Читать книгу Under a Wild Sky - William Souder - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTroglodytes hyemalis: The Winter Wren
The extent of the migratory movements of this diminutive bird, is certainly the most remarkable fact connected with its history.
—Ornithological Biography
At the end of the eighteenth century, the coastal settlement of Les Cayes looked out over a busy Caribbean harbor on the southwestern arm of Saint-Domingue—the island known today as Haiti. It is a poor country now, but in those days it was not. After Columbus landed there, the island was plundered and its native Indian population destroyed. For more than two centuries Saint-Domingue was home to wild cattle and pigs and an equally unruly assortment of English, Spanish, and French colonists and freebooters. By the late 1700s, the western portion of the island was under French control and had grown far richer than the Spanish part to the east. Sugar and coffee plantations, built on the blood and sweat of African slaves, prospered. At night, a ribbon of lights from towns and sugar mills along the coast traced the line of the sea, and Saint-Domingue was known throughout Europe as a thriving and bountiful colony, ripe with opportunity.
On April 26, 1785, a twenty-seven-year-old chambermaid named Jeanne Rabin, recently arrived from France, delivered a baby boy after a difficult two days of labor at a plantation just outside of Les Cayes. Rabin, already weak from the effects of unremitting tropical illnesses, never fully recovered after the baby arrived. Despite frequent medical attention brought to her by the baby’s father, a French sea captain from Nantes named Jean Audubon, Rabin died a few months later.
Audubon’s mulatto housekeeper Sanitte, with whom he already had two children and would soon have another, took charge of the infant. This tangled domestic arrangement—Audubon also had a legal wife back in France—relied on unstated conventions between whites and people of color, but it was a relatively uncomplicated situation in the loose social climate of the island. Audubon and Rabin had met on board ship from France. Sanitte stepped aside when the captain’s new love showed up at the plantation—and then resumed her position as lady of the house after Rabin died.
They called the little boy Jean Rabin. His early childhood was happy. Saint-Domingue was lush and mountainous, with thick forests and a warm, hypnotic sea close by. The abundant wildlife delighted Jean, who showed a curiosity about nature as soon as he could talk. Though his father was often absent and his mother had died before he knew her, the boy had the run of the plantation and several half-siblings to play with. Yellow fever and malaria were epidemic on the island, and European settlers complained of Saint-Domingue’s oppressive heat and torrential rains. But the climate suited Audubon’s children. Young Jean’s eyes were often turned upward, looking to the trees and across the wide tropical sky for birds, which were everywhere in dizzying profusion. Pelicans, sandpipers, frigate birds, herons, parrots, cuckoos, trogons, gulls, terns, plovers, and owls were common. In winter months they were joined by eagles, swallows, warblers, shearwaters, grosbeaks, and hosts of other species from the north.
Jean Audubon continued a hard life at sea. He first sailed at the age of thirteen, and at fifteen was wounded and captured when his ship was attacked by the British. After a year and a half in an English prison, Audubon returned to France and again went to sea, eventually gaining command of his own merchant ship. Seeking his fortune in the New World, Audubon acquired the plantation at Les Cayes and was soon trading in cargoes of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and slaves. In 1779, with the American Revolution in progress, he was again captured at sea by British forces and this time imprisoned in New York. After his release, he briefly commanded a French naval corvette just as the war was ending.
In the spring of 1789, with another revolution brewing in France, Audubon looked to diversify his assets. He sailed to America with a shipload of sugar, which he traded for a farm called Mill Grove, twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. But the deal was no sooner done than Audubon had a new worry. The colonists in Saint-Domingue had become alarmed at mounting unrest among the slaves—unrest being the simmering final stage before open rebellion. With only 35,000 French colonists on the island and close to a half-million black slaves, the civil order of Saint-Domingue was balanced on a knife’s edge of colonial privilege and racial oppression. Nervous authorities there declared white control “in imminent peril.” They blamed the sudden instability on whites who were, in the words of one official communiqué, “drunk with liberty” and sympathetic to blacks demanding enfranchisement. In fact, Saint-Domingue was on the brink of a fifteen-year struggle toward independence that would produce a general evacuation of the French colonists. Those who didn’t leave were eventually massacred.
For a time Audubon believed his family in Les Cayes was more or less safe, as long as he stayed away. But as the situation deteriorated he worried about six-year-old Jean, who was white, as well as his younger mixed-blood half-sister, Rose, who was unusually fair. Finally, he arranged passage to France for the two children. They arrived in June of 1791, eyes wide open at this strange country an ocean away from their home, and thrilled at being reunited with their father and at meeting his wife Anne. Three years later, the Audubons corrected the children’s ambiguous status by adopting them.
Jean Rabin became Jean Audubon. He was sent to school, where he showed an interest in making pencil sketches of birds, but was otherwise an indifferent student. At the age of eleven, he was enrolled at the naval academy at Rochefort. There he became an accomplished musician—he played the flute and the violin—and learned to dance and fence. He was also known for his swimming prowess. All of which was somewhat beside the point. Young Audubon did miserably in his military training, and also demonstrated a propensity for seasickness. After three years, he was dismissed for failing several classes. His disappointed father, who was about to retire after reaching the mid-level rank of commander in the French Navy, began to think his son needed a change of scenery and occupation.
In March 1803, the elder Audubon received unexpected news from America. The tenant farmer living at Mill Grove had discovered lead ore on the property. Lead, with its many uses in munitions and paints, was a valuable commodity. Audubon dispatched an agent from Nantes to open a mine at Mill Grove, and turned his attention to his now-eighteen-year-old son. Napoleon was conscripting an army on the eve of declaring himself emperor. The Audubons were not eager to see their son drafted and thought his prospects would be brighter in America. In August, they put young Jean on a ship bound for New York—but not before extracting a promise from him that he would never reveal his illegitimate birth. When he walked down the gangway at the piers on the East River in Manhattan a few weeks later, Jean carried documents stating that he was from Louisiana—the sprawling western territory the United States had just acquired from France. The papers gave his name as John James Audubon.
While Audubon was a toddler being dandled in the gentle surf at Les Cayes, a book of poetry was causing a sensation on the other side of the world, in Scotland. Its author, a peasant farmer named Robert Burns, had gained overnight celebrity for a slim volume of earthy verse treating everyday subjects. Despite a modest first printing of six hundred copies, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect stirred readers of every kind, from the literati in Edinburgh to field hands and tradesmen who saw their own lives and passions reflected in Burns’s lines about love and work. Imitators appeared across the country. One of them was a twenty-year-old weaver named Alexander Wilson, who lived in the town of Paisley. It seemed that everyone in Paisley was either a weaver or a poet. Many fancied themselves both.
Now a suburb of Glasgow, Paisley was then the fastest-growing city in Scotland. Situated on the pretty White Cart River in a region known as “the Seedhills,” the town was a model of the new industrial and trading prosperity. It was also a hub on the smuggling routes from America and the Far East. Goods moving between the beaches on the Firth of Clyde and Glasgow regularly passed through Paisley. Sugar and tobacco were smuggled, as was a large quantity of tea, all in avoidance of British taxes. As much as half the tea consumed in England entered the country illegally, principally by way of Scotland.
But it was cloth making—in particular its trademark patterned silk gauzes—for which Paisley was better known, and to which its comfortable middle class was indebted. Weavers endured tedious, physically exhausting hours at their looms but earned good money. Many of them belonged to after-hours clubs, associations of fellow workers who shared pastimes such as fishing, hunting, political debate, and especially golf. In the summer, when twilight lingered late in western Scotland, the weavers of Paisley could be seen heading out for rounds of golf long after their workdays and dinners were done.
As a boy, Wilson was called Sandy—short for Alexander—a gentle, fair nickname for a child who was neither. Wilson had dark hair and eyes. He was thin, but grew tall and passably handsome, with sharp, solemn features. The Wilson family fortunes were up and down. His father traded smuggling for weaving and respectability when he married, and for a time the family’s prospects were sunny. Young Sandy, who was bright and bookish, was sent to school in preparation for joining the clergy. But his mother’s death when he was only ten changed everything. His father quickly remarried, and Wilson’s stern new stepmother ended his studies and sent him to work as a cowherd on the windswept moors between Paisley and the coast. The solitude and the countryside appealed to him, but Wilson was not good at this work. He much preferred reading and contemplating nature to tending the herd, which often strayed.
At thirteen, Wilson accepted a three-year apprenticeship as a weaver. When his father renewed his smuggling activities, the family moved about ten miles west of Paisley, to an ancient, half-ruined castle called the Tower of Auchinbathie, leaving Wilson behind to learn his trade. Nobody knew for sure how old the tower was, but local legend held that it had once been owned by the father of William Wallace, the national hero of Scottish independence, in the thirteenth century. Wilson visited his family there on weekends. He took up hunting and was often out with his gun, chasing grouse across the fields near a well-known hilltop called Misty Law, the highest place in the county.
Wilson was a distractible young man. He developed a love of poetry, memorizing the mock epic poems of Alexander Pope, and often reciting verse or composing his own while he worked at his loom. He took a job in a weaving shop near Edinburgh, and began spending part of his time on the road peddling the cloth he helped to make. He traveled from one end of Scotland to another on foot, calling at farmhouses and in towns. When business was good, he stayed in inns and wrote to his friends from fashionable addresses. His letters often included poems or fragments of poems. Sometimes the whole letter was in verse. Wilson was moody, and he walked through a land of moods. With midnight approaching on New Year’s Eve in 1788, Wilson wrote to a friend back in Edinburgh from St. Andrews, on the dark threshold of the North Sea, reflecting on the universal human failure to take advantage of a short life on Earth:
Respected Sir,
Far distant, in an inn’s third storey rear’d,
The sheet beneath a glimmering taper spread,
Along the shadowy walls no sound is heard,
Save Time’s slow, constant, momentary tread.
Here lone I sit; and will you, sir, excuse
My midnight theme, while (feebly as she can)
Inspiring silence bids the serious Muse
Survey the transient bliss pursued by Man.
Deluded Man, for him Spring paints the fields:
For him, warm Summer rears the rip’ning grain;
He grasps the bounty that rich Autumn yields,
And counts those trifles as essential gain.
For him, yes, sure, for him those mercies flow!
Yet, why so passing, why so fleet their stay?
To teach blind mortals what they first should know,
That all is transient as the fleeting day.
When Wilson was broke, he slept in the open or in barns and wrote to no one. The travel proved agreeable. Wilson was an eager sightseer, visiting historic locations, archeological curiosities, old golf courses. He made frequent detours on private pilgrimages to the homes of well-known writers. Wilson was also always on the lookout for graveyards, where he stopped to add to his collection of epitaphs copied from headstones.
Wilson’s idol, Robert Burns, who lived only a short distance from the Tower of Auchinbathie, found his subjects all around him. Burns wrote about farms and churches and country life. Poetry seemed to abide, waiting to be born, in the gray airs over Scotland. And nothing was outside the realm of literature, no subject was too mundane for a poet’s consideration. Burns wrote an ode to a field mouse he’d accidentally run over with a plough, and told the tale of a hardworking farmer’s Saturday night. His poems were frequently crowded with descriptions of the natural world:
The Wintry West extends his blast,
And hail and rain does blaw;
Or, the stormy North sends driving forth,
The blinding sleet and snaw:
While, tumbling brown, the Burn comes down,
And roars frae bank to brae;
And bird and beast, in covert, rest,
And pass the heartless day.
Many heartless days were in Alexander Wilson’s future, but the power to describe them as Burns did would mainly elude him. Like Burns, Wilson was attuned to his surroundings. Unlike Burns, his vocabulary and his imagery were mostly uninspired borrowings. The cleverness and sensitivity friends detected in Wilson himself rarely materialized in his writing. He wrote a poem about his hunting spaniel. When he abruptly ended a flirtation with a girl working for his family and she poisoned the dog out of spite, he wrote a poem about that, too. Wilson wrote poems about his life on the road that inspected every particular of his experience. A lost pack. A rainy night. The way a drop of water would form at the end of his nose on a cold winter day, “dangling, limpid as the brain it leaves.” Wilson’s eyes were open to the world around him, but what he saw came across as trivial and dull in his poetry.
Wilson began to chafe under a growing burden of unrealized ambitions. He barely scraped by on the money he made weaving and peddling. He fell in love with a woman named Martha McLean. Martha was beautiful, literate—and just out of Wilson’s reach. Her family was proper, and they viewed Wilson, who was poor and aimless and worryingly artistic, as unsuitable. But the two met often, and talked of poetry as they walked in the evenings beside the Cart. In Wilson’s mind at least, an erotic attraction formed between them. He wrote poems about Martha’s ravishing beauty, describing in panting verse improbable late-night assignations on the moonlit moors.
But Wilson’s fascination with Martha stalled. In addition to the social chasm between them, Wilson’s attentions were often elsewhere. And so was he. Encouraged to publish his poetry—not everyone thought him without talent—he found a printer who agreed to bring out a book if Wilson would sell subscriptions to it in advance. He succeeded in selling a few hundred copies on a peddling tour, but it was far less than he had hoped. Wilson had to beg forgiveness from the cloth supplier whose goods he had neglected on the trip, and only a last-minute subscription and promise of help from a local nobleman allowed publication of his book to go forward. Perversely, Wilson grew morose just as things seemed to be looking up for him.
Admittedly, Wilson’s situation was largely unchanged. But he complained that he had become the caricature of a struggling poet, afflicted by poverty, dressed in tattered clothing, and living alone in his garret with only “lank hunger and poetical misery” for company. A wiser man, Wilson felt, would give up the literary life and earn an honest laborer’s living. As his anxieties over Martha and money mounted, Wilson lost weight, becoming shockingly emaciated. He fell ill, probably with pneumonia, and was bedridden at the tower in grave condition for months. His family was convinced he would die. But he didn’t.
Wilson recovered and went back to work weaving. He also resumed writing, and, for the first time, politics figured in his verse. The ideas of God-granted liberty and individual rights, recently articulated and won during the revolution in the American colonies, were spreading across Europe. Weavers in Scotland were beginning to question their treatment by the owners of looming operations, and Wilson joined the attack, anonymously publishing a series of satirical poems describing certain recognizable Paisley mill owners as cheats. One of these poems resulted in a civil suit against Wilson, who defended himself by arguing that the poem was not about the plaintiff. Nothing ever came of the case. In the meantime, Wilson kept up a proper appearance. He placed second in a speech contest in Edinburgh—his was in verse—and then landed a job as an assistant editor on a fledgling literary magazine. Word spread that his book had been recommended to Robert Burns himself, and that the great poet had actually sent for a copy.
Wilson then did something inexplicably weird. One day in May 1792, he went to Glasgow, apparently to visit a printer. While he was away, a mill owner named William Sharp turned up at the sheriff’s office in Paisley waving two documents. One was the manuscript of a long, inflammatory poem titled “The Shark.” It was about a boozy mill owner who exploited his workers. Sharp believed he was the subject of the poem—a complaint the sheriff found reasonable, given that the second document was an extortion letter.
The letter informed Sharp that a copy of “The Shark” was with a printer and would be published at once unless Sharp returned a payment of five guineas within three hours, whereupon the poem would be destroyed. The note was signed “A.B.” Nobody had any idea who A.B. was, but Sharp accused Alexander Wilson of being the author of the poem. Wilson was arrested later that day. He spent the next two years in and out of jail, regularly changing his story.
Wilson confounded everyone by admitting that he had written the letter. But he refused to identify the author of the poem, or to say whether he was part of a conspiracy. Eventually, he admitted to writing the poem as well. But he insisted, just as he had in the earlier case, that any similarity to an actual person in “The Shark” was purely coincidental. This was a crude defense—the blackmail attempt made it clear that the poem was aimed at Sharp—and Wilson was fined £60 ($270), about a year’s salary, which he of course did not have. More ominously, a review of the offending poem was launched under the provisions of a new law prohibiting the publication of revolutionary materials. Wilson was threatened with a charge of treason.
Over the course of many months, Wilson was interrogated, fined, jailed, released on bond, and jailed again when he failed to appear in court. A judge awarded £50 ($225) in damages to Sharp. Wilson, unable to pay the damages or the fines, skipped more hearings. This led to contempt charges and still more fines. At one point Wilson was made to burn copies of “The Shark” in public, and endured the humiliation of having his bail paid anonymously by Martha McLean, who could no longer openly have anything to do with Wilson. The Paisley jail became a second home. It was a squalid, oppressive existence. The food provided to the inmates was so bad that prisoners often avoided starvation only if they could afford to buy meals from a commissary on the premises. Wilson borrowed from friends to stay alive and to get out when he could. Ironically, it was at this time that Wilson published his one truly popular poem—a first-rate 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.
