FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxi 



in a letter to his wife) : "How often I thought that I might 

 once more see Audubon of La Rochelle without being known 

 by him, and try to discover if my father was still in his rec- 

 ollection, if he had entirely forgotten Selkirk's Settlements." 

 In my version of this entry there is no s at the end of the last 

 word, but the vagueness which the plural number imparts really 

 makes no difference in our interpretation of the Dauphin ques- 

 tion. "And if," continued Audubon, ". . . if I say a few words 

 more, I must put an end to my existence, having forfeited my 

 word of honor and my oath." 



This Lord Selkirk, whose interests in Canada were para- 

 mount but who never held any public office there higher than 

 justice of the peace, had been much in the public eye in England 

 in the early part of the nineteenth century. At the time of the 

 Countess' call she had been a widow seven years, but it is pos- 

 sible that Audubon had heard all about the Earl's disastrous 

 colonial expriments through her nephew. Whether this is true 

 or not, this Selkirk reference is the slender thread on which 

 Mrs. Tyler builds an amazing superstructure. "It would ap- 

 pear," she says, "that John James Audubon was, at some time, 

 a member of Selkirk's Settlements in Canada." She writes : 

 "The long suspense is over ! At last we know the reason for 

 Admiral Jean Audubon's abnormal solicitude, which took the 

 form of the constant attendance of those black servants, who 

 guarded John James Audubon, the supposedly illegitimate son 

 of the rough sea captain of Nantes ! That little nine-year-old 

 boy, adopted by Jean Audubon on March 7, 1794, was a per- 

 sonage whose real identity might presumably be recognized by 

 the wife of the Earl of Selkirk. The wife of the Earl of Selkirk 

 had apparently known him personally when he was a settler in 

 Selkirk's Settlements. It is not very likely that the Earl's wife 

 habitually met the rough colonists sent out to the wilds of 

 North America, unless by chance one of those colonists was not 

 a real settler, but was a personage emigrating under this guise 

 in order to hide his identity, and to seek the protection of the 

 Earl's remote colony. If the Earl of Selkirk were hiding a 



