In the footsteps of the shady naturalist Audubon: controversy is that thing with feathers

This story begins with the disappearance of a dinosaur. The other day I entered the Natural History Museum in London, one of those places where I feel at home (or better) to come face to face with a monumental absence: the famous diplodocus in the lobby was missing. As if it had evaporated. And look how big a diplodocus is. Alarmed, I went to a boy who was handing out some information brochures about the museum. “Oh, it’s in Coventry,” he told me as if it were the most normal thing for a dinosaur to have gone for a walk. And he added with British humor: “Don’t worry, it hasn’t been stolen.”

The iconic diplodocus skeleton (which is actually a copy of the original unearthed in Wyoming in 1899 and exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh) arrived at the London museum in 1905 and, after being exhibited in different rooms, since 1979 it occupied the place of honor in the entrance hall. Dippy, as he is affectionately known, has been on a tour of Britain visiting Dorchester, Birmingham, Belfast, Glasgow, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cardiff, Rochdale and Norwich, and, after briefly returning to the museum, he has left again for a stay of three years in Coventry. Qualified dino-star and “the nation’s favorite dinosaur,” Dippy He travels as an ambassador of the London museum.

More encouraged to know that the diplodocus is safe in Coventry (a city that will not have been scared by the arrival of a dinosaur, with what they have been through), and that a life-size bronze copy will soon be inaugurated outside the London museum, I continued my visit. And who I did meet was the famous hunter, explorer and soldier Frederick Courteney Selous, renowned white hunter (white hunter) and lion killer, who was shot dead by a sniper of the German colonial troops in Beho-Beho, Tanganyika, in 1917 (he is buried under a tamarind tree next to Rufiji). I am a big fan of Selous (as was the much missed Javier Reverte), from whom Rider Haggard modeled his character of Allan Quatermain, and who is the epitome of old African adventures including safaris and wars with the Matabele. Curiously, one of the great dangers that Selous ran was as a child in London: he barely survived the famous London disaster. skating of Regent’s Park, when the ice gave way and two hundred skaters fell into the icy water, of which 40 died. Their other bad moments were all in better weather. Well, it turns out that every time I go to the museum I greet the bronze statue of the hunter, the work of WR Colton, which has been on the left staircase at the back of the lobby since 1920 (previously, we would say past the diplodocus). And I increasingly wonder how long it will last, given the wave of decolonization and political correctness sweeping through Europe’s museums and the fact that Selous killed hundreds of elephants to trade in their ivory. Anyway, for now Selous is still there, wearing a model hat I’m on my way to King Solomon’s mines and rifle on his arm, in a granite niche in the Matoppo Hills. Who knew that the diplodocus would leave first.

But if Captain Selous is complex for the museum, what can we say about the exhibition that is dedicated (until August) to the great American pioneer of ornithology John James Audubon (1785-1851), considered one of the great naturalists, an artist of exceptional talent who undertook the task of painting all the birds of North America and a driver of interest and passion for birds. His two signature works are the monumental compendium in four huge volumes The Birds of Americawith his extraordinary large-format paintings of birds into which he tried to instill innovative realism, dynamism and drama while capturing them with the greatest artistic beauty, and the accompanying work Ornithological Biographywhere he describes North American species in five volumes, including some that he did not find.

Unfortunately (and hence the thorny issue for the museum), the fame of Audubon, who was highly valued by Darwin, who knew him, has been questioned in recent times by his racist opinions and his unprejudiced hunting of thousands and thousands of birds, real massacres, in order to study them. Great adventurer and traveler at the time of colonization, tall, handsome and bold, he was a fascinating mix of scientist, writer (he has really beautiful passages in his texts), explorer and man of the forest (smoking shotgun always in his arm). . But neither that, nor the fact that he was passionate about Walter Scott, whom he also knew personally, excuses him for having been an owner of black slaves and for defending slavery without any problem of conscience.

When he lived in Henderson, Kentucky, he had nine slaves that he did not hesitate to put up for sale when he was going through a bad financial streak. On one occasion, he acquired two blacks to help him on an expedition down the Mississippi, and when it was finished he paid them off along with the boat. He himself relates his encounter in a Louisiana swamp with an escaped slave whom he convinced to surrender and personally accompanied to the plantation from which he had escaped. Come on, he was not a reader of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Like blacks, he also did not consider Native Americans equal. Curiously, his own identity is unclear. Son of a French ship captain with a sugar plantation (and slaves) in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti) and one of his lovers, Audubon blurred his origins in a cloud of myths and lies, describing his mother as a beautiful woman of extraction. Spanish woman murdered during one of the frequent slave revolts on the island. Which has been discovered to be false (such as the fact that he learned to paint with Jacques-Louis David).

The exhibition dedicated to him by the Natural History Museum in London is discreet. It is located in the Nature Gallery, on the ground floor, near where the plaque with a paratrooper and the motto “Spirit and Resistance” is located, which reminds us that the museum was located during the Second World War, in three sealed galleries, the Station XVB of the SOE (Special Operations Executive), the organization in charge of mounting the risky clandestine missions in Nazi-occupied Europe. Of course the museum is a box of surprises. Graduated John James Adubon and his ‘Birds of America’the exhibition occupies three double display cases and includes five plates of engravings from the naturalist’s magnum opus, his portrait by Lance Calkin that shows him full of “frontier spirit” and dressed as if he were going on a date with Pocahontas, considerations about his method of artistic work, details of the printing process (he used the largest sheets of paper that existed, the so-called “double elephant”, measuring 97 x 65 centimeters), a volume of his Ornithological Biography, and a stuffed bird that looks like it’s just dead, the poor thing (the pink earwig or scissor-tailed flycatcher). Among the plates, the famous one of the tricolor heron, described by Audubon as “delicate in form, beautiful in plumage, and full of grace in its movement”; and that of the American tantalum, the only stork native to North America and currently in recession. The exhibition praises Audubon, but does not fail to point out the criticism that has rained down on him and deplores that the supremacist naturalist did not recognize how much the blacks and Native Americans whom he despised helped him in his research and explorations. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the controversy, that thing with feathers.

The exhibition is not the only mention of the naturalist in the museum. In the section Treasuresa selection in the Cadogan Callery of 22 of the center’s most extraordinary objects, other Audubon prints are shown (as well as one of Captain Scott’s three famous eggs, that is, those of the imperial penguin collected during his last expedition to Antarctica ).

By one of those coincidences in life, visiting the exhibition about Audubon coincided with reading a wonderful book about him, Audubon at Sea (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which collects the coastal and transatlantic adventures of the naturalist in his own texts, presented, edited and annotated by Christopher Irmscher and a good acquaintance, Richard J. King, whose splendid and recent Sailing alone we already realized. Audubon—Nórdica published his Mississippi diary in 2021—is considered a terrestrial ornithologist (and the phrase is worth it), who traveled through the interior of North America birding (and shooting). But this book reminds us that he also spent a lot of time at sea (12 crossings of the Atlantic and numerous voyages along the North American coast) watching seabirds (and shooting), although he was afraid of the sea and got seasick.

On the voyage from New Orleans to Liverpool in 1826 aboard the schooner Delos, of which he left a diary, saw whales and sharks, and described the fishing and agony of dolphins and other creatures on deck with a deplorable lack of mercy. He also described on a trip to the Florida Keys a grisly massacre of pelicans (he explains the use of the characteristic membrane under the beak of these birds, once dried, as a useful bag for gunpowder and bullets). But what made me most sad was reading in the story of his last trip to Labrador, the atrocious extermination he perpetrated on the Perroquet Islands of puffins, those friendly little birds that cannot but inspire tenderness. Accompanied by two sailors and carrying several double-barreled shotguns, Audubon shoots thousands of nesting birds for an entire hour, noting that, wow, it looks like half the world’s population is there. “How many puffins I killed (puffins) at that time, I take the liberty of leaving it to your imagination,” he proclaims, satisfied with the carnage.

“Ambiguous hero at best,” Irmscher and King describe Audubon in the coda of their book. They remember that in 1830, the naturalist and his wife transferred to a black woman and her two children – “who belonged to us,” Audubon noted – to some friends so that they would use them when they went to England for a while. In his talks, he went from imitating the voice of birds to singing “the cry of the red man” as if the Native Americans were just another species of fauna. The authors point out that “Audubon was certainly not a Saint Francis of Assisi” and “he hunted many more birds than he needed for his artistic and scientific task.” And they very rightly conclude that the naturalist, who died in 1851 in New York with a mind ravaged by dementia like a field under a plague of starlings, was undoubtedly a man of his time, as they say to exonerate someone, but he certainly failed to be, as the truly great tend to be, a man ahead of his time.