Frontispiece and title page of "Travels" by William Bartram.
Sketch of John and William Bartram.
A Map of the Coast of East Florida drawn by William Bartram for Travels. Image: John Bowman Bartram Special Collections Library.
1782
Franklinia alatamaha by William Bartram.
Frontispiece and title page of "Travels" by William Bartram.
Sketch of John and William Bartram.
William Bartram Trail marker in McIntosh County, Georgia, United States.
A Map of the Coast of East Florida drawn by William Bartram for Travels. Image: John Bowman Bartram Special Collections Library.
Alexander Wilson, Scottish-American poet, ornithologist, naturalist, and illustrator.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1883011116/?tag=2022091-20
1776
(This is the first inexpensive, illustrated edition of one...)
This is the first inexpensive, illustrated edition of one of the most delightful books of the 18th century. A major source work in American geography, anthropology, and natural history, it contains accurate and entertaining descriptions of the area of the New World now embraced by Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486200132/?tag=2022091-20
1777
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/116271459X/?tag=2022091-20
1791
(More than two centuries have passed since the publication...)
More than two centuries have passed since the publication of William Bartram's Travels in 1791. His work was visionary, fostered the development of a truly American strain of natural history, and transcended scientific boundaries to deeply influence Coleridge, Wordsworth, and other Romantic poets.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881462225/?tag=2022091-20
1791
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1170770479/?tag=2022091-20
1791
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820328774/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803262051/?tag=2022091-20
Botanist naturalist scientist ornithology
William Bartram was born on April 20, 1739, in Kingsessing, Pennsylvania. William was the third son of the botanist John Bartram and his second wife, Ann Mendenhall. He grew up on his father’s farm at Kingsessing, four miles from Philadelphia.
In 1752 William Bartram was sent to the Academy of Philadelphia; his studies there included Latin and French, but botany and drawing, his father wrote, were “his darling delight.” The father encouraged his son in these directions, taking him on botanizing trips to the Catskill Mountains in 1753 and to Connecticut in 1755, and letting him sketch on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, instead of working and going to the meeting.
Samples of William’s work were sent to Peter Collinson, his father’s London friend and patron, who was much pleased with them. Before he left the Academy in 1756, William was making natural history drawings for Collinson and for George Edwards, who used them and William’s descriptions of Pennsylvania birds in his Gleanings of Natural History. Two of William’s drawings of turtles were printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine.
William had no idea what profession or trade he should enter. His father, sure only that he did not “want him to be what is called a gentleman,” consuited Collinson and Benjamin Franklin. He considered medicine, surveying, printing, and engraving for the lad; but finally, in 1757, apprenticed him to a merchant. In 1761 William moved to Cape Fear, North Carolina, where he opened a trading store that soon failed. Nothing, in fact, went well for him, and by 1764 he seemed to Collinson, who liked him, to be “lost in indolence and obscurity.”
In 1765 John Bartram, setting out on his trip to Florida, asked William to accompany him. When the journey was over, William chose to remain in the south.
The young man succeeded no better as a planter than as a merchant. He returned to Pennsylvania, eked out a poor living by various means, and made a few drawings for Dr. John Fothergill, the London Quaker physician who had succeeded Collinson as the Bartrams’ patron. But the lure of the Carolinas and Florida was strong, and in 1771 William was in the south again. Fothergill encouraged him to visit Florida, offered him fifty pounds a year, and agreed to purchase any drawings he made. With this assurance, William set out in March 1773 on the travels that were to make his reputation.
For four years he traveled through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Much of the way he went alone; and so patient were his innocence and devotion to nature that colonial governors - even in wartime - let him come and go freely, and the Indians everywhere welcomed him, naming him Puc-puggy, the “Flower Hunter.” Bartram made notes on birds, animals, fishes, and plants, which were everywhere in profusion, and he recorded the life of the Indians. He wandered along meandering streams, refreshed himself from crystal springs, took refuge in dark caves from crashing thunderstorms, marveled at the terrifying roar and thrash of angry alligators, and stood in awe before forests of azalea so bright that the very mountains seemed on fire. In this world, which was as much of his own making as nature’s, Bartram found peace. He returned to Kingsessing in January 1778, however, and never left again. His brother John, who had inherited their father’s farm and garden, made him welcome; and so, after John’s death, did their sister and her husband. He worked in the garden, planting, grafting, and performing the many other chores the nursery required. In 1782 the University of Pennsylvania offered him the professorship of botany, but he declined it.
He wrote up his notes and sometimes shyly showed them to visitors, but he was in no hurry to publish, and the Travels did not appear until 1791. The book was reprinted in London in 1792 and 1794; and before the decade closed, other editions appeared in Paris, Dublin, Vienna, Berlin, and Holland. Most reviewers praised Bartram’s descriptions of natural products and of the Indians; but almost all criticized his style as florid, luxuriant, imaginative, imprecise, and personal. Yet it is for its style that the Travels is best known, and for its influence on romantic literature that it has its most lasting fame. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand filled pages of their notebooks with excerpts from the Travels; and from these notebooks Bartram’s figures and sense of nature passed through the poets’ richly imaginative minds and reappeared, still recognizable, in Ruth, “Kubla Khan,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Atala, and other works. Bartram, in short, was one of the earliest voices, and one of the authentic sources, of the nineteenth- century romantic movement.
The fame of the Travels, in addition to John Bartram’s reputation, brought a procession of visitors to Kingsessing; otherwise, William’s life was unchanged. He wrote down his observations of the Creek and Cherokee Indians for Benjamin Smith Barton, made most of the drawings for Barton’s Elements of Botany (1803), and wrote a few papers for Barton’s Philadelphia Medical and Physical Journal, among them a biographical sketch of his father.
On 22 July 1823, having completed in his study note on the natural history of a plant, Bartram took a few steps, collapsed, and died in the house where he was born. A portrait by Charles Willson Feale, done in 1808, is in the Independence National Historical Park collection, Philadelphia.
William Bartram's major contribution to science was in his Philadelphia publication of his account of his southeastern explorations, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, and E. and W. Florida. It was immensely popular in Europe and went through many editions and translations, eventually providing inspiration to romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge (whose Kubla Khan and Ancient Mariner were influenced by the work). He also furnished materials to Benjamin Smith Barton which found their way into Barton's publications Elements of Botany and Essay toward a Materia Medica.
His botanical work is noted for its splendid imagery and eloquence. His standards of completeness and accuracy were high, and his list of native species of birds was excelled only by the later work of his protégé and friend Wilson. His dependability was not great, however, and his actual production of major works was limited to the Travels.
Bartram was also influential in starting the young Scot Alexander Wilson on his study of North American bird life.
Numerous places and sites are named in his honor: The William Bartram Scenic & Historic Highway, Bartram Trail High School in Switzerland, The Bartram Trail, The Bartram Canoe Trail, The William Bartram Arboretum, Bartram Hall on the University of Florida, Bartram Trail Regional Library System.
(This is the first inexpensive, illustrated edition of one...)
1777(More than two centuries have passed since the publication...)
1791The Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture elected him a member in 1785. At its founding in 1812, the Academy of Natural Sciences made him a member as well. He was also a member of the American Philosophical Society, but took no interest in its work and never attended a meeting.
Gentle, loving, and well loved, “the happiest union of moral integrity with original genius and unaspiring science,” William Bartram lived out his life in harmony with the numberless lives in nature all about him. Without formal education in science, he was nonetheless recognized, as his father had been, for his unequaled knowledge of the natural world. Many sought his help, and he cheerfully shared all he knew.
William never married.
Alexander Wilson (July 6, 1766 – August 23, 1813) was a Scottish-American poet, ornithologist, naturalist, and illustrator. Identified by George Ord as the "Father of American Ornithology", Wilson is regarded as the greatest American ornithologist prior to Audubon. In particular, the ornithologist Alexander Wilson owed much of his training to Bartram, lived for a time at the garden, and urged his benefactor to accompany him on his ornithological journeys.
