{"id":34315,"date":"2021-03-23T00:05:15","date_gmt":"2021-03-23T07:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/?post_type=custom_features&p=34315"},"modified":"2021-04-06T08:36:09","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T15:36:09","slug":"audubon-at-sea","status":"publish","type":"custom_features","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/features\/audubon-at-sea\/","title":{"rendered":"Audubon at Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the bustling docks of New Orleans, Louisiana, just before he boarded the merchant ship Delos<\/em> and left to cross the Atlantic, John James Audubon purchased a baby alligator for a dollar. He likely thought the animal would be fun to draw, and the live specimen might impress the naturalists of Britain when he delivered his paper \u201cObservations of the Natural History of the Alligator.\u201d If his baby alligator, long hair, or French accent did not attract curious looks from the crew and fellow passengers, surely did his additional luggage of an enormous wooden portfolio, lined with tin to protect against shipboard rodents, which held over 300 drawings and paintings of birds. No one on deck at the time, including Audubon, could know that as a result of this voyage and that portfolio, he would go on to be a celebrity in his day and not only one of the most famous painters of wildlife in North American history, but the namesake, some two centuries later, of hundreds of birding societies and nature centers and a near synonym across the continent for environmental conservation.<\/p>\n

The Delos<\/em> pulled away from the dock in the early evening of May 17, 1826. Its primary business was to carry cargo, and Audubon, traveling alone, was one of the few passengers. His mission was to find and convince both a quixotic publisher and a group of deep-pocketed patrons to purchase on subscription his book of paintings of all the birds of North America, printed life-size<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Die<\/a>

Die Balize an der M\u00fcndung des Missisippi<\/em> (The Balize at the Mouth of the Mississippi), by Paul Wilhelm, was painted in the 1820s, about the same time that John James Audubon began a cross-Atlantic voyage by departing New Orleans, Louisiana, and sailing up the Mississippi River. Note the alligator in the river. Audubon purchased a baby alligator in New Orleans before embarking the ship. Image used with permission from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collection<\/p><\/div>\n

At age 41, Audubon had enough experiences on the sea to recognize that he far more enjoyed traveling and drawing in the forest and the field than he did on boats or ships. Yet it was the coasts and oceans that shaped and enabled so much of Audubon\u2019s life and work, a fact that has been largely breezed over by biographers. Even today, as his racist writings and actions require a new reckoning, Audubon\u2019s art and observations about marine life and human life at sea remain rare and compelling accounts from the 19th century, useful for today\u2019s environmental historians, ornithologists, literary scholars, and environmentalists.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIn a few minutes I found myself severely afflicted with seasickness,\u201d* Audubon wrote in his journal about first entering the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. He had suffered seasickness on his previous crossings of the Atlantic, and it would be a malady that plagued him for the rest of his life whenever he was on the ocean. This time, though, Audubon scribbled that it didn\u2019t last long because there was little wind and, though it was the middle of the night, he stayed on deck eating, drinking, and \u201cforcing [himself] to exercise constantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Audubon\u2019s journal aboard the Delos<\/em>, filled with emotional daily entries and several ink and pencil drawings, is the only primary document that remains from his time at sea. Yet before he died in 1851, he would make a total of 12 ocean crossings and dozens of coastal trips around England, France, and North America, from Galveston, Texas, to the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador. All his saltwater travels, sketches, and observations found expression in his dramatic and accurate paintings of birds: about 40 percent of the 435 plates in The Birds of America <\/em>are seabirds, shorebirds, and waterbirds. He also included his observations of life at sea in his Ornithological Biography<\/em>, a five-volume tome of descriptive essays to accompany the paintings. Audubon\u2019s biographies are lively, lofty, anthropomorphic accounts of individual species structured around his adventures killing and then painting the given bird. These often-brutal hunts were common practice among naturalists in his era interested in baseline anatomy before the age of photography. In Ornithological Biography<\/em>, Audubon also published stories that included, for example, accounts of the tides in the Bay of Fundy, cod fishing in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, turtle hunting on the Florida Keys, and a yarn about the death of an unrepentant pirate in the Everglades.<\/p>\n

\"Large-billed<\/a>

The names used in Audubon\u2019s paintings often do not match names used today. The puffins in the plate Large billed Puffin<\/em> are horned puffins. As was common in the era, artists and scientists shot birds in order to study them closer. Audubon would sketch birds in the field, but also used the dead birds as models for the images he created from watercolor and other media. Copies of his images were then reproduced from copperplate engravings. Image courtesy of the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, Montgomery County Audubon Collection, and Zebra Publishing<\/p><\/div>\n

The voyage aboard the Delos <\/em>provided Audubon exceptional material. Although their progress was maddeningly slow at first and the heat stifling, the conditions allowed Audubon time to observe, write, and draw. He shot a peregrine falcon that had alighted on one of the ship\u2019s yards. He drew a noddy tern, which a crew member captured when it landed on the ship. Around his sketch of this tern, Audubon scrawled notes on the colors and relative dimensions for his future painting. On another day, with a telescope, he watched a magnificent frigate bird soar impossibly high in the thermals.<\/p>\n

Birds were Audubon\u2019s first love and the focus of his career at the time, but his natural history interests were far-ranging. Aboard the Delos, <\/em>he measured and drew a barracuda they captured. The crew harpooned a dolphin, which they kept overnight so that Audubon could dissect it the following morning. He noted the squid inside the dolphin\u2019s stomach and how the still-warm intestines resembled those of a hog. True to his era, Audubon wrote of the marine mammal as a warm-blooded, air-breathing \u201cfish.\u201d His captain and cabin mate, Joseph Hatch, Jr., surely ordered it cooked and served, since, as Audubon wrote later in his journal, the captain loved to eat dolphin, preferring this \u201cflesh to the best of veal, beef, or mutton.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"shark<\/a>

Audubon wrote and sketched in his journal as he crossed the Atlantic on the merchant ship Delos<\/em>. He notes that this sketch of a shark was made \u201coff Cuba\u201d on June 18, 1826. Image by Library Book Collection\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p><\/div>\n

On another day, Audubon drew a female sandbar shark, and his observations reveal that even in the 1820s sailors and naturalists had a particular antipathy to sharks. He and the men opened up the 2.1-meter-long shark\u2019s abdomen, chose one of the 10 living fetuses they found inside, and threw it into the ocean to see if it could swim away: it did. They then cut another fetus in two and watched the \u201chead half\u201d swim off before finishing things up by cutting the mother and her pups into strips to use as bait for mahimahi.<\/p>\n

As the sailors fished for mahimahi for both food and sport, Audubon observed, drew, and dissected these fish, too, all described later in his essay \u201cA Long Calm at Sea.\u201d Here he wrote polished prose about the mahimahi\u2019s abundance and how he watched them \u201cgleaming like meteors\u201d as they swam through bioluminescence at night. He described the mahimahi\u2019s style of hunting, diet, and predators, and, as they died, the famous fading of their colors, \u201ca blaze of all the hues of the rainbow intermingled.\u201d These behaviors and traits, if romanticized and anthropomorphized by Audubon, all match modern observations of these fish, which he knew as dolphinfish. In one mahimahi\u2019s stomach he found 22 fish, each 15 to 18 centimeters long, \u201clike so many salted herrings packed in a box.\u201d From the orientation of the fish, he concluded that mahimahi \u201calways swallows its prey tail foremost<\/em>,\u201d presumably making the emphasis because this, to an ornithologist, seemed rare, since seabirds usually try to swallow fish head first to manage spines going down their throat.<\/p>\n

\"Sketch<\/a>

Audubon sketched and wrote about a \u201cdolphinfish\u201d in his journal, a species more commonly known today as mahimahi. Image courtesy of the Field Museum<\/p><\/div>\n

Becalmed, the Delos <\/em>drifted in the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida for five weeks, an excruciating amount of time to sail from the mouth of the Mississippi to the open North Atlantic, but the slow path continued to offer the artist a stable platform in a prolific area for marine life, providing inspiration for his paintings that would transform wildlife art on both sides of the Atlantic: seabirds soaring, diving, swimming daintily on the sea\u2019s translucent surface, or veering aggressively in storm-tossed troughs. Before Audubon, nearly all published illustrations of seabirds tended to be static, lifeless representations. This passage on the Delos <\/em>also inspired Audubon\u2019s pen: he would craft stories set in the Straits of Florida with a naturalist\u2019s specificity that few American authors would match in this region for over a century, arguably not until Ernest Hemingway sent his old man rowing out of Havana, Cuba, in 1952.<\/p>\n

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Audubon\u2019s art has undeniable verve and staying power. His writings and observations, if fanciful and often skewed more toward a good yarn than hard analysis, still provide anchoring points for marine science and conservation. A large proportion of his bird biographies end with appendices, probably co-written with the Scottish naturalist-artist William MacGillivray, which discuss taxonomy, measure dissected organs and skeletal parts, and illustrate with woodcuts the viscera and bones of specimens. Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Rail, a seabird biologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, explains that he and earlier scientists have used Audubon\u2019s observations of northern gannet colonies on Bird Rocks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a baseline to examine population shifts and even coastal erosion over time. Audubon provided information that is anecdotal, but, according to Rail, his descriptions of what was then the largest northern gannet colony in the world are accurate and detailed, including useful information on the timing of nesting and the weight of juveniles.<\/p>\n

Storm petrels, the smallest of open-ocean seabirds, are another good example of the utility of Audubon\u2019s accounts for a range of audiences today. Storm petrels seem to have been Audubon\u2019s favorite seabirds. He painted three different species\u2014the Wilson\u2019s storm petrel, the Leach\u2019s storm petrel, and the European storm petrel\u2014and he wrote biographical accounts of the first two.<\/p>\n

Sabina Wilhelm, a colleague of Rail\u2019s who monitors storm petrel colonies in Newfoundland and Labrador, calls Audubon\u2019s records \u201cpure gold.\u201d Even two centuries later, Wilhelm says that Audubon\u2019s details on storm petrels are fascinating and surprisingly accurate given he never actually set foot himself in a storm petrel colony. \u201cHe was obviously very observant\u2014and brilliant,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"portrait<\/a>

This oil painting of Audubon, wearing a wolfskin coat, was made by John Syme in 1826, the same year that the then-41-year-old Audubon crossed the Atlantic on the Delos<\/em>. That voyage was one of 12 times that he would cross the Atlantic during his lifetime. Image courtesy of White House Historical Association via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

Audubon left careful descriptions of storm petrels, in part because he observed in an era when slow, quiet time under sail was nearly the only option for ocean travel. (At times, though, his storm petrel watching wasn\u2019t so relaxing, such as when he once hunted them from a small boat and became so seasick he needed to be hoisted back aboard the ship, slumped in a chair.) He wrote in detail of the Wilson\u2019s storm petrel at sea, noting its range from land, feeding behaviors, and kee-re-kee kee<\/em> call. Audubon put this storm petrel\u2019s shape and action in flight to words, explaining that it is \u201cmore lively\u201d and flies with \u201cwings nearly at right angles with its body,\u201d traits that can still be useful to distinguish this species from the other two storm petrels in the North Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Audubon welcomed knowledge from sailors, naturalists, fishermen, and anyone who could help him build a picture of migration routes and rookeries. His description of the breeding range of the Leach\u2019s storm petrel matches what scientists have observed today, that is, until he (or MacGillivray) threw in a record of breeding far to the north beside Baffin Bay, which almost certainly could not have been true. Still, Audubon\u2019s writings provide researchers like Wilhelm with rare information regarding range, general abundance, and diet in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, since there are just so few historical records accessible today. Because they spend so much time offshore and require isolated, mammal-free islands for breeding, seabirds, and in particular storm petrels, were poorly studied, which makes Audubon\u2019s records all the more precious. Wilhelm explains that it hasn\u2019t really been until the last few years, with the development of tracking devices, that we\u2019ve learned the full picture of the daily and winter ranges of these seabirds.<\/p>\n

Audubon\u2019s writing on storm petrels is perhaps most significant today as a cultural record. Although he wrote that these birds or their eggs were not a commodity for feathers or food in 19th-century Atlantic Canada, storm petrels have a long history of being demonized by Anglophone sailors and those ashore, who depicted them as little dark birds, little witches, or the Mother Carey\u2019s chickens that brewed bad weather. Yet both he and Captain Hatch felt a certain kinship with storm petrels, believing them to be helpful, serving as harbingers of heavy weather. Audubon described them as small and vulnerable during gales. He liked to feed them off the stern (even though he was just as happy to shoot them if the seas were calm enough for retrieval). Wilhelm explains that in Newfoundland and Labrador today, it\u2019s easy to get community members to help out a puffin when it gets stranded ashore, but many people will not touch a storm petrel. Wilhelm says, \u201cPeople think they\u2019re stinky birds. They think they\u2019re maggoty. They treat them completely differently.\u201d The folklore behind storm petrels, she says, has surely crafted some of today\u2019s negative response to these particular birds and people\u2019s unwillingness to help them.<\/p>\n

\"Fork-tailed<\/a>

Audubon\u2019s painting Fork-tailed Petrel<\/em>\u00a0depicts a bird now called the Leach\u2019s storm petrel. Image courtesy of the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, Montgomery County Audubon Collection, and Zebra Publishing<\/p><\/div>\n

Earlier than most colonial observers, Audubon recognized the negative impact of early 19th-century hunting on seabird populations. One of the hooks upon which modern readers have hung their ideas of Audubon\u2019s progressive environmentalism was something he wrote in 1833, when he was aboard the schooner Ripley <\/em>on a collecting voyage. Here, predicting the demise of seabirds like the common murre, Audubon was exceptionally critical of the egg harvesters and fishermen raiding the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. He depicted the harvesters as drunken, filthy, \u201cdestructive pirates\u201d who heedlessly trampled the nests and chicks as they gathered eggs on these remote rookeries and massacred the birds for feather, food, or fish bait. Audubon urged the enforcement of British laws in the hopes of protecting seabirds so little known to the general public.<\/p>\n

Through his 19th-century eyes, Audubon\u2019s accounts help us understand the history of our relationships with marine life. His textual and visual observations capture a time for which we have few wildlife records, and his skills as an artist, storyteller, and naturalist continue to inspire, providing utility not just to marine science, but also to modern conservation movements and campaigns, especially for species like storm petrels that receive less public attention. Yet if environmentalists want to elicit empathy for seabirds with careful readings of Audubon\u2019s art and prose, and ornithologists want to mine his work for past observations, Audubon\u2019s personal record regarding race and ethnicity needs careful scrutiny. As he crossed the North Atlantic aboard the Delos<\/em>, for example, he wrote in his journal about the ship\u2019s steward, a Black man, whom he mocked for his superstitions about judging the edibility of certain fish and his attempts at speaking French. Audubon\u2019s descriptions and tone are particularly racist and harsh here, describing at one point the white men in the cabin having a laugh at the steward\u2019s expense when he had a stretch of red shirt sticking out of his fly like a phallus. There is a long history of mistreatment and racist representations of minority cooks and stewards aboard ships, which still lingers today, but Audubon\u2019s private entry here was not just him being swept along with this attitude aboard the Delos<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Audubon\u2019s Ornithological Biography<\/em> and his private writings are occasionally pierced with painful descriptions of Black Americans and Indigenous people, at times with a condescending noble-savage tone, while at other times Audubon used hateful, dismissive language about entire cultures. When he was sailing on that collecting voyage around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, showing sympathy for murre populations, he observed a small group of Mi\u2019kmaq people in Newfoundland. \u201cWe found them, as I expected,\u201d Audubon wrote in a journal later edited and published by his wife, Lucy, \u201call lying down pell-mell in their wigwams, and a strong mixture of blood was perceptible in their skins, shape, and deportment: some were almost white, and sorry I am to say, that the nearer they were to our nobler race the filthier and the lazier they were. The women and children were particularly disgusting in this respect.\u201d<\/p>\n