The lists of the army of five thousand which Rochambeau's fleet brought to our aid in the American War of Independence show but a single variant of this euphonious patronym, in Pierre Audibon,[15] a soldier in the regiment of Touraine, who was born at Montigny in 1756; but in the fleet of the Count de Grasse which coöperated with our land-forces at the Battle of Yorktown, on October 19, 1781, a ship was commanded by an officer with whom we are more intimately concerned. This was Captain Jean Audubon, who was later to become the father of America's pioneer woodsman, ornithologist and animal painter. By birth a Vendean, at the age of thirty-seven Jean Audubon had plowed the seas of half the world, and in the course of his checkered career, as sailor, soldier, West Indian planter and merchant, had met enough adventure to furnish the materials for a whole series of dime novels. Short of stature, with auburn hair and a fiery temper, he was then as stubborn and fearless an opponent as one could meet on the high seas, and one of the gamest fighting cocks of the French merchant marine. How much Jean Audubon's son owed to his French Creole mother will never be known, but to this self-taught, thoroughly capable, and enterprising sailor we can surely trace his restless activity, his versatile mind and mercurial temper, as well as an inherent capacity for taking pains, which father and son possessed to a marked degree. The true story of Jean Audubon's career has never been told, but even at this late day it will be found an interesting human document; and what is more to our purpose, it throws into sharp outline much that has hitherto remained obscure in the life of his remarkable son. The first Audubon to leave any imprint, however faint, upon the history of his time, this honest, matter-of-fact sailor, would have been the last to wish to appear in the garb of fiction, and we shall base our story solely upon the unimpeachable testimony of public and private records, which researches in France had happily brought to light before the beginning of the war in 1914.[16] Jean Audubon came by his sailor's instincts and fighting prowess naturally, for his father, Pierre Audubon of Les Sables d'Olonne, was a seaman by trade. Like his son he captained his own vessel, and for years made long voyages between French ports in both the old and the new worlds. Pierre Audubon, the paternal grandfather of John James Audubon, and the first of that name of whom we have found any record,[17] lived at Les Sables d'Olonne, where with Marie Anne Martin, his wife, he reared a considerable family in the first half of the eighteenth century.