Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time. Vol. 2 (of 2)Herrick, Francis Hobart
History
Audubon the Naturalist: A History of His Life and Time. Vol. 2 (of 2)
Herrick, Francis Hobart
Audubon, John James, 1785-1851
On July 14 the _Ripley_ took the party forty-three miles farther east
to Little Maccatina, or Hare Harbor, as it is called today, where they
remained until July 21, proceeding thence to Baie de Portage. Here
they were able to enter their small boats, and visited the captain
of a whaling schooner from New Brunswick, a Canadian trapper, and a
Scotchman, Samuel Robertson by name, who was engaged in the sealing
industry at Sparr Point, all of whom Audubon pumped for information on
the country and its products. On July 25, they started for "Chevalier's
Settlement," but were caught in a storm, and came to in Bras d'Or
(Bradore) Bay; there they found the Labrador Duck, which in 1875, but
forty-two years later, had become totally extinct.
At the approach of August the brief Labrador summer, of barely one
month, was drawing to a close, and Audubon was exerting his utmost
efforts to accomplish his purposes. Under date of August 10 he
wrote:[39]
My reason for not writing at night is that I have
been drawing so constantly, often seventeen hours a
day, that the weariness of my body at night has been
unprecedented, by such work at least. At times I felt
as if my physical powers would abandon me; my neck, my
shoulders, and, more than all, my fingers, were almost
useless through actual fatigue at drawing. Who would
believe this? Yet, nothing is more true. When at the
return of dawn my spirits called me out of my berth,
my body seemed to beg my mind to suffer it to rest a
while longer; and as dark forced me to lay aside my
brushes I immediately went to rest as if I had walked
sixty-five miles that day, as I have done _a few times_
in my stronger days. Yesternight, when I rose from my
little seat to contemplate my work and to judge of the
effect of it compared with the nature which I had been
attempting to copy, it was the affair of a moment;
instead of waiting, as I always like to do, until the
hazy darkness which is to me the best time to judge of
the strength of light and shade, I went at once to rest
as if delivered from the heaviest task I ever performed.
The young men think my fatigue is added to by the fact
that I often work in wet clothes, but I have done that
all my life with no ill effects. No! no! it is that I am
no longer young. But I thank God that I did accomplish
my task; my drawings are finished to the best of my
ability, (and) the skins well prepared by John.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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