On October 4, 1831, John James Audubon presented to the Academy of Natural Sciences a copy of the first volume of the Ornithological Biography. Three weeks later, Audubon finally overcame his fierce critics in Philadelphia to become a Correspondent for the Academy. If not even more gratifying, at least financially, was the Academy of Natural Sciences becoming a subscriber to Birds of America along with two members of the Academy, Richard Harlan and John Wetherill.
Audubon attempted to build on his status in the science community by traveling to Washington to promote his plan to follow the paths that John Bartram (1699-1777) and William Bartram (1739-1823) created when they explored Florida and the St. Johns River. Audubon met with officials in the Navy and the Treasury Department to acquire the documents necessary for Audubon to travel “to the Floridas as fast as Steamboats or Coaches will allow.” Support for the expedition was also gained by Audubon agreeing to submit reports on his progress and findings to geologist G. W. Featherstonhaugh (1780-1866) in order for them to be published in a magazine Feathersonhaugh titled Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science.
We are gratified in being able to state, that he [John James Audubon] was received in the most cordial manner, at Washington, and that the distinguished gentlemen in authority there, have given him such letters to the military posts on the frontiers, as will assure him the aid and protection his personal safety may require. We anticipate the most interesting reconnaisances, both geological and zoölogical, from this enterprising naturalist.
After arriving in Norfolk, Virginia, aboard a steamship, John James Audubon road mostly in a stagecoach up and down the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and into the Lowcountry of South Carolina. Just west of Florence, Audubon and the rest of his traveling party had to paddle a canoe for three hours to cross at the time a flooded Pee Dee River. Audubon then hired another stagecoach that leaned and lurched for 50 miles across a causeway made out of logs to reach the northern bank of the Cooper River. A ferry ride across the Cooper River then deposited Audubon into the streets of Charleston, South Carolina on October 16. Audubon and his fellow travelers located an inn where, for the first time since leaving Washington, they enjoyed the luxury of sleeping in separate beds.
The bird that Audubon first noted thriving around Charleston in the saltmarsh grass and the ground referred to locally as Pluff mud was the Salt Water Marsh Hen. The bird is commonly known today as the Clapper rail. It seemed to Audubon that “for every creek of salt-water swarms with Marsh hens [Clapper rails].” The numbers were so great that many were treated simply as target practice: “there are some most expert marksmen, of whom I know two who probably were never surpassed. One of them I have seen shoot fifty Marsh-hens at fifty successive shots, and the other, I am assured, has killed a hundred without missing one.”