John James Audubon: The Making of an American by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes [Rhodes, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biology, History, Nature, Non-Fiction, Science, Environment, Non Fiction, Birds, American History, Ornithology, Animals, Biography, Biographical
ISBN: 9780375414121
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2004-10-05T04:00:00+00:00

His solution that first Friday was to go shopping. At a watchmaker’s shop where the looks were sympathetic (since he was potentially a paying customer) he examined several gold watches. “No better watch was made in England,” the watchmaker told him. Lucy had given him money to buy one for her. He planned to buy one for himself as well to signal that he was a man of substance despite his provincial clothes and unfashionably long hair. Sometime that day he and Swift also moved their possessions from the Delos to the Commercial Inn, near the Exchange, where they were “well fed and well attended.”

Saturday Audubon tackled Customs in the company of one of Alexander Gordon’s clerks. On this second encounter Gordon had reluctantly given the artist his card, thus authorizing him to call on his sister-in-law Ann “if I feel inclined or think it proper.” But sending a mere clerk with Audubon to Customs denied him the courtesy the customs officers would have extended to a Liverpool businessman; the several hundred watercolor drawings of American birds in his two heavy portfolios were assessed 2 pence each when fine art would have been admitted free.

And then on Monday the doors of Liverpool society began to open. Audubon had delivered his letter from Vincent Nolte to Richard Rathbone’s offices on the Friday he arrived but had not found the Liverpool businessman in. Saturday, to his surprise and relief, he had received a note from Rathbone inviting him to dine on Wednesday with William Roscoe, a distinguished Liverpool poet, attorney, banker, biographer and editor. Monday Audubon rose uncharacteristically late after an evening of drinking port with John Swift, shaved, dressed, “bustled about briskly,” took up his hat, gloves and the sword cane he carried for protection and strode off to call on Rathbone at home. In the streets he cut a romantic figure, as he was well aware. “My locks flew freely from under my hat, and every lady that I met looked at them and then at me until—she could see no more.” Not finding Rathbone at home, Audubon “almost ran to his countinghouse at the salt dock, down on Duke Street. . . . My name was taken to the special room of Mr. Rathbone, and in a moment I was met by one who acted towards me as a brother ought to do! How truly kind and really polite. He did not give his card to poor Audubon. He gave me the most polite invitation to call at his house at 2.”

There he dined with Rathbone, a wealthy and prominent cotton merchant a decade younger than Audubon, his twenty-eight-year-old wife and their children. After dinner the Rathbones walked with their guest to an exhibition to see a panorama painting of Edinburgh’s Holyrood Chapel. Back at the Exchange Rathbone introduced Audubon to the American consul, James Maury, and gave him the standard tour, ending up high in the building’s dome looking over Liverpool and beyond: “I could see the Irish

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