In 1802 Rafinesque was sent with his brother to America and became a shipper's, clerk at Philadelphia, where he spent all of his spare time in the study of nature, plants being his first and greatest love. Here he was befriended by Dr. Benjamin Rush, and during this period he made the acquaintance of many pioneer naturalists in the United States. In 1805 the offer of a lucrative situation in Sicily lured him back to the Old World and to a country already known to him. There he soon discovered the medicinal squill, of ancient repute and thought to be an antidote, which in the form of syrup was long the bane of childhood; this and other medicinal drugs he exported to the European and American markets in such quantities that before the secret of his trade became known to the jealous Sicilians, he had reaped from it, in conjunction with his other enterprises, a small fortune. During the ten years that were spent in Sicily we find him the manager of a successful whisky distillery, the chancellor or secretary of the American Consulate at Palermo, editor, writer, and correspondent of learned men in Europe, as well as traveler and explorer in every part of the island, which he proposed to monograph with all of its contents. At Palermo Rafinesque met the English naturalist, William Swainson, his lifelong correspondent; together they tramped over the island and together they worked for a number of years on the fishes of the western coast.[265] Swainson, who became the friend of Audubon, was one of the few who later defended Rafinesque. Rafinesque espoused a Sicilian woman of the Catholic faith, and had by her two children, of whom a daughter lived to maturity; this experience seems to have embittered him against the sex, for no other woman excepting his mother, to whom his _Life of Travels_ was dedicated, was ever mentioned in his writings, and this one was disinherited in his extraordinary will. Through fear of being drafted into the French wars, he assumed for a time his mother's family name of Schmaltz, and finally left Sicily in disgust; taking with him his fortune and "fifty boxes of personal goods," he set out again for America in 1815. Sicily, he declared in epigram, offered "a fruitful soil, a delightful climate, excellent productions, perfidious men, deceitful women."