The New Criterion

The page of a notebook that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing on in 1798 records that his son Hartley, age two, fell down and skinned his knee and that in the swamps of Florida the dominant bull alligator bellows like nothing on earth to keep away fifty bachelor contenders for his wives. Hartley was comforted by being shown the moon, after which his father went back to making notes on William Bartram’s Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791), a book that, as John Livingston Lowes’s classic study of Coleridge’s reading, The Road to Xanadu (1927), demonstrated in 574 scholarly pages, was a gold mine of images and exotic information. “I am,” Coleridge once said, “well up on the far out.”

Wordsworth, too, got a poem (“Ruth”) out of Bartram. The Travels had fans in Emerson, Carlyle, Thoreau, and Southey. It proved to be a book for poets. Hack reviewers doubted its veracity, and scientists, for whom it was intended, were cool toward so personal and episodic an adventure.

Bartram’s travels are the best kind of adventure in that they are the hardships and ad hoc heroism of a quiet, city-bred Philadelphia Quaker. Lewis and Clark expected bears, hostile Indians, uncrossable rivers, and hyperactive weather. Bartram was looking for new species of plants, birds, and fish. The tropical storms he encountered, the mosquitoes in opaque droves, the rattlesnakes, the Seminoles, and flotillas of alligators were jolting surprises that he dealt with as he could.

Eight years before Bartram’s travels, his father John had been appointed Botanist for the North American Colonies by George III. John Bartram had been supplying British gardeners with New World plants for years, with a London dealer to handle the transactions (their correspondence survives). The eighteenth century was an age of gentleman gardeners and of horticultural experiments (the Bounty was loaded with breadfruit saplings). Despite his sixty-six years, John Bartram undertook a botanizing expedition to South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, with William as his assistant, from July 1765 to February 1766. It was on this trip that they discovered the rare and beautiful forest shrub Franklinia altamaha “on the banks of the River Altamaha in Georgia” that has always been associated with them in the history of botany. (It has been reclassified as Gordonia franklinia).

A biography of William (“Billy”) necessarily must be one of his father as well. Thomas Slaughter in writing both their lives invokes the two meanings of nature, the natural world they studied, and their characters. Both were well into maturity before they found themselves. Both are examples of the kind of self-invention that early Americans were so good at. Benjamin Franklin is the most obvious example—a Dick Whittington who would have astonished Florentines in the days of the Medicis. John had a hard go of being accepted as a scientist, as did Billy before his four years of travels (so disorienting that he always called them “five years”—Robinson Crusoe has the same trouble with time). But both earned the world’s recognition, and both lived to a patriarchal age in the family house and its botanical gardens (still there). This house, Kingsessing near Darby, Pennsylvania, is one of the American “places.” The Swedish botanist Peter Kalm (for whom the Bartrams named mountain laurel Kalmia) had wonderful discussions there about fossils. Washington visited, and Jefferson bought seeds. Just last week I received from a friend in Virginia a packet of hyacinth bean seeds, from Monticello, where in all likelihood Billy Bartram sent them.

Slaughter’s biography, superceding Ernest Earnest’s of 1940 (also a double life of John and William), is new in its psychological handling of an eighteenth-century Quaker father and his nineteenth-century son with artistic leanings. Science at this time easily cooperated with art, as witness Audubon. The ornithologist Alexander Wilson, who became a protégé of William’s, began by sending him drawings “to have names put on.”

John was British; William, American. John was of the Protestant Enlightenment, a married farmer with a large family, a stern if original moralist expelled from his Friends meeting for denying the divinity of Jesus. William’s affections are unknown. He was something of a Romantic deist, without love affairs or wife. In some sense they were the same person, living for 124 years. The old William with his pet crow that stole his glasses, who received European visitors, who wrote down the weather all day, had become his father John, napping at the same time under the same tree in the midst of a Pennsylvania paradise.

Slaughter is a congenial writer, comfortably personal about the research (he’s a historian) and thought that went into this biography. He is, however, all too willing to fall into step with a trendy agenda and fret about John’s “racism” (that is, his unkind remarks about the Indians who murdered his father), and Linnaeus’s “sexism” in his botanical taxonomy, Billy’s periods of depression (compared to William Styron’s) and other ephemeral liberal dithering vaguely Freudian and poststructural.

The Library of America’s Travels and Other Writings is a welcome and exemplary addition to their series. The Travels have never been out of print, but no previous reprint has included generous examples of Bartram’s illustrations (six color plates and thirty-two pages of botanical and zoological drawings) or the concise digest of the Travels written as a scientific report, together with his ethnographic papers.

The Travels caught Coleridge’s eye because of its prose; William took for his model various eighteenth-century descriptions in which “the sublime” was beginning to subsume the terrible and the awesome. The Romantic sensibility was being born in Bartram’s Florida thunder storms and bellowing alligators, endless swamps, and the grandeur of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The historical moment of the travels—during the Revolution—gives them a strange dislocation, a kind of secret enterprise behind the scenes of great drama on stage. When Bartram was at Cowee, North Carolina, in 1774, forty farmers in Lexington, Massachusetts, stood in a line on the village green and “fired the shot heard round the world.” Cowee is still there, not much changed, except that there’s a hiking club and a Bartram Trail that they keep neat and well-marked.