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CHAPTER TWO
COMING ACROSS
Troglodytes 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, mallows, 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 communique, "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.
(continued on the next page)
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