Читать книгу Under a Wild Sky - William Souder - Страница 14
ОглавлениеFalco plumbeus: The Mississippi Kite
He glances toward the earth with his fiery eye; sweeps along, now with the gentle breeze, now against it.
—Ornithological Biography
Wilson’s letter to Thomas Jefferson was less about his respect for the president—though that was real enough—than it was about his recently formed determination to produce an ornithology of American birds. Only months before, he had begun practicing his drawing by making repeated likenesses of a stuffed owl. Untrained as an artist, Wilson knew his initial efforts looked comical—a crude owlish head sitting atop a body that more closely resembled a lark’s. But his technique improved rapidly, and the drawing he sent to Jefferson was a competent rendering of a handsome gray bird perched on a branch, its tail angled sharply downward and its head cocked forward as if it were studying something on the ground below. Wilson acknowledged that this unknown species of jay was similar to the Canadian jay, which had already been described and classed by Linnaeus. But he thought the plumage and shape of the bird’s crest sufficiently different that it must be considered a separate species. Wilson’s claim of having seen many other birds not yet formally described echoed Jefferson’s prediction two decades earlier in Notes on the State of Virginia.
The president was impressed, and wrote back to say he admired the “elegant” drawing he’d received. He also asked Wilson for assistance in identifying a bird he had spent twenty years wondering about. This bird, Jefferson wrote, was found everywhere in America but was difficult to observe. It was almost always perched on the highest branches of the tallest trees in the forest. Despite having chased them—on occasion through “miles” of woods—Jefferson had never gotten a good look at one. He’d also offered to reward anyone who could shoot him a specimen, but none of the young woodsmen he knew had managed it. The elusive bird appeared to be about the same size as a mockingbird and was generally brownish, with a lighter coloring on its breast. What was most notable, however, was its song, which Jefferson described as a glorious serenade, not unlike the nightingale’s.
In retrospect, this exchange is an amusing demonstration of the primitive state of American natural science at the time. The jay Wilson “discovered” was in fact a Canadian jay and not a new species at all—as he was later pained to learn. As for the bird that so beguiled Jefferson, Wilson could only conclude that it was the ordinary wood thrush, a common bird also known as a “wood robin” that was not mysterious to anyone who spent time in the forest. Jefferson was, however, rightly smitten with the song of the wood thrush, which was so lovely that it taxed Wilson’s descriptive powers a couple of years later when he completed an essay on the bird and its habits for American Ornithology:
With the dawn of the succeeding morning, mounting to the top of some tall tree that rises from a low thick shaded part of the woods, he pipes his few, but clear musical notes, in a kind of ecstasy; the prelude, or symphony to which, strongly resembles the double-tonguing of a German flute, and sometimes the tinkling of a small bell; the whole song consists of five or six parts, the last note of each of which is in such a tone as to leave the conclusion evidently suspended; the finale is finely managed, and with such charming effect as to soothe and tranquilize the mind, and to seem sweeter and mellower at each successive repetition.
This lyrical, overwrought style, characteristic of the times and also of Wilson’s poetic sensibility, contrasted with his drawing of the wood thrush—a frozen profile in which Wilson showed the bird’s beak open, as if it were caught singing. Like all of his images, this one bore the caption “Drawn from Nature.” But it was nature flattened, as though the bird had been pressed onto the paper like a flower preserved between the pages of a book. Nature was less vivid in Wilson’s drawings than it was in his prose, and in this Wilson was a reflection of the moment in which he lived. America was then the epicenter of several worlds in collision—a country of revolution and radicalism premised on the triumph of reason, a civil nation thinly established on the shore of an immense land where the raw power of nature flooded the senses. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia had in effect been a second declaration of American independence, this time from the tyranny of European science. In answering Jefferson’s call to arms, Wilson was awed by what he saw in nature and by the responsibility of rendering it properly. But he wasn’t ready, or talented enough, to throw away tradition. This limitation added a sorrowful tinge to the graceful but immovable images in American Ornithology, which was so much like its creator—ambitious yet bound by convention. Wilson allowed his writing to soar, but not his birds.
Wilson’s interest in ornithology arrived late in his short life, after years of struggle and restlessness. In the summer of 1803 he wrote to a friend back in Scotland that he was determined to “make a collection of all our finest birds.” He was just shy of his thirty-seventh birthday. He would be dead in ten years.
In the summer of 1794, Philadelphia, which had so impressed Wilson and his nephew when they first saw it sprawled on the opposite shore of the Delaware River, was in reality a devastated city just coming back to life. Still the provisional seat of government—Philadelphia was the federal capital under the Articles of Confederation—the city had been decimated by yellow fever the previous summer and fall. The fever was a terrifying, frequently fatal disease that produced rashes, lethargy, breathing difficulties, black vomit, and a ghastly yellowing of the skin. It turned up initially along the riverfront but spread quickly, sending panicked citizens fleeing to the countryside. Many who left did so on the advice of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the city’s most prominent physician. Rush, who was also a political leader and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was among the handful of doctors who first realized an epidemic was under way. He believed that the fever was caused by airborne poisons given off by putrefying garbage—especially the spoiled cargoes that were sometimes dumped on the wharves along the Delaware and left to rot. Rush thought that a great load of ruined coffee, lying out under the August sun and fouling the air over the city immediately before the outbreak of fever, was particularly suspect.
As the city emptied, those who stayed behind saw the hellish effects of the fever. City officials commandeered deserted homes and stables to house the sick. In reeking hospitals the dying and the dead were confined together and then abandoned by their physicians, left to be tended only by ill-trained nurses, some of whom stole their patients’ food and took no notice of the filth accumulating around them. The sky itself turned black, as buckets of tar were burned in the streets in hopes of sanitizing the air.
Rush no doubt saved many lives with his advice to get out of town—mainly because people who left were more likely to escape his own widely practiced treatment for the fever. Rush adhered to an old-fashioned, two-stage remedy that began with a massive dose of purgatives, which doubtless exhausted and dehydrated an already desperately ill patient. This was followed with a heavy bleeding of the victim. Rush, who greatly overestimated the amount of blood in a typical human body, advised the removal of several quarts from fever sufferers. In both phases of the treatment, Rush emphasized that it was important not to err on the side of caution, but to take the most aggressive measures possible. This approach, which by itself could be enough to kill a healthy person, contributed to the deaths of many fever patients.
Yellow fever was actually transmitted by mosquitoes. It probably arrived in Philadelphia with infected refugees who’d fled the recent uprising in Saint-Domingue—and who also seemed somewhat resistant to the disease. All of this was the subject of keen speculation, but nobody at the time really understood how the fever spread or what to do about it. A few doctors who were more familiar with tropical diseases prescribed fluids and cool baths, and their fortunate patients survived at higher rates. But the disease ran rampant. Racing through the city in a matter of months, it left five thousand dead—about one out of every ten Philadelphians. The following spring the city still appeared deserted. Weeds grew in the streets. Many businesses were boarded up; some had been looted or burned out.
But by midsummer, as Wilson and his nephew hiked along the Delaware toward the city, things were returning to normal and a general cleanup had restored a sense of well-being. Wilson, shocked as he was at the prices of almost everything and by the number of Caribbean refugees wandering the streets, still perceived the wealth and opportunity pulsing in the city. When he couldn’t find work as a weaver right away, he accepted a position at an engraving shop—where he got a taste of the printmaking business in which he would one day make a name. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Wilson felt happy. In letter after letter home, he wrote about the wonder of America, and how grand a city Philadelphia was.
Philadelphia was then America’s most successful seaport, prospering on a brisk export trade in agricultural produce—principally flour—and on the import of manufactured goods. Built on an orderly grid of tree-lined avenues fronted by sturdy, somewhat unimaginative brick buildings, the city was dominated by a burgeoning class of merchants and seamen. Market Street, which ran east–west from the Delaware waterfront, bisected the downtown area. It was twice as wide as the other streets, and the roofed stalls of meat and produce sellers occupied the center of the boulevard. Newcomers gaped at the abundance on display in the marketplace and at its tidiness. The butchers, especially, were immaculate. They dressed in sparkling white smocks and sawed the bones as they cut meat—an appetizing improvement over the European practice of breaking the bones. Every inn and hotel in the city served feastlike meals daily, though the rough table manners of the Americans offered a challenge to anyone too dainty to grab a portion.
By day the streets were clean and quiet, and it was generally agreed that no city in the world was better lit at night. Philadelphia looked rich, and it was—a city triumphant in the wake of a revolution launched from where it stood. Wilson said that coming to America was like being a tree that had been transplanted. After a period of adjustment to his new environment, he could feel himself blooming anew amid the bounty of the New World. Any of his old friends who dreamed of coming here should do so at once, he thought. No matter what a man’s occupation was, there were “a thousand other offers” of employment to contemplate in America, and it was all but assured that you could “live ten times better” here than in Scotland. For Wilson, one recurring measure of the young country’s greatness was how well Americans ate. “When I look round me here on the abundance which every one enjoys,” Wilson wrote to a friend back in Paisley, “when I see them sit down to a table loaded with roasted, boiled, fruits of different kinds, and plenty of good cyder, and this only the common fare of the common people, I think on my poor countrymen, and cannot refrain feeling sorrowful at the contrast.”
After a few months, Wilson and Duncan found work at a loom just outside the city and spent the winter weaving. The following spring Wilson headed for New Jersey, where he found eager buyers for the cloth he peddled. When he got back he decided to try something new—teaching school. Having little education himself, Wilson managed as best he could by becoming both an instructor and a student at once, furiously going through his next day’s lessons until late in the evening, learning just fast enough to stay ahead of his pupils. He practiced his grammar and read history. Finding he had a special affinity for mathematics, Wilson was soon reading Newton’s calculus. He taught himself surveying and earned a little extra income from it. He even managed to make a few of his own instruments.
Wilson settled in at a school in Milestown, Pennsylvania, about twenty miles northeast of Philadelphia, where most of his pupils were Pennsylvania Dutch. They spoke German, as did the family with whom Wilson boarded, and so he learned German even as he drilled the students every day in English. He found his neighbors pleasant and honest, and filled with aspirations for their children. But they were also strange—governed by superstition and odd religious dogma. They followed phases of the moon in timing activities such as the slaughter of livestock or cutting their hair. They treated physical ailments with charms and spells, and believed the countryside was haunted. But Wilson was gratified by their commitment to his school. He was well thought of in the community and could count on his salary in full as it came due.
America suited Wilson’s taste for exploring the countryside, and also his deepening passion for wingshooting. Hunting in America, where wild places were never far away, was a thrilling elevation of the senses. The abundance of game and birds, especially waterfowl, was amazing. The latter passed along the East Coast for months every autumn in massive, noisy migrations. Ducks and geese of every kind funneled down the Delaware watershed en route to the marshes of the Chesapeake Bay and eventually on to their tropical overwintering destinations far beyond. From the end of summer through Christmas, the markets were hung with a seemingly limitless bounty: swans, geese, pigeons, woodcock, grouse, quail, and a kaleidoscopic assortment of ducks. Mallards, redheads, teal, and widgeon could be had for pennies, although a brace of prized canvasbacks sometimes commanded several dollars. For someone like Wilson, happy to do his own shooting, the arrival of September commenced an annual rite as these birds of passage poured through, each species arriving and departing on its own schedule.
It began with blue-winged teal, which Wilson learned was the first of the duck “tribe” to head south out of its breeding grounds. By early September, teal congregated in such numbers along the mudflats of the Delaware River that a hunter could often kill a large number of them with a single discharge of his shotgun. Although the birds were wary and fast-flying, a hunter could sneak up on them merely by hunkering down and pushing a small boat ahead of him though the shallows, taking care to remain concealed until the last minute. Teal were delicious, and they grew fat in their days along the Delaware until they fled south with the first frost.
Canada geese—which were shot in the spring as well as the fall—were more difficult to hunt, as their sharp eyesight and skittishness made them impossible to pursue in the open. Hunters had to conceal themselves near places regularly overflown by flocks of geese, and it was possible to decoy the birds within range by various means, some as crude as shooting a goose or two and impaling them on stakes that were then set out near the gunner. Many hunters tamed geese they had wounded and used them as live decoys, tethered and eager to call to other geese flying overhead.
But it was canvasback hunting that seemed to inspire the most imaginative and relentless techniques. Their ranks now immensely reduced, these large, tasty waterfowl, which got their name from the white plumage that wraps their midsections, once migrated across America in great numbers. The duck waters around Philadelphia produced crops of an aquatic plant known as “wild celery,” which grew so thick in places that it was impossible to row a boat through a stand of its submerged stalks. Canvasbacks love the root of this plant, and when it comprises the bulk of their diet, the taste of canvasback flesh is unequaled. It was not uncommon for rafts of canvasbacks to form in open water near stands of wild celery, and to remain there in safety through the daytime before coming closer in at night to feed.
Temporary measures were sometimes adopted to regulate duck hunting, usually in times when waterfowl numbers appeared low. As early as 1727, the colony of Massachusetts had briefly outlawed nighttime hunting. But, for the most part, anything went. On moonlit nights, when the canvasbacks were thick on the Delaware, it was common practice to guide a boat silently under the shadow of the shoreline and then drift into a flock of feeding ducks—whereupon the stillness was broken by a blue flash and a booming report that echoed over the water as the hunter raked the ducks where they sat, killing many at a time. Another method, used late in the season, involved painting a boat white and setting chunks of ice or snow along the gunwales. The hunter—also dressed in white—approached a flock from upstream and reclined hidden in the boat, allowing it to float in among the ducks as it if were a chunk of drifting ice before he rose up and fired. The method that most intrigued Wilson was “tolling,” in which a well-hidden hunter ordered his highly trained dog to scamper along the shoreline, usually with a brightly colored handkerchief tied about its midsection. The canvasbacks mistook the dog’s actions for the movement of other ducks paddling close to shore and, curious, would swim in to investigate.
Wilson eagerly took up these sports, so different from his casual walking hunts over the moors near Paisley. It would have been hard to envision a more dramatic demonstration of nature’s bounty than the annual flights of ducks and geese that passed over his head each autumn and again every spring. Their numbers, like the vision itself, are now so much diminished that it is all but impossible to conceive what it was like. The throngs of geese and ducks that Wilson saw were but a fraction of the waterfowl migrating along the Eastern Flyway, a number that was itself a fraction of the unimaginable masses overflying the continent.
Although there were other Scottish immigrants in the area, Wilson avoided people he thought might know about the circumstances under which he’d left his homeland. One exception was a man named Charles Orr, who lived in Philadelphia and occasionally visited Wilson out at Milestown. They wrote each other often, with Wilson sometimes corresponding in verse. Evidently, he enjoyed Orr as a compatriot and captive audience. The great thing about letter-writing, he once told Orr, was that it afforded you an opportunity to speak your mind without fear of interruption.
Time slipped away. William Duncan moved to upstate New York, to establish a farm. In 1798 Philadelphia was again gripped by a yellow fever outbreak that emptied the city. Through the summer and into the fall, people died by the thousands. Wilson could scarcely believe the deserted streets—no more than 8,000 of the city’s 65,000 residents remained in town. It was possible, Wilson wrote to his family, to stand in any public square and hear no other human being “except for the drivers of the death carts.” But the plague passed with the onset of winter and Philadelphia again recovered. Before he knew it, Wilson found that he’d been teaching for five years—and that he was on the verge of something, either an epiphany or a nervous breakdown. Or maybe both. He began to feel imprisoned by his responsibilities. He periodically complained of being ill. At one point he even resigned his post, only to be coaxed back to work with a promise of additional sick leave from the school’s trustees. In the summer of 1800, Wilson’s letters to Orr began to confide his innermost feelings—which were suddenly jumbled and anxious. In one letter, Wilson suggested they had much to reveal to each other as “lovers of truth,” adding, oddly, that they were both “subject to the failings of Human Nature.” Wilson couldn’t quite seem to stay on one subject. He said he planned to begin an earnest campaign of frugality. Did Orr think that was a good idea? Could he speculate on the benefits of such a program? Wilson admitted he was writing in haste and urged Orr to write him back the same way. In a long, nearly inscrutable passage, Wilson hinted at something he wished to discuss that was so mysterious that even he couldn’t tell for sure what it was:
I, for my part, have many things to enquire of you, of which at different times I form very different opinions, and at other times can form no distinct decided opinion at all. Sometimes they appear dark and impenetrable; sometimes I think I see a little better into them. Now I see them as plain as broad day, and again they are as dark to me as midnight. In short, the moon puts on not more variety of appearance to the eye than many subjects do to my apprehension & yet in themselves they still remain the same.
Alarmingly, Wilson added that he had “many things of a more interesting and secret nature” to talk over with Orr. Perhaps Orr would find these “things” funny. A few days later, Wilson again wrote to Orr—who, not surprisingly, showed a growing reluctance to write back—and this time solicited Orr’s opinion on marriage and family, a topic that Wilson said had been on his mind since a fateful walk in the woods the previous spring.
It was in the middle of May, Wilson wrote. The forest was in full bloom, and Wilson noticed many birds “in pairs” building nests in which to mate and raise their young. Continuing on his hike, Wilson saw a colt nuzzling its mother. Then he heard the bleating of lambs “from every farm,” and after that he became aware of insects “in the thousands” at his feet and in the air around him, all “preparing to usher their multitudes into being.” Suddenly, as if from a voice out of the heavens, the words “multiply and replenish the earth” formed in his mind. For a moment, Wilson said, he “stood like a blank in this interesting scene, like a note of discord in this universal harmony of love and self-propagation.” He perceived himself in this flash of clarity for what he was: a wretch, living outside of normal society, a man with “no endearing female” who saw in him “her other self” and no child to call him father.
“I was,” Wilson wrote, “like a dead tree in the midst of a green forest.” Hurrying home, Wilson found his landlords playing happily with their children. He was mortified. What good had he accomplished? What was the point of all his study and his books? Did it not strain the bounds of decency that a man such as he—learned now in science and in literature, and susceptible to “the finer feelings of the soul”—should not continue his line? There and then, Wilson vowed to fulfill the biological imperative. He would marry. He would raise a family. Bachelor to the core, he promised to do all this even though he could anticipate “ten thousand unseen distresses” that would befall him in the bargain. In any event, Wilson said, what he most wanted Orr’s advice on was this: Was it not a crime to “persist in a state of celibacy”?
Of course, Wilson quickly admitted, he’d forgotten about all of this as soon as he was back in his room and immersed in his mathematics. Almost as an afterthought, Wilson said he had lately considered a modified version of his plan. It would not be necessary, strictly speaking, to get married in order to contribute “towards this grand work of generation” and to become “the father of at least one of my own species.” Evidently there had been more than sap rising in the Pennsylvania woods that season. But Wilson said no more about it—certainly nothing about who might be his partner in such a furtherance of the species. He told Orr that, after thinking it over, he’d decided the whole idea seemed indecent and had abandoned any further thought of launching a little Wilson outside the bounds of holy matrimony. Exactly what additional thoughts he may have entertained he kept to himself.
And with that, he signed off.
Another year passed. In early 1801, Wilson was asked to speak at a patriots’ rally in Milestown to mark the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as president. Although he still felt he was something of an outsider—Wilson would not become a citizen of the United States for three more years—his speech was a resounding success. He chose to speak principally of liberty, which he called “the great strength and happiness of nations, and the universal and best friend of man.” With a nod to the veterans of the Revolutionary War present in the crowd, Wilson exhorted his listeners to be protective of the freedoms gained by force of arms and to be mindful that the great American experiment was being closely watched around the world. Children should be taught to feel the highest regard for their country, and for the importance of preserving their rights, which were not granted to them by other men, but by God himself. Wilson so stirred his audience that the speech was transcribed and widely printed in pro-Jefferson newspapers. Wilson, carried away by the enthusiastic response to his rhetoric, basked in glory for weeks afterward.
But Wilson’s moods were like the rising and falling flight of a bird that beats its wings only intermittently, traveling forward on an undulating line that is always in part a free fall to earth. In May, only months after his speech, Wilson sent Orr a panicky note asking him to come see him so that they might discuss an urgent matter. Wilson said he was quite distracted by something that had happened, and was in fact making plans to leave Milestown as soon as possible. Staying on was out of the question, and he could confide his reasons to nobody but Orr. Orr, he said, was the only friend he had now—apart from “one whose friendship” had brought ruin to them both, or soon enough would. Wilson said he would await Orr at the schoolhouse and to please come out that same day.
Apparently, Wilson had fallen in love with someone, possibly a married woman, and his reputation as well as hers was now at risk. Wilson must have told Orr the whole story, but if he ever revealed the details of this affair to anyone else, he did so in private conversation or in letters that do not survive. Orr found Wilson in a miserable state when he visited him that evening, and the next night, after Orr had gone back to Philadelphia, Wilson led his horse out onto the road in the night and stole away, leaving behind everything he owned. He never went back.
In the months following his disappearance, Wilson wrote Orr a string of increasingly pitiful letters—begging for information about rumors that might be circulating in Milestown and especially for any word of the “one” who’d broken his heart. He spent some time in New York City, a place he didn’t care for, and briefly contemplated going home to Scotland. Eventually he found a teaching post near Newark, New Jersey. It paid poorly and Wilson remained deeply depressed. At one point he asked Orr to consider something they had often talked about—opening their own school together. But Orr became slower in writing back, and then he stopped entirely, devastating Wilson. In a tortured letter, Wilson told Orr he still loved him, even if the reverse was not true anymore. He repeated that he no longer had any friends, and as for what was being said about him back in Milestown, he was indifferent to expressions of either love or hate from anyone he’d known there. He just didn’t care about anything now. A week later he wrote to Orr to apologize and take it all back. Orr should regard everything Wilson had told him as the rantings of a crazy person, but he should never doubt Wilson’s undying friendship. He said he had never experienced such unhappiness and that it would be a long time before his mind recovered. “Past hopes, present difficulties, and a gloomy futurity,” Wilson wrote, “have almost deranged my ideas and too deeply affected me.” Without even a hint that he saw better days ahead, Wilson also mentioned that he had secured a new teaching position, this one at a school in Gray’s Ferry, just across the Schuylkill River from Philadelphia. His predecessor there had been a boisterous and ineffective former sea captain, and the pupils appeared to be an unruly lot. He said he regarded the prospect of returning to yet another classroom with the same feeling as a condemned man walking to the gallows.
As it turned out, the move to the Union School of Kingsessing at Gray’s Ferry was the most fortuitous of Wilson’s life. The schoolhouse, a squat, one-room building with a steep roof and shuttered windows, stood in a glade near the main thoroughfare leading south out of the city. The road passed out of the city’s busy streets and into the countryside, running by nurseries and the U.S. Arsenal before arriving at the river crossing about four miles from downtown. On the opposite shore, the highway entered a woodsy neighborhood made up of a number of taverns and a few blocks of wooden houses thrown together during the yellow fever exodus ten years earlier. It was also where an elderly man named William Bartram lived quietly on an estate known for its elaborate botanical gardens, which were said to include most of the known flora of North America.
Bartram, Philadelphia’s most eminent naturalist, was a living legend. He was the son of John Bartram, formerly the “King’s Botanist” before the Revolution. The elder Bartram had been revered in America and all over Europe both for his expertise in New World plants—Linnaeus considered him the world’s most accomplished botanist—and for a series of expeditions he had made to collect plants and explore the continent. William, who from an early age showed an enthusiasm for drawing birds and trees, accompanied his father on several of these trips, most importantly in 1765 to northeastern Florida where he stayed on and established an indigo plantation near the banks of the St. John’s River. The enterprise failed. But in 1773 William returned to Florida and again explored its northeastern palmetto jungles and savannas over the course of a four-year sojourn among the area’s planters and the native Seminole Indians. In 1791, Bartram published a book, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, based on the field journals he kept during his expedition. It offered a vivid account of a wild place that seemed to Bartram a kind of Garden of Eden, and included detailed lists and descriptions of the many plants and animals he had encountered. Bartram’s description of the Alachua savanna, an immense opening of sawgrass and wetlands just south of present-day Gainesville, evoked the intoxicating wildness of the place:
The extensive Alachua savanna is a level, green plain, above fifteen miles over, fifty miles in circumference, and scarcely a tree or bush of any kind to be seen on it. It is encircled with high, sloping hills, covered with waving forests and fragrant Orange groves, rising from an exuberantly fertile soil. The towering Magnolia grandilora and transcendent Palm, stand conspicuous amongst them. At the same time are seen innumerable droves of cattle; the lordly bull, lowing cow and sleek capricious heifer. The hills and groves re-echo their cheerful, social voices. Herds of sprightly deer, squadrons of the beautiful, fleet Siminole horse, flocks of turkeys, civilized communities of the sonorous, watchful crane, mix together, appearing happy and contented in the enjoyment of peace, ’till disturbed and affrighted by the warrior man. Behold yonder, coming upon them through the darkened groves, sneakingly and unawares, the naked red warrior, invading the Elysian fields and green plains of Alachua.
Travels was an instant sensation, though it was better received in Europe, where it quickly went through nine editions, than in the United States, where reviewers complained about Bartram’s ornate style and his high regard for Florida’s Indians. Bartram undeniably overcooked his prose, but in recounting his many adventures with the people and animals of the southeastern United States, he was often hugely entertaining. In one of his most talked-about escapades, Bartram described his killing of a large rattlesnake. In a momentary rage after nearly stepping on the angrily coiled specimen while hiking through a swamp near St. Augustine, Bartram whacked the animal with a stick and then cut off its head. He was instantly overcome with guilt—Bartram regarded the rattlesnake as a marvelous example of natural form and function—though he felt a different sensation after dragging it back to camp and being served a portion of its flesh when the local governor had it cooked up for dinner the same evening. Bartram admitted he could bring himself to taste the meat, but not swallow it.
This kind of adventure was riveting to casual readers, but Bartram earned even more respect for his enlargement of what was known of the country’s natural history. Bartram drew sketches of and described snakes, frogs, turtles, and many sorts of mammals, bringing them to life with sometimes startling immediacy. He reported that Florida swamps in the springtime reverberated with the bellows of male alligators, and that when these reptiles issue their calls, “vapor rises from their nostrils like smoke.” Bartram discovered a great many species not previously known to science, from the gopher turtle to the Florida panther. Among his most significant contributions were observations on bird migration. Bartram noted the transitory appearance in Florida each fall and spring of the many birds that bred in the North and overwintered in the South. And he assembled a new list of American birds—215 in all—that nearly doubled Jefferson’s compilation. Bartram probably had even more bird data than he included in Travels, and his use of unconventional naming schemes in place of Linnaean binomials denied him full credit for many species he was certainly the first to formally describe. But later naturalists came to regard Bartram’s Travels as the true starting point of American ornithological study. Three years after the book first appeared, Bartram was the only American named to an international list of “all living zoologists.”
Bartram was sixty-three when Alexander Wilson came to Gray’s Ferry, and was busy drafting illustrations for Elements of Botany, the first botany textbook published in America. Wilson’s schoolhouse was less than a mile from Bartram’s Garden, which he soon discovered. Long devoted to rambling before and after his teaching day, Wilson loved hiking among the unusual and stately trees and shrubs that abounded in the garden. He was more quickly acquainted with Bartram’s cypresses and azaleas than he was with Bartram himself, as it apparently took the shy schoolteacher the better part of a year to become a regular visitor at the old stone house built by Bartram’s father three-quarters of a century earlier.
But by the spring of 1803, Wilson was corresponding with Bartram and was spending time in the famous naturalist’s library, where he was learning plant and animal classification. He had also begun taking drawing instruction from Bartram’s niece. Wilson regretted not having more free time to pursue these new interests, and remarked how difficult it was to draft proper images when he was forced to work by candlelight. In March, he sent a note to Bartram thanking him for his letters of encouragement, which he said were like “Bank Notes to a Miser.” Wilson worked on images of birds and flowers, and drew an interesting shrub Bartram had pointed out to him, sending the picture—which he deemed a “feeble imitation”—to Bartram with a request that he supply its Linnaean and common names.
One of the works Wilson studied in Bartram’s library was an age-mellowed copy of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands that the book’s author, the English naturalist Mark Catesby, had presented to Bartram’s father. It was, before Bartram’s Travels, the most complete and the most beautiful zoology of North America. The two-volume book consists almost entirely of 220 etchings of plants and animals that Catesby had observed and drawn during two lengthy expeditions to the New World between 1712 and 1726. The pictures depict animals familiar now in North America, but also some that were completely unknown to Wilson. The schoolteacher’s head, for years preoccupied with grammar lessons and the figures of the calculus, now filled with colorful images of fishes and reptiles and mammals and, especially, birds. The first volume was devoted to birds. Wilson saw birds that he knew and some that he didn’t, many depicted in ways suggesting their personalities. In Catesby’s most ambitious drawing, a bald eagle with wings outstretched and talons flaring dives high above a river to capture a fish that has just fallen from the grasp of an osprey seen hovering helplessly in the background. The complexity of this drawing—it is one of only two in which Catesby drew a landscape as a backdrop—is remarkable, and the fact that most of the rest are much simpler indicates how expensive and time-consuming engraving and coloring prints could be. Some of Catesby’s animals are posed against neutral backgrounds; most are either perched on or standing by trees or shrubs that are carefully classed and named.
Catesby had a soft style—the original drawings were made in water-color—but he used bold, saturating colors. There is an arresting degree of detail in the engravings, with the lines of even the softest feathers clearly delineated. His blue jay is typical. The bird stands on the limb of a smilax bush in a scolding posture, its tail cocked high and its head canted upward with its beak open to reveal a wagging tongue. The bird’s signature crest is erect, and the fine feathers along its belly stand out excitedly.
Wilson found Catesby’s book irresistible, and he seemed to begin thinking almost immediately about undertaking a project to expand on it. With only a hundred species of birds represented, the Natural History wasn’t even close to a comprehensive catalogue of North American species. But Catesby had found the right approach in using the available printing techniques and figuring out how to market such a book.
There were several ways of reproducing drawings or paintings. All were labor-intensive and expensive. Images were typically traced and then cut into wood or engraved on stone or metal, usually copper. When these templates were inked and pressed onto paper, a black-and-white copy of the original image resulted. Depending on how rapidly the wood-cut or engraving wore down, it could be reused many times to mass-produce copies.
If the finished image was to be in color, however, this added another demanding step—hand painting. Using the original as a guide, a colorist—or sometimes a team of colorists—painted over the black-and-white print, filling it in one color at a time, like a paint-by-numbers. When well executed, a hand-colored print was almost indistinguishable from the original and from its sibling prints—even though each reproduction was, in truth, a unique work of art.
Printmaking thus involved several skilled disciplines, with the engraving in particular requiring talent often equal to that of the original artist. This meant that the biggest obstacle facing any illustrated book was the cost of making it. Catesby did his own engraving, partly so he could control the quality of the prints but mainly because he couldn’t afford to hire an engraver. Even then, the finished book figured to be so expensive—not to mention the normal risk of less-than-hoped-for sales—that Catesby had had to ensure in advance that the project would pay for itself. He did this by producing the Natural History in installments and selling subscriptions to buyers who agreed to pay for each batch of “birds, beasts, fish, serpents, insects, and plants” as it was received. He also decided to make the book available in black and white. One uncolored installment, or “Number” as it was called, cost one guinea—a pound and a shilling (about $4.80). Catesby then advertised a luxury version. “For the Satisfaction of the CURIOUS,” he stated in a prospectus, “some Copies will be printed on the finest Imperial Paper, and the Figures put in their Natural Colours from the ORIGINAL PAINTINGS, at the Price of Two Guineas.”
Catesby’s Natural History made a terrific impact. It was widely reprinted and translated for many years, and found its way onto the shelves of several royal families. Virtually all of Europe’s most influential naturalists regarded it as the definitive work on North American wildlife. Linnaeus himself based many of his taxonomic listings of New World plants and animals on Catesby’s observations. Like William Bartram decades later, Catesby was struck by the coming and going of the birds through the South each fall and spring. At the time, there was still much uncertainty about migration, and many myths about where birds went in the winter persisted. It was thought that some spent the winter in the deep recesses of caves. Another surprisingly durable theory was that some species, such as swallows, dived to the bottoms of lakes and remained there until the return of warm weather.
Catesby was humbled by his success, and was at pains to apologize—quite unnecessarily—for his primitive style. He took more pride, it seemed, in having endured the rigors of his expeditions, which were considerable. Catesby made all of his drawings in the field, working whenever possible from live-caught specimens. He traveled in unsettled areas, hauling his kits of paints and papers and dissecting instruments, and often lived in the open. He was impressed by the many species he encountered—and by the violence they perpetrated on one another—as he advanced deeper into the tropics. In South Carolina, he lived through a powerful hurricane that left the carcasses of deer and bears hanging from tree limbs, and watched snakes feasting on animals fleeing ahead of the deluge. Inevitably, Catesby experienced the heart-stopping run-in with a rattlesnake that seemed obligatory among early American naturalists. After awaking at an inn in Georgia one morning, Catesby had just sat down to tea in the next room when he heard the maid who’d gone to make up his bed start to scream. She had discovered a rattler between the sheets that Catesby had vacated only minutes before. Catesby concluded that the snake had climbed into bed with him to warm up—it was February—but he couldn’t guess how long they’d kept one another company. In any case, the snake did not care to be disturbed at this point, as Catesby noted when he investigated the scene and found the serpent “full of ire, biting at everything that approached him.” Tellingly, Catesby’s painting of the rattlesnake included a separate close-up of one of its fangs.
For the first time since the days when he had dreamed of being a poet, Wilson felt he’d found an objective—and a means of achieving it. He continued to work at his drawing, routinely submitting his renderings of birds and plants to Bartram for correction and advice. He got to know the Philadelphia engraver Alexander Lawson, a fellow Scot, who provided additional instruction. In the spring of 1804, Wilson sent Lawson a note explaining his frustration at not having more time away from his teaching duties to tend to his “itch for drawing,” which he said he’d gotten from Lawson. He then told Lawson of his idea for an ornithological study of America, confessing that he was famous for having big ideas that came to nothing, but saying he would appreciate his friend’s backing just the same. “I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America,” Wilson wrote. “Now I don’t want you to throw cold water, as Shakespeare says, on this notion, Quixotic as it may appear. I have been so long accustomed to the building of airy castles and brain windmills, that it has become one of my earthly comforts.”
Wilson had taken lodgings near his school with a family named Jones, and in this, too, he was fortunate. The Jones house stood between two creeks that merged into a pool at the base of a low cliff in a thicket a short distance away. Wilson spent hours before and after school lazing atop this hill, reading poetry and studying the sunlight filtering through the beech trees overhead, or looking down at the water, which reflected the laurel branches hanging beside the pond. The grove was full of birds in the spring and summer—so many species that Wilson’s observations there would become the basis for much of his ornithology. He kept track of the intermittent appearances of hawks and orioles, goldfinches and whipporwills. Once, while walking in Bartram’s woods not far away, he saw a species of woodpecker he was sure was new.
Wilson was sometimes joined in his poolside bower by Bartram’s niece. Her name was Nancy, though Wilson called her by her nickname, Anna. Whether they were ever more than the closest of friends is unclear. A few lines in several of Wilson’s poems hint at a greater affection. Wilson seemed, in any event, content and focused on his future—even when Lawson ignored his plea for support and instead tried to talk him out of attempting to publish an illustrated ornithology. Given the more than two hundred birds already known, plus the many more Wilson intended to add to the list, Lawson calculated that the cost of engraving, coloring, and printing such a work—in which Wilson also planned to include a scientific narrative giving the natural history of each species—would easily run to several thousand dollars a copy. No one would pay so dearly, Lawson said, and no publisher would risk investing in a book that might end up costing as much as a small farm.
Wilson never shared these reservations. He kept at his drawing undeterred. Within two years of his coming to Gray’s Ferry he had assembled a fair collection of drawings of the larger birds in the area and was hard at work on the warblers and other small species. His students, amused by his interest in nature, constantly brought Wilson all sorts of plants and animals for his enjoyment. He received a whole basket of ornery crows from a boy in his class, and wondered if the child would next turn up with a load of live bullfrogs. One day a student caught a mouse in the schoolhouse and turned it over to Wilson, who considered how best to pose the animal for drawing. He finally decided to kill the mouse and mount it in the claws of his stuffed owl, but as he watched the animal struggling against a string with which he’d tied it up, Wilson’s heart melted. When he accidentally spilled a few drops of water near it, the mouse quickly drank them up and then, to Wilson’s mind at least, looked up at him with terror in its eyes. He let the mouse go.
Wilson’s perpetually erratic mood stabilized during this time, or at least its extremes subsided in his new, invigorating surroundings. But he still had his moments. Bartram and his niece had promoted Wilson’s interest in birds and drawing partly as a way of pulling him out of the tail-spin he was in when he arrived. They understood that his long walks in the woods were not entirely about his devotion to nature, but were in fact Wilson’s way of escaping his tormented thoughts. On one of these walks, he had accidentally dropped his gun—which shockingly went off. Stunned by the concussion of the blast and the whoosh he felt as the shot charge narrowly missed his chest, Wilson had gone home badly shaken. He confided to Bartram how ironic it would have been if his life, so amply punctuated by times when he almost wished he were dead, had ended in an accident that looked like a suicide. Bartram didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried sick.
And while the birds seemed to lift Wilson’s spirits, his work held his mood in check. Wilson was better paid at the Union School than he ever had been, but he knew now that teaching was not for him. He hated its confinement above all. Indeed, he was now convinced that the grinding repetitiveness of the classroom was killing him. “Close application to my profession, which I have followed since November 1795,” he wrote to a friend, “has deeply injured my constitution, the more so, that my rambling disposition was the worst calculated of anyone’s in the world for the austere regularity of a teacher’s life.”
