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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.
(continued on the next page)
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