Under the pressure of such persecutions, hard times, and possibly from disappointment in an affair of the heart, Wilson decided to emigrate. Practically driven out in rags from the country which one day was to raise a monument to his memory, at the age of twenty-eight he sailed from Belfast with his nephew, William Duncan, for the Eldorado of the New World. Wilson slept on deck throughout the entire voyage of fifty-three days, and landed at New Castle, Delaware, with the clothes on his back and an old fowling-piece as his only possessions. This was on July 14, 1794, nine years before John James Audubon left Nantes. Taking train "number 11," in the parlance of knights of the road, the two immigrants first walked to Wilmington in search of employment, and finding none there, went on twenty-nine miles farther to Philadelphia.
The story is told that while they made their way through the woods of Delaware, Wilson shot a Red-headed Woodpecker and met with the Cardinal Grosbeak; as he often referred to the pleasure which the sight of these beautiful birds had given him, the incident, if it really occurred, may have played a part in the inspiration, which later came to Wilson, of becoming the historian of American bird life.
After eight hard years of shifting about, during which Wilson tried day-labor, weaving, peddling and school teaching, working long hours at miserable pay, he finally settled as a country school teacher near New York. On the twelfth of July, 1801, he wrote to a fellow teacher and friend, Charles Orr, who was then living at Philadelphia: "I live six miles from Newark and twelve miles from New York, in a settlement of canting, preaching, praying, and snivelling ignorant Presbyterians. They pay their minister 250 pounds for preaching twice a week, and their teacher 40 dollars a quarter for the most spirit-sinking, laborious work—6, I may say 12 times weekly." To the same friend, in 1802, he confided: "My disposition is to love those who love me with all the warmth of enthusiasm, but to feel with the keenest sensibility the smallest appearance of neglect or contempt from those I regard."
In 1802, at the age of thirty-six, Wilson decided to take up a school at Gray's Ferry, on the Schuylkill River, in Kingsessing Township, then a small settlement four miles from Philadelphia. A year later, in 1803, John James Audubon was sent to America to learn English and enter trade, and, as chance would have it, settled on the banks of the same river, not many miles from Wilson's old schoolhouse. In one respect the older man was the more fortunate, for, as will be seen, he found close by his door an excellent naturalist who played the part of mentor.
On February 14, 1802, while at Philadelphia, Wilson wrote to Orr:
On the 25th. of this month I remove to the schoolhouse beyond Gray's Ferry to succeed the present teacher there. I shall recommence that painful profession once more with the same gloomy, sullen resignation that a prisoner re-enters his dungeon or a malefactor mounts the scaffold; fate urges him, necessity me. The agreement between us is to make the school equal to 100 dollars per quarter, but not more than 50 are to be admitted. The present pedagogue is a noisy, outrageous fat old captain of a ship, who has taught these ten years in different places. You may hear him bawling 300 yards off. The boys seem to pay as little regard to him as ducks to the rumbling of a stream under them. I shall have many difficulties to overcome in establishing my own rules and authority.
At Gray's Ferry, where he was then settled, Wilson again wrote in July: "Leave that cursed town at least one day. It is the most striking emblem of purgatory, at least to me, that exists. No poor soul is happier to escape from Bridewell than I am to smell the fresh air and gaze over the green fields after a day or two's residence in Philadelphia...."
George Ord, Wilson's staunch friend, literary executor, biographer, and editor of the last two volumes of the American Ornithology, thus characterized him: "He was of the genus irritabile, and was obstinate in opinion." He would acknowledge error when discovered by himself, "but he could not endure to be told of his mistakes. Hence his associates had to be sparing of criticism, through fear of forfeiting his friendship. With almost all his friends he had occasionally, arising from a collision of opinion, some slight misunderstanding, which was soon passed over, leaving no disagreeable impression. But an act of disrespect he could ill brook, and a wilful injury he would seldom forgive."
In 1801, while teaching and studying German at Milestown, Pennsylvania, Wilson had another unfortunate love affair, in this instance with a woman already married. To this he alluded in letters written in the summer of that year to his friend Orr, with whom he later quarreled. On August 7, 1801, he wrote: "The world is lost forever to me and I to the world. No time nor distance can ever banish her image from my mind. It is forever present with me, and my heart is broken with the most melancholy reflections."
At Gray's Ferry, however, Wilson soon found in the estimable William Bartram, then in his sixty-first year, the sympathetic adviser, kind teacher, and judicious friend that he most needed, for though Wilson took the initiative in his ornithological plans, it was the kindly Bartram who eventually extended a helping hand. Both Bartram and Lawson, the engraver, urged him to devote his leisure to drawing, as a foil to his melancholic tendencies. Wilson did not hesitate long, for on June 1, 1803, he confided to a friend in Scotland that he had begun to make a "collection of our finest birds." Early in 1804 his purpose was clearly fixed, and on March 12 of that year he wrote to Alexander Lawson: "I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a collection of all the birds in this part of North America.... I have been so long accustomed to the building of airy castles and brain windmills, that it has become one of my earthly comforts, a sort of rough bone, that amuses me when sated with the dull drudgery of life." A little later in the same month we find him appealing to Bartram for exact names, when he writes: