hoped for. He gave talks, organised exhibitions, and accepted commissions. His frontiersman image also proved highly marketable, and “the American woodsman,” as he was dubbed, became something of a celebrity. This he used to gather subscriptions from the great and the good, including King George IV, who signed up to buy a copy of his work in advance. Committing these subscriptions and his own money to the project, he did not need a publisher, and took all the profits himself. His investment has been calculated at $115,000 (around $2 million at today’s value), but selling some two hundred sets at $870 each brought in about $175,000. Subscribers received a fresh set of five hand-coloured printed engravings, based on his drawings, every month or two. An accompanying explanatory text was also published in five volumes. This vast “Double Elephant Folio,” printed in Edinburgh, was followed by a smaller and more affordable edition, again sold to subscribers, and then more
editions followed. Finally wealthy, Audubon returned to the US, where he bought a twenty-acre estate by the Hudson in northern Manhattan. He continued to draw new species, travelling from Newfoundland to Florida, and published Ornithological Biographies in 1841. He was working on a book on mammals when his health began to fail, and he died on 27 January, 1851, at his Manhattan home. Reproductions of Audubon’s images are widely available these days, but if you should wish to acquire one of the original two hundred sets — as did a Qatari sheikh at an auction at Christie’s in London in 2000 — you would have to pay something like £8.8 million. But Audubon’s real legacy perhaps lies in the National Audubon Society, a non-profit environmental pressure group, with five hundred chapters across the US and many affiliated groups in the Caribbean. Established in 1905, it educates the public about conservation and protection and operates sanctuaries in many different habitats.
Audubon’s best-known drawing is probably the American Flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber), the large wader with electric red-orange plumage. In his depiction, it is bending its long, elegant neck down at the water’s edge (and hence neatly filling the page). Given Audubon’s early life, it is suitable that this iconic image is of a bird that is still today found in Haiti — though under threat — as well across the Caribbean from Trinidad and Tobago to the Bahamas. His notes on the Flamingo, taken at the Florida Keys, are largely factual and rather dry, but one brief section reveals the sheer joy and excitement that bird-watching always gave him: Ah! reader, could you but know the emotions that then agitated my breast! I thought I had now reached the height of all my expectations, for my voyage to the Floridas was undertaken in a great measure for the purpose of studying these lovely birds in their own beautiful islands. n WWW.CARIBBEAN-AIRLINES.COM
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