FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxi 



tions about himself in 1811, admitted that he was a Frenchman 

 by birth and a native of La Rochelle. 



Joseph Robert Mason, youthful companion of Audubon on 

 his famous journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in 

 1820-21, who was thus closely associated with him for twenty- 

 one months, told John Neal, fifteen years later, that Audubon 

 had repeatedly represented to him that he was born in Santo 

 Domingo. A statement to this effect was also made by James 

 J. Walsh in 1904. 6 Audubon's journal record of this river 

 journey, which I was permitted to examine rather cursorily 

 twenty years ago, was published in 1929 and is commented on 

 by Mr. Arthur. 7 While fortunate in escaping the fire and 

 general mutilation by injudicious hands, this record has been 

 tampered with at one critical point — in the entry for Novem- 

 ber 28, 1820, where Audubon spoke of his birth and parentage 

 and related incidents which he thought that his family in the 

 future might wish to know. The mutilator of his text, how- 

 ever, did not succeed in forever obscuring what the writer pre- 

 sumably intended to convey. In the two lines at this point that 

 have been blotted out as effectively with a pen as could have 

 been done with an ink-filled brush, we can reasonably infer that 

 Audubon gave his own mother's name and either stated or im- 

 plied that he was born out of wedlock and in Santo Domingo. 

 This inference seems to be justified by the addition in what im- 

 mediately follows, with the same kind of ink and probably by the 

 same hand, of the prefix "re" to the word "married." As origi- 

 nally written by Audubon, the entry reads: "My Mother, who 

 I have been told was an extraordinary beautiful Woman, died 

 shortly after my Birth and my father having married in France 

 I was removed thereto when only Two Years old and received 

 by that Rest of Women, raised and cherished by her to the 

 utmost of her Means . . ." It is evident that the person who 



"See James J. Walsh, Bibl. No. 240. 



7 See Journal of John James Audubon, Bibl. No. 250, and for repro- 

 duction of the mutilated manuscript, Stanley Clisby Arthur, Bibl. No. 264, 

 p. 118. 



