John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles

      Figure 4. The Jolly Flatboatmen, by George Caleb Bingham, 1846. Oil on canvas, 38 1/8 x 48 1/2 in. Object #2015.18.1. Patrons’ Permanent Fund. National Gallery of Art.

      Audubon had no illusions about the romance of the river, and he would certainly find little joy in this trip. He had been in the flatboat business before, back when he and his Kentucky-based business partner, Ferdinand Rozier, were moving goods from their store down the Ohio River to the Missouri Territory in the winter of 1810–1811. Now, a decade later, he found himself essentially bumming a ride on someone else’s boat. His journal repeatedly speaks of the “desagreable” discomforts of drifting downriver on a clumsy, slow-moving wooden barge, being thrown together with men he didn’t much like, and living in squalid accommodations that gave him almost no protection from the elements, much less enough room to work. With only a small, claustrophobic cabin for shelter, Audubon and his boatmates remained constantly exposed to the weather, which turned out to be repeatedly rainy, windy, and surprisingly chilly for mid-fall. On the second day out, Audubon wrote, “The Wind Rose and brought us to Shore, it raind and blowed Violantly untill the Next Day,” and for days more after that, morning frosts and temperatures below freezing seemed “desagreably Cold.” As an artist he suffered under the circumstances of the cramped onboard environment, “drawing in a Boat Were a Man cannot stand erect.” By November 1, another day with “weather drizly and windy,” flatboat life had already left Audubon feeling flat himself: “Extremely tired of My Indolent Way of Living,” he grumbled, “not having procured any thing to draw since Louisville.” Even his dog, Dash, seemed to have her own case of the flatboat blues, looking to be “apparently good for Nothing for the Want of Employment.”¹⁰

      Ornithology on the River

      For both man and dog, the best remedy for such ennui was to get off the boat and go on the hunt for food, which was Audubon’s responsibility in his free-passage arrangement with Aumack. Almost anything counted in flatboat cuisine, and the search for fresh meat put him in pursuit of both mammals and, as always, birds. From the first day he boarded the flatboat, in fact, Audubon kept a regular record of the birds he saw and shot, and the entry for October 18 gives a good indication of the variety and abundance of the avian life along the Ohio River:

      Saw some fine Turkeys, killed a Common Crow Corvus Americanus Which I drew; Many Robins in the woods and thousands of Snow Buntings Emberiza Nivalis—several Rose Breasted Gros Beaks—We killed 2 Pheasants, 15 Partridges—1 Teal, 1 T. T. Godwit—1 Small Grebe all of these I have Seen precisely alike in all Parts—and one Bared Owl this is undoubtedly the Most Plentifull of his genus.¹¹

      (Audubon’s occasional use of the Linnaean binomials in that passage also speaks to his self-conscious sense of identity as naturalist, and among his few flatboat possessions he carried a copy of William Turton’s 1806 translation of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. Turton’s work served Audubon well as a ready reference for identification and classification, not to mention a model for drawing: One of the sketches in his journal is a detailed bird diagram copied closely from Turton.¹²)

      Despite all the discomfort and frustration of trying to draw in the cramped, uncomfortable quarters of the flatboat, Audubon kept at it, combining sketches of birds with close ornithological description. One “raw & Cloudy” Sunday morning in November, for instance, he got a “beautifull specimen” of a water bird he had never seen before, which he identified as an Imber Diver (and which is now identified as the Common Loon). He had to wait a while to get started on his drawing—“the Wind rendered our Cabin smoaky I Could Not begin to Draw until after Dinner”—but he finished it over the next two days, while also recording field notes in his journal:

      It is with apparent Difficulty or a Sluggish disposition that these Birds rise out of the Watter & yet Will Not dive at the flash of a Gun—while on the wing are very Swift— … they frequently Dipp their Bill in the Watter, and I think have the power of Judging in that Way if the place Contains Fish = One I shot at; dove & raised again Imediatly as if to see Where I was or What Was the Matter.

      Audubon took careful measurements of the bird’s weight and dimensions, and he opened it up to see what it had been eating: “Contents of Gutt & Gizard Small Fish, Bones & Scales and Large Gravel—Body extremely fat & rancid.”¹³

      The day he finished his Imber Diver drawing, Audubon also “saw several Eagles, Brown & White headed,” and a few days later he shot a “beautifull White headed Eagle Falco Leucocephalus,” a male weighing eight and a half pounds and with a wingspan measuring over six and a half feet. Since his shot went through the eagle’s gizzard, he couldn’t determine its diet, but the dead specimen did give him the opportunity to make a close examination of the bird and become convinced that “the Bald Eagle and the Brown Eagle are Two Diferent Species.” (In fact, they are not, the Brown Eagle being the immature version of the Bald Eagle.) Audubon continued to observe eagle behavior, especially the mating habits and other relationships between male and female. On the afternoon of December 1, he had the good ornithological fortune to watch two eagles copulate: “The femelle was on a Very high Limb of a Tree and Squated at the approach of the Male, who came Like a Torrent, alighted on her and quakled Shrill until he sailed off, the femelle following him and Zig zaging through the air.”¹⁴

      A week later, he made another observation of a male and female eagle pair, this one with a less happy outcome. “Mr Aumack Winged a White headed Eagle, [and] brought it a live on board,” Audubon wrote, noting that “the Noble Fellow Looked at his Ennemies with a Contemptible Eye.” Audubon then undertook a harsh-seeming scientific experiment with the captive eagle, tying a string to one of its legs, then making the wounded bird jump into the water. “My Surprise at Seeing it Swim well was very great, it used its Wing with great Effect and Would have made the Shore distant then about 200 yds Dragging a Pole Weighing at Least 15 lbs.” When his assistant Joseph Mason went after it, the defiant eagle defended itself, and all the while its female partner hovered above and “shrieked for some time, exhibiting the true Sorow of the Constant Mate.” This would not be the last time Audubon would have a close encounter with a captive eagle—thirteen years later, as we shall see, the story of his eye-to-eye showdown with a caged Golden Eagle would mark one of the most dramatic episodes in Audubon’s artistic career—but it speaks to the ways that rough, even cruel treatment of live specimens could be a seemingly necessary, albeit unseemly, element of his scientific method.¹⁵

      Longing for Lucy

      Audubon’s observations of male-female eagle relations may have been especially pressing on his mind, because he, too, experienced “the true Sorow of the Constant Mate.” The farther he drifted downriver, the more his sense of separation from Lucy and his sons weighed on his mind, the more his slow-moving pursuit of an unpromising calling reminded him of his poverty—and theirs. Here he was, floating slowly toward New Orleans for a couple of months, shooting and drawing birds along the way, but really having no idea of what prospects lay before him in the longer run. In mid-November, after being afloat for five weeks, and as the boat finally left the Ohio River and turned into the Mississippi, he took sad note of the turn his life had taken. “Now I enter it poor in fact Destitute of all things … in a flat Boat a Passenger.” In a brief reverie, he made the confluence of the rivers a metaphor for his own difficult history: “The Meeting of the Two Streams reminds me a Litle of the Gentle Youth who Comes into the World, Spotless he presents himself, he is gradually drawn in to Thousands of Dificulties that Makes him wish to keep Apart, but at last he is over done Mixed and Lost in the Vortex.” Before being swept too much deeper into this emotional abyss, Audubon snapped out of it and turned his attention to a visual description of the way the “beautifull & Transparent Watter of the Ohio … Looks the More agreable to the Eye as it goes down Surrounded by the Muddy