Meanwhile Audubon, never one short on energy, conceived an audacious, fanatical project. He would paint all of North America’s birds, one a day, and find someone to publish them in full-color, life-size volumes.
His subjects rarely stood still, and neither binoculars nor photography existed yet. So month after month Audubon traveled the American frontier on both sides of the Mississippi, perfecting his technique. He’d watch birds, shoot them, string them up in lifelike positions, draw them, dissect them, and often eat them. Eventually, after years in the woods, he carried a sheaf of his best paintings to Philadelphia only to find no one wanted to publish them.
So in 1826, at the age of 41, with 250 “watter coloured Drawings’’ in a portfolio, and the blessings of his wife, and with all their fortunes at stake, he sailed from New Orleans to England to see whether his dream might be realized overseas.
His diary of that year, which reads like a sometimes bombastic, sometimes deeply humble book-length letter to Lucy in Louisiana, has been reissued in an authoritative edition by the University of Nebraska Press. It’s called “John James Audubon’s Journal of 1826: The Voyage to The Birds of America,’’ and it is a meticulously rendered transcription of the original document, as close an experience to reading Audubon’s dash-laden, exclamation point-littered cursive as most can get.
The journal opens with his 65-day voyage across the Atlantic, and the entries oscillate between complaints about the tedium (“My Time is really dull, not a Book on Board that I have not read Twice since here’’) and characteristically sharp observations (“these Birds skim very low over the Sea in search of the Bunches of Floating sea weeds that abound over this Gulph’’). Audubon sees whales, eats porpoise, sketches sailors, and writes hilariously about the hazards of inhaling the air directly beneath the captain’s hammock.
In July a seasick and “disconsolated’’ Audubon finally reaches Liverpool, pays a two-pence duty on each of his drawings, and starts trying to show the rich and powerful his portfolio.
