1785-04-26: (John James Audubon, Born in Les Cayes as the Illegitimate Son of a French Planter and a French Servant, Who Fled Haiti’s Slave Unrest as a Child…

1785-04-26: (John James Audubon, Born in Les Cayes as the Illegitimate Son of a French Planter and a French Servant, Who Fled Haiti’s Slave Unrest as a Child, Emigrated to the United States to Avoid Conscription, and Became the Most Famous Ornithological Artist in American History, His Haitian Origins Largely Forgotten): John James Audubon was born on April 26, 1785, in Les Cayes, the illegitimate son of a French sugarcane planter and a French servant. He was named Jean Rabin, taking his mother’s surname. Sensing the threat posed by growing slave unrest, his father sold his plantation and returned to France in 1789, taking the boy with him. In 1794, his father officially adopted him and renamed him Jean-Jacques Audubon. In 1803, to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s military, the young Audubon procured a false passport and emigrated to the United States, where he anglicized his name to John James. From childhood, Audubon had been fascinated by birds, and after a series of failed business ventures in America, he devoted his life to ornithology and drawing. Unlike most contemporary artists, he depicted birds in their natural habitats, studying their behavior, migration patterns, and anatomy with scientific rigor. In 1826, he sailed to Britain with over three hundred bird drawings. Between 1827 and 1838, he published The Birds of America, featuring 435 life-size hand-colored prints from engraved plates, a work of staggering artistic and scientific ambition. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1830 and died in New York City on January 27, 1851. The National Audubon Society, established in 1905 to promote conservation, bears his name. In 1975, a Haitian postage stamp scandal involving fake Audubon bird stamps exposed the corruption of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s regime. Audubon’s Haitian origins are largely invisible in American popular memory, another instance of the way Haiti’s contributions to the world are systematically erased.