FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxvii 



tlement in the Hudson Bay country at the end of the eighteenth 

 century." Verily, "man walketh in a vain shadow, and dis- 

 quieteth himself in vain." The noble lord Thomas Douglas, 

 who gave his all to his country, in after years is confounded 

 with that notorious pirate Alexander Selkirk, who was bucca- 

 neering in the South Seas in the seventeenth century and, after 

 having reformed, as we may hope, became the prototype of 

 Robinson Crusoe ! 



Lord Selkirk's active' colonial work lasted seventeen years, 

 1803-1820, during which time Audubon, with the exception of 

 parts of two years (1805-1806) at Coueron, was in the United 

 States, engaged, when not hunting birds, in various business 

 enterprises. On July 26, 1817, Audubon executed a power of 

 attorney in favor of his brother-in-law, Gabriel Loyen du 

 Puigaudeau, a little more than a year after his father had 

 drawn up his last will, and but little over six months before 

 his death. This will was at once contested by a number of 

 nieces, in the courts of Nantes, on the ground that his ille- 

 gitimate children, J. J. Audubon and Rosa du Puigaudeau, 

 could not inherit Jean Audubon's property under existing 

 French law. Nothing was said about the Dauphin or the per- 

 sonal identity of the son. When this litigation became known, 

 Audubon seems to have broken off all relations with his father's 

 family at Coueron, and in June, 1820, after the lawsuit had 

 been settled by compromise, we find the brother-in-law writing 

 him an appealing letter, saying that no word had come from 

 him in two years and that Madame Audubon "does not cease 

 to speak of you." Audubon did not ignore this appeal, but, 

 as recorded in his journal on January 10, 1821, at New Or- 

 leans, he wrote letters to his brother-in-law and to his foster 

 mother, at Coueron, a long neglected duty, as he acknowledged. 



In his European journal Audubon spoke of "my mother, 

 the only one I can truly remember; and no one ever had a 

 better, nor a more loving one. Let no one speak of her as my 

 stepmother. I was ever to her a son of her own flesh and blood, 

 and she was to me a true mother." If such apparently spon- 



