and sallow countenances of the prisoners, and the general gloom of the place.” During one of his releases, in the spring of 1794, Wilson decided to go to America. Taking care not to tip off the authorities, Wilson hastily scraped together the fare. On May 23, he sailed for Philadelphia aboard the Swift, accompanied by his sixteen-year-old nephew, William Duncan. “I must get out of my mind,” Wilson said to a friend just before leaving.
Crossing the Atlantic was then a common but still hair-raising experience. In addition to the risks of bad weather or other misfortune, the ships were usually overcrowded and disease-ridden. Wilson waited until he and Duncan had safely arrived in Philadelphia before writing to his family about the trip.
They’d gone first to Belfast, Ireland, and had a look at the Swift that almost decided them against going. Surveying the throng of passengers, 350 in all, Wilson doubted half would survive the voyage in the dank, cramped spaces below decks, where the berths were no wider than a coffin. The good news, as they chose to see it, was that passage on deck was all that remained available. After they determined themselves to be among the fitter specimens in the crowd, Wilson and Duncan gamely got aboard, never to see Scotland again. They were seasick for a few days but soon felt better in fair weather and gentle seas. Once away from land, one of the passengers, a physician, revealed that he recently had been tried as a seditionist and condemned to death in Ireland. Rum was found and everyone drank to the doctor’s health and the cause of liberty the world over. In three weeks of pleasant sailing “only” three passengers died, an old woman and two children.
In the middle of the voyage, the Swift passed for two days through a maze of “ice islands.” Wilson was astounded at the size and number of the icebergs. Some were more than twice as high as the ship’s tallest mast. At one time he counted thirty-four of them surrounding the vessel. A steady breeze pushed the ship onward until they got through. But soon after they were hit by a terrific storm—the most violent Wilson had ever seen. A day later, one of the sailors fell overboard. He swam strongly after the ship and came agonizingly close. But despite every effort, the man could not be rescued.
After fifty days at sea, the Swift entered the calm waters of the Delaware River and proceeded to the town of Newcastle, where Wilson and Duncan disembarked and set out on foot for Wilmington. They were “happy as mortals could be” as they walked through a flat, densely wooded country overflowing with unrecognizable vegetation and the calls of many remarkable birds. In Wilmington they asked about work for weavers, but none were needed and they decided to continue on to Philadelphia, another thirty miles upriver. They stopped at farmhouses along the way and were disappointed at finding the residents less welcoming than they had been led to expect. On reaching Philadelphia, they were impressed by the city’s sprawl, which extended some three miles along the western riverbank. But Wilson was distressed to find no more than twenty looms running in a city of nearly fifty thousand inhabitants, where everything was very expensive and there was no demand for journeyman weavers.
Mulling what to do next, Wilson was meanwhile agape at the richness and natural beauty of the New World. Nothing about it was familiar—not the trees nor the bushes nor the animals. Even the air was different. The midsummer heat and humidity were tremendous—Wilson noticed that just sitting still in trousers and a waistcoat he sweated as he never had before. Like most Europeans, Wilson had believed that America’s oppressive climate, where dense heat alternated with numbing cold, was hostile to wildlife. But walking in the forests around Philadelphia, he and Duncan found themselves in a veritable Garden of Eden. They were amazed at the number of squirrels scampering among the trees, and the size of the snakes sunning themselves by the footpath. They feasted on apples and peaches, delighted to find the local orchards without the high walls and fierce guard dogs encountered in Scotland. Nowhere on earth, Wilson imagined, could anyone find such an “agreeable spot” as Pennsylvania. Wilson could not identify a single one of the many birds they saw, but he was struck by the intensity and variety of their colorations. One day he shot several cardinals in order to make a closer inspection. Holding their warm, scarlet bodies lightly in his hands, Wilson wondered what they were.
Grus americana: The Whooping Crane
The members of a flock sometimes arrange themselves in the form of an acute-angled triangle; sometimes they move in a long line; again they mingle together without order, or form an extended front; but in whatever manner they advance, each bird sounds his loud note in succession, and on occasions of alarm these birds manifest the same habit.
—Ornithological Biography
Arriving in America nine years apart, Wilson and Audubon found themselves at the edge of a large, misunderstood continent. Like many of their fellow immigrants, each had come to the New World to get away from difficulties in the Old. Their ambitions, like their backgrounds, were vague. Neither of them could have been described as an artist or a naturalist; neither had aspirations as a scientist. Both would become all of these things. For the time being, they merely increased the population of interesting North American fauna by two.
Most of the country’s 5 million immigrant citizens lived along the Eastern Seaboard. The frontier lay just beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 had doubled the size of the young nation, pushing the border across the Mississippi River and all the way to the Rockies, but this tremendous area—some 900,000 square miles—had scarcely been visited in three hundred years of European exploration and conquest. Little was known about the interior topography of North America apart from a skeletal outline of the major waterways. Even less had been discovered about the plants and animals living in the western two-thirds of America. The same was true with respect to the uncounted tribes of American Indians living between the two oceans.
European naturalists, disinclined to let a shortage of facts get in the way of a good story, had been busily describing and cataloguing New World flora and fauna from afar for a long time. They’d made a mess of it, but then this was a confusing time for biology, especially the study of natural history. By the end of the eighteenth century, intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic had been swept up in the Age of Reason. The movement was the product of Enlightenment philosophy, which held that traditional lines of authority—specifically the church and secular monarchies—were inferior to rational thought and the proposition of universal human liberty. These ideas had led more or less directly to the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of American democracy. Inevitably, the same principles resulted in a clash between European science and a group of American amateurs who challenged the views of the leading naturalists of the era—including one of the shining lights of the age, Carolus Linnaeus.
Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, was the Swedish botanist and physician who in 1735 formalized a naming strategy for all living organisms. A man of wide interests, Linnaeus dabbled in politics and economics, and spent many years trying (unsuccessfully) to grow tropical food crops in Sweden. His lasting contribution to biology was Systema Naturae, a compendium of species names, which he expanded and revised many times. Over the course of several editions, Linnaeus devised the binomial identification system still in use today. In the Linnaean system, each plant and animal is given a two-word name, with the first a Latin term signifying the genus to which it belongs and the second a specific or “species” name. So, for example, the gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus) and the peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) can be seen to be two distinct species of similar birds belonging to a single genus.
Giving names to plants and animals is, of course, as old as language itself. Sorting them into categories is likewise an ancient practice. A thousand years before Linnaeus, Aristotle wrote at length about the “history” of animals and also about their