The Flower Hunter

William Bartram in Florida: A Restless Spirit of Curiosity.

by Judith Magee
photography by Richard T. Bryant

SweetTea Journal (Spring/Summer 2008) – On warm summer nights in his later years when William Bartram “fancied himself transported thither in his dreams,” as he wrote in a letter to a friend, the famous American botanist was revisiting the “Elysian springs and the aromatic groves” of Florida he had explored during the 1760s and 1770s. The majestic scenes, which he had found so awesome and sublime, continued to delight his slumbers some thirty years after he had first seen them. Florida and the entire southeastern United States, where he had traveled extensively, left an enduring mark on him, just as his work left an indelible imprint on how others perceived the young country itself.

When William returned to the townhomes and cobblestones of his native Philadelphia after his travels, his fond memories of Florida found expression in his writings and drawings. In 1791 he published his seminal work, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, which told of his regional expeditions in the years 1773–1777. The work brought him fame and influenced scientists in America as well as Romantic poets in Europe. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth both incorporated much imagery from William’s Travels into their poetry.

William was born in 1739 in Kingsessing, Pennsylvania, four miles outside of Philadelphia. His father, John Bartram (1699–1777), was well known as a plant collector and nurseryman who provided seeds and plants for many gardens in Europe and the American colonies. The Bartram garden, which still thrives today, became a place of pilgrimage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for naturalists and the curious-minded from around the world. It was here that John Bartram became the first to cultivate Venus’s flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), and where William grew the Franklinia alatamaha, saving it from complete extinction. It was also in this garden that William would sit, reminiscing about his years in the South and retelling his tales and adventures there to many of the young naturalists who traveled, often from great distances, to visit him.

William’s love of the natural world began at an early age, during trips he took with his father to hunt for plants. When he was not studying at the Philadelphia Academy, which later became the University of Pennsylvania, he spent his time collecting plants, catching and stuffing birds, studying mineralogy and the composition of the earth, and reproducing what he observed. His education did not include drawing, and William learned his skills as a draftsman by studying the color plates in books sent to his father by naturalists such as George Edwards and Mark Catesby.

William first visited Florida in 1765 when he accompanied his father, newly appointed as the King’s Botanist, on an expedition to the southeast region. Florida recently had been opened up to the British as a result of the 1763 treaty of Paris, in which Spain ceded the region to Britain. The Bartrams’ journey was the first dedicated to exploring the flora and fauna of the area, and as the   King’s Botanist, John was intent on collecting exotic plants and seeds to grow in his garden and send to King George III.

Their travels took them through Georgia and along the Altamaha River, where they discovered—as John later wrote in his diary—several “very curious shrubs” yet unknown to science, such as fevertree, Pinckneya bracteata, and Franklinia alatamaha, a plant that William named after Benjamin Franklin, a family friend. (In 1776, through his seed-collecting efforts, William saved Franklinia from extinction.) Father and son continued into Florida, exploring the dark labyrinthine forests of magnolia, oak, sweet gum, sweet bay, holly, and many other species that both men found “most perfect, and every way astonishing” (this and all subsequent quotations are taken from William’s Travels). During their voyage, William and John also witnessed the treaty signing between the Creek Nation and the British Government, at the Congress of Picolata, on November 18, 1765.

The Florida experience was significant for William. After traveling and discovering for ten months, John returned to Philadelphia, but William remained in the area, intent on becoming a planter near Six Mile Creek, in the vicinity of the St. Johns River. This “frolic,” as John described it, proved to be economically disastrous and almost destroyed William, sending him into a spiraling depression. But despite the hardship he suffered in his attempt, he never lost his fascination with Florida, and after returning home in 1767, William was determined to revisit at some future date its glorious displays of nature.

That date came in 1773, after he successfully persuaded John Fothergill to become his patron; William enticed the London physician with drawings that he had made in North Carolina. Fothergill provided William with the means to travel in the Southeast in exchange for seeds, plants, and drawings of new and exotic flora and fauna. So in the spring of that year, William set out from Philadelphia for Charleston, South Carolina, with the purpose of discovering “rare and useful productions of nature,” and he spent the next four years as the first botanist to explore much of this region. William’s travels not only made him world famous among naturalists, but also provided him with an independence he had never before experienced.

Once again his travels took him to the familiar haunts he had visited with his father, but this time he ventured farther afield. He attended the council and treaty signing between the British and the Cherokee and Creek Nations at Augusta, Georgia, in the summer of 1773; skirted the southern coast of Georgia from Savannah to Darien; and entered Florida along the St. Johns River. He made his camp at the two Spalding trading posts along the river, and from there, he went on excursions to explore the local islands and environs. He slept under the stars, eating only what he managed to pick or catch—nothing ever larger than the size of a turkey. His night’s slumber over, he would waken to the “gracious and beneficent smiles” of the “roseate morn” and the “music of the seraphic crane.”

Not all William’s experiences, however, were so delightful. Nature could be dangerous, threatening, and frightening, as he found out on occasion. Camping close to the river invited predators, and both alligators and bears were often closer neighbors than he cared for. Birdsong was not always his wake-up call; there were times when “the dreaded voice of the alligators shook the isle, and resounded along the neighbouring coasts, proclaiming the appearance of the glorious sun.” At other times, it was not living creatures that endangered his progress but storms. William wrote, “The skies appeared streaked with blood or purple flame overhead, the flaming lightning streaming and darting about in every direction around, seems to fill the world with fire; whilst the heavy thunder keeps the earth in a constant tremor.” 

From the lower Spalding store, William often accompanied traders going west to the town of Cuscowilla. This journey provided him the first glimpse of the Alachua Savannah, which he described as “the Elysian fields.” The route took him through grassy plains; shrubberies of Kalmia, Andromeda, and Myrica; and groves of palm, citrus, elm, and Cornus. Bartram’s sense of the sublime can be read in his description of what he saw: “This ... would have been alone sufficient to surprise and delight the traveller, but ... the attention is quickly drawn off, and wholly engaged in the contemplation of the unlimited, varied and truly astonishing native wild scenes of landscape and perspective ... how is the mind agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world!”

In the spring of 1775 William began a journey to west Florida and the Mississippi River. John, almost blind by this time, was now too old to contemplate such a journey, although reaching the Mississippi had been a dream of his for many years. For his son it was now a reality. William traveled northwest to the Piedmont, through Georgia and the native towns of the Creek and Cherokee, across to Mobile, Alabama, then a part of Florida. From there he sailed to Pensacola, the capital of west Florida, where Governor Chester invited him to conduct further research in natural history in the area. Chester offered to bear William’s expenses, and he invited the botanist to stay in his own palace—“a large stone building ornamented with a tower, built by the Spaniards”—for as long as William wished.

Tempting as Chester’s offer was, William was determined to reach the Mississippi and spent but a short time in Pensacola. Returning to Mobile, he took a boat bound for the town of Manchac on the Mississippi River, but he soon became very ill and sought treatment from a Mr. Rumsey on Pearl Island. After some weeks William was well enough to continue his journey, and finally he stood on the banks of the Mississippi, “the great sire of rivers.” The illness had reduced his collecting days considerably, but the journey to west Florida had, nevertheless, been rich in botanical discoveries. These included the “pompous and brilliant” evening primrose (Oenothera grandiflora) and the “very singular and beautiful” oakleaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia).

The return journey took Bartram back through west Florida and into Georgia to the Creek town of Mucclasse, where he observed the lifestyle and culture of the inhabitants and studied their language. He met with “the most ancient chief of the town” who was “stone-blind by extreme old age.” He and the chief exchanged presents, with William giving the older man a fine handkerchief and a twist of tobacco and receiving from the elder “a stone pipe and cat skin of Tobacco.” William had by then become accustomed to exchanging presents with Native Americans and on one occasion had been honored with the Seminole name of Puc Puggy, meaning “flower hunter”—a name that was applied to him often when he traveled among the Native Americans. He was so flattered by this moniker that years later, he sometimes would use the name when he wrote to friends in Georgia and Florida. 

During his return to the southern coast of Georgia, William retraced some of his now well-trodden routes and was able to see the Franklinia in full bloom along the banks of the Altamaha River. By late 1776 the American Revolution and the violence that accompanied it had extended even to Georgia, and William’s travels came to an end. With plant collecting in Georgia and Florida nearly impossible, he began the weary return journey to his family and home in Philadelphia.

In 1791 William published the narrative work of his travels in the South, and within ten years, there were eight editions circulating in six different countries. His use of poetic language and the pantheistic views he expressed captured the imagination of Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Many of William’s evocative descriptions and luxuriant phrases can be found in their poetry, an American voice and view surfacing in European literature.

This use of William’s work seemed to be its natural evolution, as he had been raised in a household steeped in Enlightenment ideas. Family friends included Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, two leading figures in the American Enlightenment movement. By the second half of the eighteenth century the American intellect was dominated by science, the push toward freedom from colonialism, and the forging of a nation state. Allied to the process of nation building was the struggle for a cultural and scientific identity. William, distinguished in science, was an important figure in the development of just such a scientific identity in the new American republic; he recognized the need for Americans themselves to begin identifying, describing, and classifying their own indigenous flora and fauna.
This independence was particularly important to American scientists, considering the views of French naturalists such as the Comte de Buffon, who claimed that American species, both animal and vegetable, had degenerated over time. In his Histoire Naturelle, Buffon wrote that European species had in the past made their way to the American continent, and the poor environmental conditions, such as climate and diet, had caused them to degenerate and become smaller, weaker, and inferior to their European counterparts. Buffon also applied this theory to the indigenous people of America.

William, who was familiar with this idea of degeneration and inferiority of species, recognized that environmental conditions influenced species in different regions, but he also knew that American species had not in fact degenerated. Never one to confront directly those he disagreed with, William had instead demonstrated by example how flawed their arguments were. He wrote in his Travels of the grandeur of the “stately columns of the superb forest trees” and the splendor of the “infinite variety of animated scenes” of nature that were “inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing.” In his lengthy descriptions of Native Americans, he said that the Cherokees were “the largest race of men” and that one Seminole prince was “the most perfect human figure” he had ever seen. He saw no need of the so-called civilizing of Native Americans and concluded that the “white man” could learn much from them. “Do we want wisdom and virtue?” he asked. “Let our youth then repair to the venerable councils of the Muscogulges.”

The Bartrams, like many of their fellow Philadelphians, were members of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, but they were not typical adherents of this faith. John was a Deist and Unitarian, and he was “named” at a local Quaker meeting for disbelieving the divinity of Christ. William’s brothers and sisters were founding members of the Free Quakers, who believed they had a right to follow their consciences about whether to take up arms to defend the American republic.

William’s religious views were similar to those of his family. He too was a Unitarian, and when in Georgia in 1776, he participated in fighting with rebels against the British. The most striking feature of his religious convictions was that they were inseparable from his views of nature. William celebrated his belief in God by participating in and studying nature. For him all of creation was infused with a universal spirit, and the Creator could be discerned in all natural things. He recognized that Native Americans held views comparable to his own in their relationship with nature, and for this reason he came to admire them greatly.

It was not only poets who were influenced by William but also a host of young naturalists, who were inspired by his writings and by the experience of meeting the man himself. Many of the founding members of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia—including William’s grandnephew, entomologist Thomas Say—spent much of their youth visiting the Bartram garden. Many of these naturalists later recalled those visits as first establishing their own love of studying the natural world.

The botanist William Baldwin kept Travels with him at all times when he followed in William’s footsteps through Florida, rediscovering many plants noted in the work. Ornithologist Alexander Wilson—a protégé of William’s and the author of the nine-volume American Ornithology—owed much to William, including his knowledge of birds and how to draw them. In a letter to William about his bird drawings Wilson wrote, “They may yet tell posterity that I was honoured with your friendship, and that to your inspiration they owe their existence.”

The Bartram garden was all important to William, and it is fitting that he died there at age 84. He had dedicated his life to the study of the natural world, all the while participating and actively living in rhythm with it.

Very much a field naturalist who favored observation over classification, William had demonstrated, through his writings and drawings, a balance between the narrow categorizing and labeling of nature that dominated much of science at the time and a comprehension of the world as an integrated whole.