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A young Man of Seventeen sent to America to Make Money (for such was My Father’s Wish) brought up in France in easy Circumstance who had never thought on the Want of an article.
John Audubon wrote those words in his journal while floating down the Mississippi River on a flatboat; by then, he had been in America for fifteen years. His memory was not precise; in fact, he had turned eighteen, not seventeen, in the spring of 1803, before sailing that autumn from France to New York. He was incorrect about his father’s motives, as well. Jean Audubon did not send his only son to America to “Make Money.” He sent him there to keep him out of harm’s way.
That same year, 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were preparing to leave on the explorations that would chart the vast, wild continent that lay before the young man of eighteen: America. A land of promise, as Saint-Domingue in the West Indies had been for Audubon’s father. America, a safe haven from Napoleon Bonaparte, whose need for soldiers had become insatiable. When the American president Thomas Jefferson convinced Napoleon to sell 828,000 square miles of French-claimed territory, this Louisiana Purchase instantly increased the size of the country by 140 percent—and worked to the young Frenchman’s advantage as well, since he could claim to have been born in the United States.
It had not been easy to leave the country house in Couëron, not easy to leave France. The pain of that parting remained so vividly etched in his memory that years later he would write, “When, for the first time . . . I left my father, and all the dear friends of my youth, to cross the great ocean . . . my heart sunk within me . . . The lingering hours were spent in deep sorrow . . . My affections were with those I had left behind, and the world seemed to me a great wilderness.”2 Homesickness was compounded by mal de mer; the sea made him sick, and it always would. He complained that he could not draw while at sea because of a “giddiness” which seldom left him.
