Through the discovery in France of new documentary evidence in surprising abundance we are obliged to draw conclusions contrary to those which have hitherto been accepted, and the new light thus obtained enables us to form a more accurate and just judgment of Audubon the man, and of his work.
CHAPTER II
JEAN AUDUBON AND HIS FAMILY
Extraordinary career of the naturalist's father—Wounded at fourteen and prisoner of war for five years in England—Service in the French merchant marine and navy—Voyages to Newfoundland and Santo Domingo—His marriage in France—His sea fights, capture and imprisonment in New York—His command at the Battle of Yorktown—Service in America and encounters with British privateers.
Few names of purely Gallic origin are today better known in America, or touch a more sympathetic chord of human interest, than that of Audubon, and few, we might also add, are so rare. John James Audubon first made his family name known to all the world, and though he left numerous descendants, it has become well nigh extinct in America, and is far from common in France. The great Paris directory frequently contains no entry under this head; Nantes knows his name no longer, and it is rare in the marshes of La Vendée, where at some remote period it may have originated.
The lists of the army of five thousand which Rochambeau's fleet brought to our aid in the American War of Independence show but a single variant of this euphonious patronym, in Pierre Audibon,[15] a soldier in the regiment of Touraine, who was born at Montigny in 1756; but in the fleet of the Count de Grasse which coöperated with our land-forces at the Battle of Yorktown, on October 19, 1781, a ship was commanded by an officer with whom we are more intimately concerned. This was Captain Jean Audubon, who was later to become the father of America's pioneer woodsman, ornithologist and animal painter.
By birth a Vendean, at the age of thirty-seven Jean Audubon had plowed the seas of half the world, and in the course of his checkered career, as sailor, soldier, West Indian planter and merchant, had met enough adventure to furnish the materials for a whole series of dime novels. Short of stature, with auburn hair and a fiery temper, he was then as stubborn and fearless an opponent as one could meet on the high seas, and one of the gamest fighting cocks of the French merchant marine. How much Jean Audubon's son owed to his French Creole mother will never be known, but to this self-taught, thoroughly capable, and enterprising sailor we can surely trace his restless activity, his versatile mind and mercurial temper, as well as an inherent capacity for taking pains, which father and son possessed to a marked degree.
The true story of Jean Audubon's career has never been told, but even at this late day it will be found an interesting human document; and what is more to our purpose, it throws into sharp outline much that has hitherto remained obscure in the life of his remarkable son. The first Audubon to leave any imprint, however faint, upon the history of his time, this honest, matter-of-fact sailor, would have been the last to wish to appear in the garb of fiction, and we shall base our story solely upon the unimpeachable testimony of public and private records, which researches in France had happily brought to light before the beginning of the war in 1914.[16]
Jean Audubon came by his sailor's instincts and fighting prowess naturally, for his father, Pierre Audubon of Les Sables d'Olonne, was a seaman by trade. Like his son he captained his own vessel, and for years made long voyages between French ports in both the old and the new worlds. Pierre Audubon, the paternal grandfather of John James Audubon, and the first of that name of whom we have found any record,[17] lived at Les Sables d'Olonne, where with Marie Anne Martin, his wife, he reared a considerable family in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Les Sables, at the time of which we speak, was a small fishing and trading port on the Bay of Biscay, fifty miles to the southwest of Nantes, but is now become a city of over twenty thousand people. Lying on the westerly verge of the Marais, or salt marshes and lakes of La Vendée, the inhabitants of the district, and more particularly of the Bocage, or plantations, to the north and northeast, were noted from an early day for their conservatism, as shown in a firm adherence to ancient law and custom, as well as for their unswerving loyalty to the old nobility and to the clergy. Like their Breton neighbors on the other side of the Loire, the Vendeans were honest, industrious, and faithful to their civic obligations; they were also independent, resourceful, and knew no fear. When the neighboring city of Nantes planted trees of liberty and displayed the National colors in 1789, the Vendeans were stirred to indignation and later to arms, while the Chouans on the right bank of the river were quick to follow their example; in short, the rebels of La Vendée raised such a storm that for months the very existence of the infant Republic was threatened. This spirit of revolt to the newer order, the Chouanerie, as it came to be called, was stamped out for the time, but a few smoldering embers always remained, ready to burst into flame at the slightest provocation; recrudescent symptoms of this tendency had to be suppressed even as late as 1830, when Charles X, the last Bourbon king, lost his crown. Pierre Audubon's family, no doubt, shared many characteristics of their Vendean and Breton neighbors, but as the sequel will show, one at least did not approve of their political course, for he took up arms against them, and presumably against many of his own kith and kin.