SOURCE: Regis, Pamela. “Description and Narration in Bartram's Travels.” In Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History, pp. 40-78. Northern Illinois University Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Regis examines Bartram's use of narrative as a mode for employing two different description techniques for the external world.]

As an instance of the literature of place, William Bartram's Travels represents large portions of the territories of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to readers eager for images of the New World they had never seen. Using the rhetoric and method of natural history, Bartram details “the furniture of the earth” to be found in these regions—the minerals and animals and, in particular, the plants. Using Edmund Burke's theory of the sublime and the beautiful, he describes the scenes through which he sailed, paddled, rode, and walked during his three-and-a-half-year journey through the Southeast. The two methods, natural history and the sublime, complement each other. Each compels notice of a different selection of the creation. The natural historical practitioner described individual items. The Burkean practitioner described entire scenes. For Bartram, both methods were objective. The natural historical method, as we have seen, relied on observation conducted according to exact procedures. Burke's theory, relying as it did on the observer's accurate reporting of his emotional responses, provided Bartram with a scientific way of representing his reactions to the scenes he saw.

The frame for both kinds of description is narrative, the defining characteristic of the travel genre. Travel books include interruptions of the forward progress of narrative to accommodate extended descriptions of countryside or city. Narrative and description are counterpoints to each other, narrative propelling the narrator forward through time and space, description halting him to detail the scene before him.

Narrative is for Bartram a potentially mediating form of discourse between the two modes of description that he employs. He describes both the things of the external world, represented in Travels through natural historical description, and his internal responses to the external world, represented through Burkean description of the land and the sea. Individual action, represented in Travels through narrative, is both external, as Bartram moves through the world, and internal, as he experiences his own action. Bartram reports his movements as he travels, but this narrative remains a mere frame for the description. It fails to provide a middle ground between the impersonal facts of natural history and the psychologically immediate sensations of Burkean aesthetics.

This failure of narrative in Travels is most clearly illustrated by Bartram's representations of the American Indians. When narrative fails him, he ultimately resorts to natural historical description. Natural history, the means to knowledge of a place and the provider of a universal frame for the contents of that place, is, in Bartram's hands, inadequate when it is turned upon native people. Bartram's own response to the native Americans is often given as fear or awe, the two establishing emotions of the sublime, and this leads him into perorations on the American Indians' heroic, “noble savage” natures. A representational mediate ground between the discrete facts of the manners-and-customs account and the soaring moralizing of the Burkean description is available to Bartram. Narrative would permit Bartram's reader to see American Indians in action, and might vouchsafe him and his readers a glimpse into an individual native's experience. Bartram makes a few tentative narrative forays in the first three parts of Travels. Then, in part 4, he resorts to a manners-and-customs description as the rhetoric and method of natural history provide him with the most available means to represent America's original inhabitants.

Bartram was born in 1739 near Philadelphia, where his father, one of the first botanists in America, had founded a botanical garden on the banks of the Schuylkill. He traveled from 1773 to 1778 through the American Southeast under the patronage of Dr. John Fothergill of London, returned to his family's garden, and wrote an account of his journey, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, The Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; containing An Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of those Regions, together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians.¹ During Bartram's lifetime, Travels was published in Philadelphia (1791), London (1791), Dublin (1793), Berlin (1793), Haarlem (1794-97), and Paris (1799).² This book, Bartram's only major publication, found an audience in England and on the Continent, eventually entering the canon of American literature through the auspices of readers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, and Thoreau.

Commentators on Travels have established a tradition of ignoring the natural history in the book. The early literary-source hunters did not have to concern themselves with Bartram's scientific accomplishments. Lane Cooper and later John Livingston Lowes simply followed the echoes of Bartram's text in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although N. Bryllion Fagin included in his book a consideration of Bartram's life, philosophy (including his science), and landscape, he too concentrated on an assessment of Bartram's influence on other writers.³

More recently, Robert Arner and Wayne Franklin have examined only the narrative portions of the text (parts 1 through 3) to discover the pastoral and chivalric elements of Travels. Thomas Vance Barnett extends this appropriation of the text to narrowly literary uses. He declares, after a demonstration that William Bartram was “a mediocre scientist” that, in fact, “William Bartram's Travels is … a literary work.”⁴ Efforts to limit the text before interpreting it bespeak these critics' discomfort in dealing with science, or with those elements of a text that are scientific.

Critics may simply be following Bartram's contemporary reputation as a “difficult” son to his father, a judgment that is first recorded in the letters the patron Fothergill wrote to John Bartram about his most gifted child.⁵ William Bartram's relationship with Fothergill determined his relationship with the entire natural history community. That is, it determined his pre-Travels reputation.

William Bartram was first brought to the notice of Dr. John Fothergill (1712-80) by Peter Collinson, who showed Bartram's drawings of butterflies and plants to many members of the natural history circle.⁶ Fothergill was a physician, and owner of the largest private garden in England. Adjoining a sitting room at his Upton home was a 260-foot greenhouse.⁷ He owned more than 3,000 different species of exotic plants.⁸ He prized botanical illustrations, employing artists to draw new items as they were added to his collection. In 1770 he agreed to buy any drawing that Bartram might send; in 1773, he agreed to sponsor Bartram on a trip to the Southeast.⁹

As we have seen in chapter 1, patrons could be self-interested purchasers of a service. Fothergill, like Collinson, was not motivated solely by the pure spirit of science. For patrons of plant hunters, their gardens “proved to be the most conspicuous means of enjoying the natural riches of the far corners of the earth.” Much is often made of Fothergill's generosity in thinking of and supporting William Bartram.¹⁰ Less is made of the advantages he reaped—the possession of curiosities from the New World to show his botanizing friends and to help him maintain his status in the British collectors' community.

In his letter to John offering to pay William's expenses on his trip to the Southeast, Fothergill made one thing clear: “I would not have it understood that I mean to support him.” Indeed, Fothergill was not happy about Bartram's destination:

He proposes to go to Florida. It is a country abounding with great variety of plants, and many of them unknown. To search for these, will be of use to science in general; but I am a little selfish. I wish to introduce into this country the more hardy American plants, such as will bear our winters without much shelter. However, I shall endeavour to assist his inclination for a tour through Florida; and if he succeeds, shall, perhaps, wish him to see the back parts of Canada.¹¹

Two years later Fothergill was complaining about William to John:

I have received from him about one hundred dried specimens of plants, and some of them very curious; a very few drawings, but neither a seed nor a plant.

I am sensible of the difficulty he is at in travelling through those inhospitable countries; but I think he should have sent me some few things as he went along. I have paid the bills he drew upon me; but must be greatly out of pocket, if he does not take some opportunity of doing what I expressly directed, which was, to send me seeds or roots of such plants, as wither by their beauty, fragrance, or other properties, might claim attention.¹²

A dried specimen is what a botanist puts in an herbarium, a library of plants. When an unknown specimen comes to light, the botanist compares it to the specimens that are already in the herbarium to determine the new plant's classification. A seed or root, once planted and growing in the possessor's garden, can always produce cuttings, blossoms, and fruit to dry and mount for an herbarium specimen. Thus, seeds and roots yield more glory for the collector, and a better return on his investment. This acquisitiveness is reflected in Fothergill's charge to William when he agreed to sponsor a plant-gathering trip: “I am not so far a systematic botanist, as to wish to have in my garden all the grasses, or other less observable, humble plants, that nature produces. The useful, the beautiful, the singular, or the fragrant, are to us the most material.”¹³

When Fothergill complains that William has not sent him seeds or roots, only dried plants and drawings, he is neatly reflecting the division between the pure hunt for knowledge about plants and his desire to have the best garden he can manage. Clearly, he thought of Bartram primarily as a plant hunter. Despite this limiting characterization, Fothergill did carry Bartram's name into the natural history circle both in England and on the Continent. When Fothergill died in 1780, three years after Bartram's return from the Southeast, the American botanist was deprived of this access. Bartram had probably begun writing Travels by then.¹⁴ But the war and his patron's death must have made its completion more urgent. At the time it was his single remaining opportunity for receiving the recognition he knew he deserved.

Despite his subordinate relationship to Fothergill, Bartram transcended the role of plant hunter to become a respected and accomplished botanist. He never took a university degree, but studied botany and natural history with an acknowledged master—his father, John.¹⁵ He was paid for his work as a plant collector.¹⁶ He had read the revolutionizing work of Linnaeus and was aware, as we shall see, of the current concerns of an eighteenth-century botanist.¹⁷ Bartram appears in contemporary lists of scientists. One F. A. A. Meyer, commentator on Travels in its German edition, included Bartram in a 1794 list of all living zoologists; Bartram was the only American thus honored.¹⁸ In the preface to the first American botanical publication, Henry Muhlenberg lists Bartram simply as “William Bartram, Botanist.”¹⁹ The University of Pennsylvania offered him a professorship in botany, but he refused it, citing his poor health.²⁰ Despite Bartram's lack of a formal post, students eagerly sought him out, then went on to illustrious careers of their own, most notably Alexander Wilson, author of The American Ornithology.²¹ One account of Bartram's influence on botany links him with thirty-three investigators and fourteen texts.²² His scientific achievements were recognized by his election to the American Philosophical Society.²³

A cursory glance at Travels itself shows Bartram to be a natural historian with a wide range of interests—geology; botany; zoology in all of its forms, including entomology, ornithology, herpetology, and malacology; as well as anthropology. Botany was his strongest interest and the area of most of his lasting contributions. Had his drawings and verbal descriptions been published promptly, he would have claimed credit for the discovery of twenty-three American species. He was an illustrator of great talent, and his work has been favorably compared to that of Georg Ehret, the leading contemporary botanical illustrator on the Continent.²⁴

The methods of eighteenth-century natural history little resemble those of natural history's modern-day descendants, the life sciences. Thomas S. Kuhn reminds us of the “unhistorical stereotype drawn from science texts” that mistakenly urges us to hold early practitioners of a given science to a modern standard of what constitutes doing that particular science.²⁵ One popular definition holds that an enterprise is a science if information that counts as knowledge in that field is discovered through duplicatable experiments. By this criterion, natural history is not a science at all. “Scientist” is not even a term that Bartram would have applied to himself. It was coined in 1840. “Scientific,” employed in the modern sense, was not widespread until after the turn of the nineteenth century. “Science” had a long history predating Bartram, but at the time he wrote it was still being used to mean any knowledge of natural phenomena. Although Bartram did not perform experiments, he would have known about experimentation—his father was one of the first botanists in America to experiment with “mule” (hybrid) plants.²⁶ Bartram did, however, make observations of the most painstaking sort. He classified the specimens he observed using the Linnaean system, and he communicated these results to others in his scholarly community.

If the lack of experiments makes Bartam's science hard to recognize, so does the nature of his arguments in the introduction to Travels, the primary repository of his theoretical pronouncements on botany. In the introduction he writes a long essay on natural history that is organized hierarchically, covering first the vegetable and then the animal kingdom. The resulting overview establishes his metaphysical stance, and his scientific one as well. He invokes ideas of design and plenitude in the form of the Great Chain. He introduces the opposing activities of contemplation and use, opposites that remain unreconciled in the entire book as they become translated into description (which, like contemplation, is passive) and narrative (which by its nature is active, like use). To an eye alert to the signs, Bartram's introduction is a catalogue of the concerns of an eighteenth-century botanist. Such a catalogue reveals the still-close association of botany and teleology, and teleology of a grand sort—the use of design or purpose to explain events in nature.

The scope of the introduction is nothing less than the entire animate world. Bartram divides it into distinct sections whose subjects are located on progressively higher links of the Great Chain of Being: an eleven-paragraph section on the vegetable world with teleological as well as physiological speculations on several of the problems then current in botany; an eight-paragraph section on the animals with anecdotes carefully chosen to illustrate their moral system; and a four-paragraph section on American Indians that constitutes a plea for considering them to be more civilized than the usual European believed them. The general movement is toward elevation—the plants Bartram mentions are animal-like; the animals are humanlike; the savages are not savage at all. For Bartram, all creatures, plants, and inanimate things yearn upward; for those who can understand its hidden reality, everything in creation has more to recommend it than was commonly thought. Bartram reads the universe as more exalted, more able, more accomplished than it was usually seen to be. In addition to this improvement plan for the universe, he uses a mode of thought characteristic of eighteenth-century botany: analogy.

The first two sentences embody the hierarchical thinking with which Bartram's prose is suffused:

The attention of the traveller should be particularly turned, in the first place, to the various works of Nature, to mark the distinctions of the climates he may explore, and to offer such useful observations on the different productions as may occur. Men and manners undoubtedly hold the first rank—whatever may contribute to our existence is also of equal importance, whether it be found in the animal or vegetable kingdom; neither are the various articles, which tend to promote the happiness and convenience of mankind, to be disregarded.²⁷

Here Bartram states his immediate end in writing: use. (Ultimately, his end was to glorify God.) “Men and manners” are at the top of the chain, then that part of creation lesser than man but living—animals and plants—then inanimate creation (the last-mentioned “various articles”) at the bottom of the chain. Lovejoy reminds us of the common place that this hierarchy occupied in Bartram's era: “It was in the eighteenth century that the conception of the universe as a Chain of Being, and the principles which underlay this conception—plenitude, continuity, gradation—attained their widest diffusion and acceptance.”²⁸ Bartram authorizes the enterprise to his British audience first by mentioning his father, botanist to King George III; then his Father: “This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator, is furnished with an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing, equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all his creatures.”²⁹ This invocation of the Creator, with its reference to plenitude (“infinite variety”), at once authorizes the enterprise and determines its ultimate end. In addition to use, Bartram states a more immediate end for his enterprise—inspection and enjoyment. Throughout Travels Bartram claims his reason for writing is to be of use, but the text represents and invites “inspection and enjoyment,” as does his practice in the field.

The second section, which begins the long discourse on the vegetables, continues this teleological bent: “There is not any part of creation, within reach of our observations, which exhibits a more glorious display of the Almighty hand, than the vegetable world.” Having once again framed his remarks with mention of the universe and its creator, Bartram narrows his scope, confining himself merely to the earth: “It is difficult to pronounce which division of the earth, between the polar circles, produces greatest variety.” He provides a Linnaean catalogue of tropical plants that seem intended for “luxurious scenes of splendour.”³⁰ The temperate zone “exhibits scenes of infinitely greater variety, magnificence, and consequence, with respect to human economy, in regard to the various uses of vegetables.”³¹ He follows with another long list of plants of the temperate zone, which provides evidence of plenitude, one of the principles of the Great Chain of Being. The fulsome list evokes the brimming creation.

This section has another aim as well. Bartram has divided the globe into zones—a common practice today. But traveling in the colonies in 1749, Peter Kalm, a Linnaean disciple, records in his diary this conversation with William's father: “[John Bartram] reiterated what he had often told me before, namely that all plants and trees have a special latitude where they thrive best, and that the further they grow from this region, whether to the north or south, the smaller and more delicate they become, until finally they disappear entirely.”³² In 1749 this observation was noteworthy. As a topic of conversation it recurred in Kalm's talks with John Bartram. It was not simply a settled matter. The rest of their conversation that day involved instances of plants at the extreme limits of what we now call their range, including an aloe growing in Virginia.

In a section of the introduction devoted to plants that seem to straddle the boundary between plants and animals, William Bartram discusses the function of parts of the pitcher plants (Sarracenia), of the apparently volitional motion of both the Venus flytrap (Dionea muscipula), and of the tendrils of certain climbing plants, such as the cucumber (Curcurbita). He speculates on the little “lid” of the pitcher plant, the “cordated appendage,” which nature has provided to guard against the vessel's filling with water and breaking. The plant's leaves, shaped like pitchers, cannot support a “sudden and copious supply of water from heavy showers of rain, which would bend down the leaves, never to rise again because their straight parallel nerves which extend and support them are so rigid and fragile, the leaf would inevitably break when bent down to a right angle.”³³ This is our first evidence of Bartram's link to branches of natural history other than taxonomy. Bartram is speculating as to the function of certain structures he observed and sketched.³⁴ The prominent “nerve”—the supporting rib and its branches—is featured in each of several renderings he made of the plant. The mode of discourse here, rather than the catalogue, is analysis; the mechanism of explanation, the analogy. Parts of plants are compared to parts of animals.

In employing analogies, Bartram weaves into his work one of the dominant threads of eighteenth-century botanical discourse. For many historians of botany, the analogic method of investigation marks Bartram as, at the very least, one who would be left by the wayside when the histories of botany were finally written. In one such history Philip C. Ritterbush has recovered the place that analogy held in eighteenth-century botanical reasoning. Naturalists believed, and based arguments on the proposition, that “plants were analogous to animals because of their close proximity in the scheme of nature.” His disapproval of such analogizing is plain: “Although the authority of science was invoked on [its] behalf the concept reflected an improper understanding of organic nature, far exceeded the evidence given for [it], and too often led naturalists to neglect observations and experiment in favor of abstract conceptions.”³⁵

A second historian of botany, François Delaporte, sets himself against historians like Ritterbush who vilify the analogists and champion the experimentalists:

The analogical method was a hindrance, it is argued, because it was a procedure the eighteenth century presumably inherited from the Renaissance or even Antiquity. The identification of the various parts of the vegetable organism with the known parts of the animal was, we are told, a source of error. In contrast, the work done by experimentalists and observers was supposedly a prefiguration of the nineteenth century.

This separation of the botanists into two camps—the successful observers and the misguided analogists—is problematic, says Delaporte.

That the discipline has had to be divided up in this way is one indication that something has gone wrong. For one thing, the logical connections among certain statements are obscured, because botanists numbered among the analogists happen to have become involved in observation or experiment. For another, the use of analogy by those described as observers and experimentalists is disguised.³⁶

Ritterbush discovers the relationship between the Great Chain, the usual eighteenth-century way of visualizing the Creator's plan, and analogy: “There was a reciprocal relationship between analogies and imputed proximity of place on the scale. The discovery of certain properties which plants shared with animals lent encouragement to the belief that they were close to animals upon the scale of beings and that consequently any number of analogies might pertain between them.”³⁷ Analysis—what Bartram calls analysis moderns would likely call observation and description—went hand in hand with reasoning from analogy. And since there was a plan, one could reason not only from the Creation to the blueprint for it, but from the blueprint back to the Creation. This is much more consequential than the accidentally heuristic models that twentieth-century scientists construct. This same correspondence, this same path to truth, was also possible with the parts of the Creation—plants were believed to be like animals because they shared with them certain functions such as nourishing themselves, reproducing themselves, and moving volitionally. One could reason from the better-known animals to the lesser-known plants just as one could reason from the blueprint to the Creation. Analogy was not simply a way to explain a lesser-known thing in terms of a better-known thing—a one-way flow of knowledge; instead, it was a way to know both things in terms of each other—a two-way flow.

This speculative reasoning in the introduction is quite different from the taxonomy that is the focus of parts 1-4 of Bartram's Travels. It places Bartram's thought in a broader context. The Great Chain of Being figures not only as the overarching scheme for the taxonomic work that Bartram did but also as a sort of metaphysical abacus. A plant's essence, like a counter on an abacus rod, could be moved higher, toward the animals, or lower, toward inanimate matter, through this analogical thinking. By choosing certain difficult cases, such as an animal-like “carnivorous vegetable” (the Venus flytrap) and arguing from observable characteristics to metaphysical states, Bartram could slide enough counters toward a higher state of being to shift the whole nature of the Creation. Analogy between plants and animals had led Linnaeus to his “sexual system” of taxonomy. (Reproduction in animals was understood before reproduction in plants.) Bartram, in his speculations here, was in tune with the scientific methods of his day, however odd it now seems to us that he would try to demonstrate the animality of certain plants.

This elevation of the things in the “glorious apartment of the Creator” is carried through to his observations of certain animals. Bears seem humanlike in their “parental and filial affections.”³⁸ Spiders are “cunning” and “intrepid” in their hunting; birds, “social and benevolent creatures.”³⁹ But if one consequence of his analogizing is his exaltation and sentimentalization of animals, another is his willingness to look at American Indians in a spirit of equality. The final paragraphs of the introduction are Bartram's plea to European settlers to send visitors to the American Indians “to learn perfectly their languages, and by a liberal and friendly intimacy become acquainted with their customs and usages, religious and civil; their system of legislation and police, as well as their most ancient and present traditions and history.” This is quite a program. Its goal might be assimilation: “[The Indians] were desirous of becoming united with us, in civil and religious society,” but it is assimilation based on thorough knowledge.⁴⁰ He does not suggest a missionary excursion where European visitors would teach the native Americans an imported language, traditions, and history; rather, he suggests exactly the kind of visit that he himself makes in Travels—to “learn perfectly” and to return “to make true and just reports.” He suggests, in short, an expedition whose methodology is scientific within the broad compass of natural history.

Bartram's introduction, written after his return from the Southeast, puts into motion the elements of his science and of his thinking, and offers us a way to understand where many of his more-commented-upon ideas came from. The universe is a hierarchy, traditionally divided into three kingdoms—minerals, plants, and animals—with man at the top of animal creation. But science shows Bartram a way of blurring these categories, or employing them to redefine them: plants are like animals, animals are like men, and American Indians are like Europeans. More particularly, certain characteristics that we ascribe to animals, such as volitional movement, are also present in plants, and this blurring of the boundaries between plants and animals is grounds for reevaluating creation wholesale—and for promoting its constituents upward in our estimation of them. So animals display humanlike characteristics, and since in humans the source of these characteristics is a refined and reasoning intellect, animals must have one, too. So, too, do American Indians display European-like characteristics. They must also have similar sources for such beliefs and will benefit from the same sort of treatment that Europeans might expect under similar circumstances.

Within this universal teleology is a program for man's relationship with the natural world. There are two choices: observation and use. In Bartram's text, the corollary of observation is description; the corollary of use, narration. For Bartram traveling through the Southeast, observation and use define his possibilities for interacting with the territories through which he passes. For Bartram writing Travels, the two associated modes of discourse define the possibilities for representing that country in the text. Travels contains both modes: description on the Linnaean and Burkean models, and narrative.

Bartram was trained in the Linnaean system. His father had received a copy of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae in 1736, three years before William's birth, and had been tutored in its use by James Logan, an accomplished colonial botanist who demonstrated, experimentally, the mechanism by which pollen fertilized corn.⁴¹ Bartram's mastery of the Linnaean system is best demonstrated by his account of his most famous discovery, Franklinia alatamaha.

It is a flowering tree, of the first order for beauty and fragrance of blossoms: the tree grows fifteen or twenty feet high, branching alternately; the leaves are oblong, broadest towards their extremities, and terminate with an acute point, which is generally a little reflexed; they are lightly serrated, attenuate downwards, and sessile, or have very short petioles; they are placed in alternate order, and towards the extremities of the twigs are very large, expand themselves perfectly, are of a snow white colour, and ornamented with a crown or tassel of gold coloured refulgent staminae in the centre, the inferiour petal or segment of the corolla is hollow, formed like a cap or helmet, and entirely includes the other four, until the moment of expansion; its exterior surface is covered with a short silky hair; the borders of the petals are sessile in the bosom of the leaves, and being near together towards the extremities of the twigs, and usually many expanded at the same time, make a gay appearance: the fruit is a large, round, dry woody apple or pericarp, opening at each end oppositely by five alternate fissures, containing ten cells, each replete with dry woody cuneiform seed.⁴²

The concentration on the flower and the fruit is the hallmark of Linnaeus's sexual system of classification.⁴³ Other characteristics are not ignored, but these are the most closely scrutinized. Hence Bartram's remark about his first look at the shrub: “This very curious tree was first taken notice of about ten or twelve years ago, at this place, when I attended my father (John Bartram) on a botanical excursion; but it being then late in the autumn, we could form no opinion to what class or tribe it belonged.” Franklinia blooms in the spring. He adds this footnote:

On first observing the fructification and habit of this tree, I was inclined to believe it a species of Gordonia; but afterwards, upon stricter examination, and comparing its flowers and fruit with those of the Gordonia lasianthus, I presently found striking characteristics abundantly sufficient to separate it from that genus, and to establish it the head of a new tribe, which we have honoured with the name of the illustrious Dr. Benjamin Franklin.

Bartram was obviously more than a simple Quaker boy who rode through the American Southeast gathering new-looking plants and sending them back to England. The comparison of the flowers and fruit of one plant with those of another—the most essential procedure in naming a plant using the Linnaean method of classification—also marks him as more than a literary-minded pilgrim on a pastoral retreat.⁴⁴

The rhetoric imposed by the Linnaean method resulted in a series of descriptions, all of them static or, as in the case of Franklinia, atemporal, where blossom and fruit are represented in the same description. Even as they suspend or transcend time they establish the physical reality of the country. To represent the Southeast's natural history, Bartram had at his disposal three different forms of natural historical description: an entry describing a single item, a list of like items, and an essay encompassing the range of natural history in a given locale.

In the third chapter of the first volume of Travels, Bartram offers the reader a description of “a new species of Anona.” This is an instance of an entry describing a single item. The passage serves as an “exploded” version of an entry in a work like the Species Plantarum. It also serves as a verbal gloss on the engraving that appears on the facing page of the London 1792 edition.⁴⁵ The text-and-illustration combination permits the reader to experience the method of natural history—to look at the specimen and at the same time to read the description that Bartram has produced.

“It is very dwarf, the stems seldom extending from the earth more than a foot or eighteen inches.” With this scale in mind the reader then learns, “The leaves are long, extremely narrow, almost lineal.” A glance at the picture confirms this. “However, small as they are, they retain the figure common to the species, that is, lanceolate, broadest at the upper end and attenuating down to the petiole [leaf stalk] which is very short.” This is especially clear in the largest, centermost leaf. “Their leaves stand alternately, nearly erect, forming two series, or wings, on the arcuated [bow-shaped] stems.” The drawing clearly shows the alternating leaves, the bowed stem. “The flowers, both in size and colour, resemble those of the Antrilove”—this was beyond his technical means to show in the drawing—“and are single from the axillae of the leaves [the upper angle between a leaf or petiole and the stem from which it springs] on incurved pedunculi [stems bearing single flowers], nodding downwards.” The uppermost flower best shows this relationship between stem and leaf, the nontechnical “nodding” mirroring the “incurved pedunculi” that produce this downward-looking attitude.

This careful description and the equally careful drawing teach the reader how to look at all of the drawings and read all of the descriptions in the volume. The details of leaf shape, attachment, and flower position are precise. The verbal description enables a nonbotanical reader to understand much of the information, particularly with the aid of the drawing. Foucault explains this close association of the verbal and the visual. He notes that “the blind man in the eighteenth century can perfectly well be a geometrician, but he cannot be a naturalist.” In natural history, sight has “an almost exclusive privilege, being the sense by which we perceive extent and establish proof.” But sight itself has been narrowed, refined, reduced to the most certain of its elements. It is “a visibility freed from all other sensory burdens and restricted, moreover, to black and white.” Bartram's illustrations for this edition of Travels were black-and-white line drawings. Visibility determines natural history: “This area, much more than the receptivity and attention at last being granted to things themselves, defines natural history's condition of possibility, and the appearance of its screened objects: lines, surfaces, forms, reliefs.”⁴⁶ Foucault notes that the natural historian's sight operates within four variables: “The form of the elements, the quality of those elements, the manner in which they are distributed in space in relation to each other, and the relative magnitude of each element.” Variations in form, quality, distribution, and magnitude of five parts of the plant—“roots, stem, leaves, flowers, fruits”—become the keys to the plant's identification. He asserts that the relationship between the name and that which it denotes, between language and things, “can … be established in a manner that excludes all uncertainty.”⁴⁷ Furthermore, “the plant is thus engraved in the material of the language into which it has been transposed, and recomposes its pure form before the reader's very eyes. The book becomes the herbarium of living structures.”⁴⁸

In Bartram's description of the Anona we have the apotheosis of the Linnaean form of natural historical inquiry. A single plant is reconstituted in the mind of the reader by a verbal description. Bartram's volume included seven illustrations of natural historical specimens, yet it contained more than fifty verbal descriptions of the flora and fauna of America. He relied on the shared language of natural historical description to represent the contents of the American Southeast to the reader. The specimens and the book are made one by the rhetoric of the Linnaean method. Samples of American plants and animals are included in every copy of the book.

As we saw in chapter 1, every Linnaean binomial is backed by a description similar to the one that Bartram offered of his “new species of Anona.” When Bartram includes a Linnaean name in Travels, he invokes the entire intellectual scheme upon which the Linnaean system was built—the unique description of a single plant as well as that plant's place in the Great Chain. If the invocation of this context made the name an unambiguous representation of a part of America, it also abstracted the thing represented out of its American context. Bartram's lists compensate for this deficiency in the rhetoric that grew out of the method.

In describing an island off the coast of Sunbury, Georgia, Bartram includes lists of all of “the natural produce of these testaceous ridges”—the plants and animals.⁴⁹

The general surface of the island being low, and generally level, produces a very great variety of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants; particularly the great long-leaved Pitch-Pine, or Broom-Pine, Pinus palustris, Pinus squamosa, Pinus lutea, Gordonia Lasianthus, Liquid ambar (Styraciflua) Acer rubrum, Fraxinus excelcior; Fraxinus aquatica, Quercus aquatica, Quercus phillos, Quercus dentata, Quercus humila varietas, Vaccinium varietas, Andromeda varietas, Prinos varietas, Ilex varietas, Viburnum prunifolium, V. dentatum, Cornus florida, C. alba, C. sanguinea, Carpinus betula, C. Ostrya, Itea Clethra alnifolia, Halesia tetraptera, H. diptera, Iva, Rhamnus frangula, Callicarpa, Morus rubra, Sapindus, Cassine, and of such as grow near water-courses, round about ponds and savannas, Fothergilla gardini, Myrica cerifera, Olea Americana, Cyrilla recemiflora, Magnolia glauca, Magnolia pyramidata, Cercis, Kalmia angustifolia, Kalmia ciliata, Chionanthus, Cephalanthos, Aesculus parva.⁵⁰

These names would appear in a work like Linnaeus's Species Plantarum or Gronovius's Flora Virginica separated from each other by many pages of text. Fraxinius excelcior, for example, appears in the first edition of the Species Plantarum grouped with the Polygamia Dioecia on page 1057. There it is listed with the other Fraxinia, which follow the Gleditsia and are followed by the Diospyros. It occupies its niche both in the Species Plantarum and in the Great Chain, with gradations on one side or another duly listed. The Magnolias are listed with the Polyandria Polygynia, on page 536. Yet in Bartram's book, the two are listed in the same paragraph at the same place in the text, and so are located for the reader on the island. They are entries in the 1200-page Linnaean table of plants, where they appear with their near neighbors on the Great Chain. They are also entries in Bartram's text, where they appear with their actual neighbors in the world. Bartram's list counters the abstracting influence of the Linnaean name. It provides a local habitation or context to accompany the universal name and location on the Chain. The list represents to the reader an American scene.

Taken together, Bartram's lists of the natural productions of Georgia's Atlantic islands represent to the reader an American territory, located (off the coast of Sunbury), bounded (the islands themselves), and furnished with the items in the lists. When he made the survey on which he based his description in Travels, Bartram was revisiting the islands. They merited a second look because he knew they would “exhibit a comprehensive epitome of the history of all the sea-coast Islands.”⁵¹ In his Report to Fothergill, prepared from his field notes and sent to England while Bartram was still traveling, he wrote for his patron a four-sentence account of the islands. On them he had “discover'd nothing new, or much worth your notice.”⁵² In Travels, the description of the islands is ten times longer. Clearly, Bartram was interested in showing the reader of Travels not just what was new on the islands, but whatever was there. The essay describing the natural history of an entire area represented for the reader a definitely bounded piece of American territory, a country in the geographical sense of the word.

The natural historical entry, list, and essay define space at the expense of time: they suspend narrative. Bartram's visit to the islands begins in narrative: “Next day, being desirous of visiting the islands, I forded a narrow shoal, part of the sound, and landed on one of them, which employed me the whole day to explore.” Curiously, it ends in the same bit of action: “The sight of this delightful and productive island, placed in front of the rising city of Sunbury, quickly induced me to explore it; which I apprehended, from former visits to this coast, would exhibit a comprehensive epitome of the history of all the sea-coast Islands of Carolina and Georgia, as likewise in general of the coast of the main.”⁵³ The opening statement is truly narrative, containing the details of Bartram's path from the mainland to the island. But the closing passage takes us back to a moment before the opening passage, to Bartram's seeing the island and the city of Sunbury, and to knowledge that he had from a prior visit (“former visits to this coast”). In between the parenthetical narrative statements we read about the island's soil, artifacts (fragments of earthen vessels), plants, and animals. In these passages, particularly in the lists of plants with their Linnaean names, the temporal element present in the narrative drops out, and we are presented with a list located in space, but no longer in time. As an observer moving through time, Bartram disappears. He reappears as the describer who is not in time (“throughout the seasons”). Time suspends before the calling of the eternal Linnaean names. The static, curiously still descriptions partake of the verbless nature of the Linnaean names themselves. The reader reconstitutes the scene, but does so in the historyless “now” that is a consequence of the Linnaean rhetoric.

The other descriptive method used in Travels is Edmund Burke's. “Romantic” passages conveying Bartram's awe and terror at the vistas he encountered have received more critical attention than the natural historical description.⁵⁴ Critics assume that aesthetics and science must be warring points of view. If a writer is romantic, he must not be scientific. If a writer is scientific, he cannot truly be said to be romantic. These divisions are modern, imposed from a perspective in which science is looked upon as positivism and art as extrarational. But in Bartram's day, and in Bartram's text, science and art are not at war with each other.

The sublime makes its appearance early in Travels, and is invoked throughout to convey the immensity of the objects and the magnitude of the experience that Bartram faced. Edmund Burke is the most important eighteenth-century theorist of the sublime, and there is evidence that Bartram saw his work. A survey of treatises on art and aesthetics available in America shows among its forty-seven entries for Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that as early as 1760 a copy was offered for sale in a Philadelphia bookseller's catalogue. At some point before 1807 a French translation of the work was donated to the Library Company of Philadelphia, an institution where Bartram would have had privileges. And in 1771, in a letter recommending books appropriate for a gentleman's library, Thomas Jefferson included Burke.⁵⁵ Bartram lived within a morning's ride of Philadelphia, a city that certainly knew of Burke's theory and that contained copies of Burke's Enquiry. He had the opportunity to know Burke's book, as his own text demonstrates.

In the early pages of Travels, when Bartram introduces the reader to the ideas that will be needed to navigate the book itself, he includes an account of a storm that lasted for the second and third days of his voyage from Philadelphia to Charleston:

The powerful winds, now rushing forth from their secret abodes, suddenly spread terror and devastation; and the wide ocean, which, a few moments past, was gentle and placid, is now thrown into disorder, and heaped into mountains, whose white curling crests seem to sweep the skies!

This furious gale continued near two days and nights, and not a little damaged our sails, cabin furniture, and state-rooms, besides retarding our passage.⁵⁶

Contrast this account with Bartram's interpretation of ocean travel, offered just one paragraph later:

There are few objects out at sea to attract the notice of the traveller, but what are sublime, awful, and majestic: the seas themselves, in a tempest, exhibit a tremendous scene, where the winds assert their power, and, in furious conflict, seem to set the ocean on fire. On the other hand, nothing can be more sublime than the view of the encircling horizon, after the turbulent winds have taken their flight, and the lately agitated bosom of the deep has again become calm and pacific; the gentle moon rising in dignity from the east, attended by thousands of glittering orbs; the luminous appearance of the seas at night, when all the waters seem transmuted into liquid silver; the prodigious bands of porpoises foreboding tempest, that appear to cover the ocean; the mighty whale, sovereign of the watery realms, who cleaves the seas in his course; the sudden appearance of land from the sea, the strand stretching each way, beyond the utmost reach of sight; the alternate appearance and recess of the coast, whilst the far distant blue hills slowly retreat and disappear; or, as we approach the coast, the capes and promontories first strike our sight, emerging from the watery expanse, and, like mighty giants, elevating their crests towards the skies; the water suddenly alive with its scaly inhabitants; squadrons of sea-fowl sweeping through the air, impregnated with the breath of fragrant aromatic trees and flowers; the amplitude and magnificence of these scenes are great indeed, and may present to the imagination, an idea of the first appearance of the earth to man at the creation.⁵⁷

This is not so much a description of a storm—the earlier, four-sentence account is such a description—as it is a theory of what looking at the ocean is like, of the contrast between stormy seas and quiet ones, generalized to apply to almost any ocean voyage, to any view at sea. The ocean, in other words, causes certain effects in the viewer, who is generalized along with Bartram (“we approach”) until both fade into the perceiving imagination of Adam himself.

This account of the effects of the ocean on the viewer, indeed on the first viewer, is put forth in Burke's Enquiry as productive of the sublime: “A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with any thing so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes, but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror.”⁵⁸ Burke's textbook example of sublimity is also Bartram's. And although it appears in a book about a particular man traveling a particular route, Bartram couches his explanation in the broadest terms. This is partly because he seems self-conscious, in those opening pages, of introducing the reader to the kind of analysis he will be doing in the book itself—interested, that is, in giving the reader the essential frameworks from which he will be operating.

But Bartram's explanation goes beyond Burke's, which had been offered in the section entitled “Terror,” to provide an example of the terrible producing the sublime.⁵⁹ Bartram, instead, provides us in this first instance of sublimity in Travels with a sort of compendium of the sublime. He adds details that support most of the elements that Burke notes as productive of the sublime. In the shorter, specific description Bartram offers us terror and devastation; then, in the more generalized lecture on the sublime, he includes the “encircling horizon” (vastness), the moon with its “thousands of glittering orbs” (vastness and intensity of light), the “luminous appearance of the seas … transmuted into liquid silver” (intensity of light, vastness), “prodigious bands of porpoises foreboding tempest” (the threat of danger), “the mighty whale” (magnificence), “who cleaves the seas in his course” (power), “the sudden appearance of land from the sea” (suddenness), “the alternate appearance and recess of the coast” (intermittence), “promontories … like mighty giants” (vastness), “the water suddenly alive” (suddenness), and finally, what seems to be Bartram's own contribution to the idea of the sublime, “the air impregnated with the breath of fragrant aromatic trees and flowers (the opposite of Burke's intolerable stenches). Before he has even gotten off of the boat that took him south, Bartram's retrospective narrator has offered the reader a compendium of the sublime. All of these elements reappear in the narrative, over and over, as Bartram beholds still another prospect whose awesome or terrible appearance compels him to convey his reactions.

Both the American traveler and the British aesthetician trace the source of these reactions to the same emotions. Bartram nominates “curiosity” as the “attendant spirit” of his travels. Burke, in the first sentence of part 1 of the Enquiry, says, “The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is Curiosity.” Bartram traveled in search of new plants for Fothergill, and new scenes to gratify his own curiosity. Burke's theory also recognizes the importance of the new: “Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions.” The sources, then, of passion and information, for Bartram and for Burke, were the same—novelty and its motivating spirit, curiosity.⁶⁰

Both men also shared a belief in the importance of direct observation. In defending the limitations of his theory Burke noted, “A theory founded on experiment and not assumed, is always good for so much as it explains.”⁶¹ Burke's departure from previous aesthetic practice was to examine his own reactions rather than to simply convey the findings of the rhetoricians who had preceded him.⁶² Bartram's entire method was one of seeing and observing. The very enterprise of traveling to observe attests to that. Indeed, this similarity in aims—from the beginning, Bartram speaks of “observations” and the importance of the visual (Burke's theory is a visual one)—is everywhere apparent in Travels. Burke's theory is also an unusually democratic one: “The true standard of the arts is in every man's power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things in nature, will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation, must leave us in the dark, or what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights.”⁶³

Yet Burke is not claiming that each observer makes up his own mind independent of other observers. Having made the reactions of one person the basis of his theory, he goes on to assert that all men have similar reactions—“the standard both of reason and Taste is the same in all human creatures.” He offers a definition of taste: “I mean by the word Taste no more than that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts.” And he makes it even stronger: “The principle of pleasure derived from sight is the same in all.”⁶⁴ Thus, Bartram, subscribing to Burke's theory, could report the effects of the vistas on the viewer with the same sort of belief in them that he held in his observations of plants and animals. Burke was scientific in the sense that those reports of rhapsody were the same, for Bartram, as reports of a new plant or animal. They were observations that were privileged, because they depended upon faculties rather than upon changeable judgment. Bartram's description of the ocean is akin to his description of the island off Sunbury, offering the reader an epitome of the sublime in much the same way that a description of the island offered the reader an epitome of the natural products of the seacoast islands.

Bartram describes a storm that is in time, then describes what oceans do to any viewer at any time. This analysis is presented as eternal, as embodying the same sort of principles that Adam himself operated under at “the first appearance of the earth to man.” The universal behind the particular is Bartram's aim, reducing experience to a set of responses that the responder can count on simply because he is in possession of the same set of equipment as other responders.

Report to Fothergill, the field journal Bartram kept for his patron, does not include the rhapsodic reactions to the scenery in which Travels abounds. It is an accounting of the natural history that Bartram saw on his way, composed with an eye to Fothergill's already considerable knowledge of American animals and, particularly, plants. Bartram wrote the Travels, including the reactions to sublime scenes, from the garden on the Schuylkill, within an hour's ride of Philadelphia. How could he have done this?

Trained as a painter, Bartram must have had a good visual memory. And the field journals contained enough detail to remind him of what he had seen and when—to a point. The rest was a matter of considering the objects he had encountered—the stimulus—and applying the appropriate term of sublimity or beauty—delineating the response. This somewhat mechanical procedure accounts for the repetitive, formulaic effusions over yet another sublime forest, yet another vast savanna.⁶⁵ Understanding the mechanism, however, need not lessen the impact of the descriptions. Bartram was showing his readers these places for the first time. Clearly, Bartram's rhapsody did not somehow consume his science. It was not founded differently from his science. Epistemologically, the book is of a piece. Aesthetics and science coexist in a telling based on experience filtered through Linnaeus's system or through Burke's, both of which are built on the bedrock of reporting what an observer experienced.

Any accounting of Bartram's aesthetics would be incomplete without a consideration of the other key term in eighteenth-century aesthetics: the picturesque. S. H. Monk notes “the invention, late in the century, of a third category, the picturesque, which had to come into existence in order to give those objects that are neither beautiful nor sublime (in Burke's sense of the words) a local habitation and a name.”⁶⁶ In his treatment of the picturesque, Bartram rejects an aesthetics based on something other than experience or observation.

The picturesque was known to Bartram—he uses the term carefully. Christopher Hussey defines it as the “habit of viewing and criticizing nature as if it were an infinite series of more or less well composed subjects for painting.”⁶⁷ Traveling was an important way to encounter the picturesque; travel accounts were published describing scenes in picturesque fashion and were, in turn, used as guidebooks to teach a novice traveler where to find such scenes. “The picturesque traveller is the traveller who has a conception of an ideal form of nature, derived from landscape painting, and whose purpose it is to discover ideal scenes in existence.”⁶⁸ The composition of the scene was prearranged. The traveler simply went in search of it, confirming, when he found it, his sense of beauty, derived from painting.

Bartram rejects this intercession of art between observer and object. In a famous passage in the second part of Travels, Bartram describes the “paradise of fish” in a sinkhole filled by a subterranean spring. In the resulting deep well of absolutely clear water the fish swim “with free and unsuspicious intercourse.” The basin is remarkable. The water is so clear, the fish so unafraid of one another, their disappearance into and reappearance from a sunken corridor so impressive, the scene excites “terror and astonishment.”⁶⁹

The basin is so very remarkable that Bartram takes pains to remove himself from charges of ornamenting his description:

This amazing and delightful scene, though real, appears at first but as a piece of excellent painting; there seems no medium; you imagine the picture to be within a few inches of your eyes, and that you may without the least difficulty touch any one of the fish, or put your finger on the crocodile's eye, when it really is twenty or thirty feet under water.

And although this paradise of fish may seem to exhibit a just representation of the peaceable and happy state of nature which existed before the fall, yet in reality it is a mere representation; for the nature of the fish is the same as if they were in Lake George or the river.⁷⁰

The prelapsarian ideal society demonstrated by the fish in this basin, which seemed at first to be a mediumless painting, is a “mere” not a “just representation,” and the reader is to realize that the fish's true natures have not been idealized from their lake and river roles of prey and predator. Neither has the description of the basin been idealized; the behavior of the fish can be accounted for by the impossibility of ambush in the clear water, thus depriving predators of necessary covert from which to take their prey, covert that they have in Lake George and the river. The delusive element here, for Bartram, is not his description of the scene, but the scene itself. He recognizes in it the sort of idealized landscape that artists might paint, and he cautions the reader to reject this model. He offers instead a demythologized interpretation that uses the nature of the fish to account for their behavior in this seemingly mediumless medium that tempts the describer to reach for the marvelous.

Elsewhere “mere representation,” where it approaches the ideal of the picturesque, is also subject for suspicion. Bartram is describing the Sand Hills, which have

the appearance of the mountainous swell of the ocean immediately after a tempest; but as we approach them, they insensibly disappear, and seem to be lost; and we should be ready to conclude all to be a visionary scene, were it not for the sparkling ponds and lakes, which at the same time gleam through the open forests, before us and on every side, retaining them in the eye, until we come up with them. And at last the imagination remains flattered and dubious, by their uniformity, being mostly circular or elliptical, and almost surrounded with expansive green meadows; and always a picturesque dark grove of live oak, magnolia, gordonia, and the fragrant orange, encircling a rocky shaded grotto of transparent water, on some border of the pond or lake; which, without the aid of any poetic fable, one might naturally suppose to be the sacred abode or temporary residence of the guardian spirit.

This is the account of a prospect that is too ideal, a reality too much like paintings of nature. Bartram punctures the illusion with his last phrase, “but is actually the possession and retreat of a thundering absolute crocodile.”⁷¹ Bartram mistrusted the picturesque ideal.

In another passage Bartram completes a description with picturesque details, while at the same time labeling the completion as delusive. He is describing water lettuce, Pistia stratiotes. He offers a complete botanical description, then notes,

These floating islands present a very entertaining prospect: for although we behold an assemblage of the primary productions of nature only, yet the imagination seems to remain in suspense and doubt; as in order to enliven the delusion and form a most picturesque appearance, we see not only flowery plants, clumps of shrubs, old weather-beaten trees, hoary and barbed, with the long moss waving from their snags, but we also see them completely inhabited, and alive, with crocodiles, serpents, frogs, otters, crows, herons, curlews, jackdaws, & c. There seems, in short, nothing wanted but the appearance of a wigwam and a canoe to complete the scene.⁷²

The completion of the scene is a picturesque one—and for Bartram this meant the imposition on nature of a visual ideal that one carried into the wilderness rather than the representation of a real wilderness when one had gone forth to discover her novelties.

The Burkean mode of description provides Bartram with a means of objectively representing his reactions to the locales through which he travels. Taken together with the natural historical mode, the two forms of description represent to the reader the natural scenes observed in America and the effects of those scenes on the observer. Travels is ruled by the rhetoric of these modes of description, a circumstance that becomes problematical when Bartram uses these modes to describe the highest link of the Great Chain of Being—the American Indians. In the narrative portion of Travels, parts 1 through 3, Bartram shows some awareness of the problems of writing narrative about native people, but ultimately his literary models for such narrative prove inadequate, and his natural historical models assert themselves to provide the reader with the most extended passage about the American Indians in Travels—part 4.

As we have seen, Bartram arrives at a statement of philosophy concerning the native Americans in his introduction to Travels. He proposes that the Indians, who are “desirous of becoming united with” European society, be made the subject of extensive study by emissaries from European culture before newcomers to the American Indians' land formulate any plan concerning them. That is, he proposes what would now be called a field study, in which proto-anthropologists would live in “liberal and friendly intimacy” in American Indian towns, learning the language and customs of the inhabitants. Although Bartram did not live with the natives, he traveled extensively in their territory, and his final account of them in part 4 stems from observations he made in the spirit of this pre-anthropological anthropology.

His attempts to depict the natives fall into two groups—scenes in which the depiction is influenced by literary models, and scenes that have a natural historical basis in that they include manners-and-customs portraits of the villagers.⁷³ The other alternative, a narrative in which the people appear as characters, in much the same way that Bartram is a character in Travels, never comes to be written.

Bartram's first encounter with a native American in the narrative portion of Travels has a decidedly literary cast. Bartram had ridden beyond the frontier white settlement when he crossed the river St. Ille (now called the Satilla) in southeastern Georgia. Traveling south he saw a mounted, armed American Indian cross the path some distance in front of him. Bartram tried to hide behind some trees, but the “intrepid Siminole” saw Bartram and “sat spurs to his horse.”⁷⁴ Bartram, unarmed, did not run, but “resigned [him]self entirely to the will of the Almighty.” Then Bartram offered the man his hand, and after a bad moment when it seemed that this offering would be met with an angry response, Bartram had the satisfaction of having the man shake his hand in friendship. Bartram asked directions to a nearby trading house, and they parted.

Bartram does not offer the reader an account of the exchange of questions and information—What language did they speak? What was said? How were the directions given? Instead Bartram assumes temporarily the powers of an omniscient narrator and tells us what the other man was thinking:

Possibly the silent language of his soul, during the moment of suspense (for I believe his design was to kill me when he first came up) was after this manner: “White man, thou art my enemy, and thou and thy brethren may have killed mine; yet it may not be so, and even were that the case, thou are now alone, and in my power. Live; the Great Spirit forbids me to touch thy life; go to thy brethren, tell them thou sawest an Indian in the forests, who knew how to be humane and compassionate.⁷⁵

Bartram writes the man's interior monologue rather than reporting his words. The model here is the “noble savage.”⁷⁶ The language of the man's supposed thoughts is lofty, literate, and Quaker in its use of pronouns.

Sometimes the literary model for the noble savage is quite specific. Bartram's account of his meeting with the White King of Talahasochte ends with the king's being quoted as saying, “Our whole country is before you, where you may range about at pleasure, gather physic plants and flowers, and every other production.”⁷⁷ The chief had been reading Milton.⁷⁸

Christianity is not the only source for this mythologizing of the natives. Bartram and his traveling companions came upon women gathering wild strawberries. Bartram labels this a “sylvan scene of primitive innocence,” a “gay assembly of hamadryades.” He leaves it to the reader to speculate as to the lengths to which the travelers' “passions might have hurried us, thus warmed and exited” by the sight of these young maidens “wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.”⁷⁹ The travelers come upon these “nymphs” in the “Elysian fields.”⁸⁰ In this scene the literary transformation of the American Indians is complete. These women are not human at all, but the very spirits of the trees surrounding the travelers.

Bartram provides us with instances of the noble savage's opposite, too. Another American Indian appears as the wife of a white trader. She has robbed him of his possessions, and he is taking refuge in brandy. Bartram notes her beauty, her engaging manners, the “perfection in her person,” and calls her husband “her beguiled and vanquished lover and unhappy slave.” The situation is described in a summary paragraph, and Bartram includes it, he says, “to exhibit an instance of the power of beauty in a savage, and her art and finesse in improving it to her private ends.” Bartram engages an American Indian to travel upriver with him but must put the man ashore after he becomes weary of rowing. Bartram complies, he says, because he knows “the impossibility of compelling an Indian against his own inclinations, or even prevailing upon him by reasonable arguments, when labour is in the question.”⁸¹ This American Indian is unnamed, the narrative of his abandonment told in the course of Bartram's pursuit of the natural history that is most often the aim of his voyage.

If the literary models furnished Bartram with both noble and bad natives, the natural historical models turn the American Indian into the Other. Ultimately, Bartram represents native Americans with exactly the same rhetoric he has been using to represent the plants and animals he encounters on his trip.

Bartram's account of his reception in Cuscowilla, a Creek town in Florida that he visited with four men who were acting as traders' representatives to the American Indians, is unusual in Travels in that it provides a fairly complete picture of the encounter. The account is narrative, lapsing from the past tense used for the party's greeting and walk to the chief's house into the ethnographic present for the explanation of the pipe-smoking and communal-drinking ceremony, back into the past tense for a description of Cowkeeper, the chief, and once again into the present for the brief account of the “banquet.”⁸² The description of Cuscowilla is preceded by a natural history essay on the turtle known (then and now) as the gopher, and a paragraph of description of the plant productions of the marshes near Lake Cuscowilla. It is followed by a description of a level, grassy plain and the Alachua savanna. The description of the community is one more natural history essay sandwiched between the turtle and the savanna. Aside from Cowkeeper's greeting (“You are come”) and his dubbing of Bartram “Puc Puggy” (the Flower Hunter), the account is undifferentiated from the natural history essays around it.

It is undifferentiated because it is one with them. Indian chiefs are individualized. “Untitled” townspeople in the scene are simply “young men and Maidens” or “women and children.” The account of the meal is a list: “The repast is now brought in, consisting of venison, stewed with bear's oil, fresh corn cakes, milk, and homony; and our drink, honey and water, very cool and agreeable.”⁸³ The tense is the ethnographic present. The list is one with the account of the plain: “After partaking of this banquet, we took leave and departed the great savanna. We soon entered a level, grassy plain, interspersed with low, spreading, three-leaved Pine-trees, large patches of low shrubs, consisting of Prinos glaber, low Myrica, Kalmia galuca, Andromedas of several species, and many other shrubs, with patches of Palmetto.”⁸⁴ The American Indians are treated as just one more item of natural history.

After the travelers return from the savanna, they conclude their business with the native Americans, and Bartram has another opportunity to present the reader with an account of this town and its inhabitants. He provides us with a long description of the “habitations,” and of the town's situation on the edge of the lake, again presented in the historical present. A description of the “plantation” (common fields), including a Linnaean list of the plants the townspeople grow there, concludes Bartram's second look at Cuscowilla. The description of the town is as static as the description of the nearby savanna. Bartram employs this descriptive method when he describes a little (unnamed) village, and the Seminole towns of Sinica and Cowe.⁸⁵ The long description of Cowe eventually gives way to a list of forty-three “towns and villages in the Cherokee nation inhabited at this day.”⁸⁶

At Attasse, another American Indian town, Bartram spends a week waiting to travel to Augusta with some traders. He offers us an extensive description of the town itself and of the inhabitants' “vigils” and “vespers.” He describes the buildings, and speculates as to the means of construction that must have been used to erect a huge pine pole in a mound of earth, when no such pine grows within twelve miles of the place.⁸⁷ This is the most extended description of a single native community that appears in the narrative portion of the Travels. In it not one person is individualized, not one distinguished from the rest. And once again, the description becomes a list, as Bartram recites the towns on the Tallapoose, Coosau, Apalachucla, and Flint rivers, along with the languages spoken in each town.⁸⁸

In his treatment of the chief of Whatoga, Bartram mixes the method of natural history with a rare instance of personal narrative. He finds himself at the edge of a town planted with separate plots that adjoin one another in such a way that there are only narrow spaces between them to allow passage for his horse, “when observing an Indian man at the door of his habitation, three or four hundred yards distance from me, beckoning me to come to him, I ventured to ride through their lots, being careful to do no injury to the young plants, the rising hopes of their labour and industry.”⁸⁹ Bartram's narrative carries us with him to the man's home, where we have described for us the meal the chief served him, the calumet they shared, and the corn ordered for Bartram's horse. The chief walks with Bartram two miles out of town to show him the right course for Cowe, Bartram's next destination. The narrative shows us the actions of a single man but ends in a passage with the familiar ring of natural history in which the individual fades into the representative male:

This prince is the chief of Whatoga, a man universally beloved, and particularly esteemed by the whites for his pacific and equitable disposition, and revered by all for his exemplary virtues, just, moderate, magnanimous and intrepid.

He was tall and perfectly formed; his countenance cheerful and lofty, and at the same time truly characteristic of the red men, that is, the brow ferocious, and the eye active, piercing or fiery, as an eagle. He appeared to be about sixty years of age, yet upright and muscular, and his limbs active as youth.⁹⁰

For Bartram there are few real choices for him in his representation of the American Indians. His heroic models from literature betray him into moral flights of eloquence. His single attempt at extended narrative ends in an idealized portrait of a great and heroic chief. His portrait of the deceitful wife of a European trader comes closest to a depiction of an individual, perhaps because she had distinguished herself to Bartram in her choice of husbands, or in her lapses in morality.

In the end, he turns to the rhetoric of natural history, offering in part 4 “An Account of the Person, Manners, Customs and Government of the Muscogulges or Creeks, Cherokees, Chactaws, & c., Aboriginies of the Continent of North America.”⁹¹ Here he presents a standard manners-and-customs account still consulted for its accurate depiction of American Indian characteristics. In 1789 Bartram wrote a similar account in response to questions put to him by Benjamin Smith Barton; the American Ethnological Society published it in 1853 in its Transactions.⁹²

To present an adequate account of the southeastern natives, Bartram removed them from the narrative portion of Travels. In part 4 his actions as traveler are no longer the framing device that they were for parts 1 through 3; part 3 ends with Bartram's return to his father's house. He cast part 4 in the eternal now of the historical present. The final portion of Bartram's text represents these people as without a history, either as a group or as individuals, while it furnishes readers with thematically organized descriptions of their persons, character, government, dress, feasts, property, agriculture, arts, manufactures, religion, language, and monuments. Bartram visited the southeastern natives as an observer, with all of the detachment that such a role implies.

Why were the native Americans banished from the narrative when the plants and other animals that Bartram encountered were included, however disruptively, in the portion of the book framed and punctuated by Bartram's account of his movement through the Southeast? The same method and rhetoric produced both sets of descriptions. But in the American Indians Bartram faced fellow humans. His method for describing these people was first formulated to describe plants and animals that were clearly not of the same species as the describer. A tree is clearly Other. So is a bird. Transfer the method used to describe the tree or bird to another human being, and he becomes Other, too. The observer is led to see only what the method sanctions. He is led to record only what the rhetoric has devised formulas to represent.

The Southeast, and by extension the American represented in Travels, is a place where objects can be named using the Linnaean system, and, conversely, a place where Linnaean names have referents. It is a part of the universal system, a place where natural things are found that are related to the ones in the reader's own country. It is a room in the “glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator.”⁹³ The Great Chain provides Bartram and his reader with a shared system for arraying the things that the traveler finds and reports.

Bartram himself provides a second, parallel system for arraying the objects. The plants and animals of the Southeast accumulate before the reader's very eyes as their Linnaean names are called: Magnolia grandiflora, Myrica cerifera, Laurus borbonia, Rhamnus frangula. The discrete things denoted by the Latin names arrange themselves, through accretion in list after list, into a series of southeastern locales: the seacoast island, the riverbank, the savanna, the forest, the swamp, the inland lake. In a series of epitomes made possible by and conveyed almost solely through Linnaean nomenclature, Bartram painstakingly represents the country through which he traveled for almost four years. The effect is visual and scenic, although Bartram does not construct landscapes. For Bartram, the Southeast is a locale that exists prior to the kind of art that the picturesque grew from—landscapes sought out and arranged according to aesthetic rules. The American locales that Bartram sought and represented were unmediated by such artifices.

In addition to telling the reader what the scenes looked like, Bartram provides his own reactions, but not before he has demonstrated the theory behind those reactions—the sublime as defined by Edmund Burke. For Burke, and so for Bartram, one observer's reactions were those that any observer might have.

Yet the scenes, like many of the plants and animals in Travels, were new. Many of them had never been described. Both the method of natural history and the theory of Edmund Burke provided the observer with a shared context within which he could circumscribe the novel objects and scenes he encountered in the Southeast. The objects there are like objects the reader is familiar with, and they have their places on the Great Chain. The observer there is like observers everywhere, moved to awe and terror by the novel scenes that make up the Southeast. Thus America, simultaneously exotic and familiar, is represented to the sight and emotions of the reader.

The method makes the land appear new; it strips the land of its history. Natural historical description is static and atemporal. As represented by the method, the Southeast is a place where there are no verbs. Thus Bartram's America seems to be waiting for history to happen and for individuals to live their lives there. The remains of Spanish settlements are represented by means of the same rhetoric that Bartram uses to describe the plants or the soil of a given locale.⁹⁴ American Indians, also represented by the same rhetoric, are not individuals with a personal history, nor are they a group with a collective history.

Ultimately, the narrator is not even a character in his own narrative. In 1766, Bartram tried and failed to make a living on his own indigo plantation in East Florida.⁹⁵ On the subject of the author's year-long residency in the country he described, Travels is absolutely silent. Any such personal relationship to the land is unrepresentable by the natural historical method and its attendant rhetoric, which requires contemplation by both observer and reader, but makes no provision for use. Bartram moves through a fully furnished American Southeast with no role to play other than that of observer and recorder. He leaves, in Travels, a record but not a memorial.

In his descriptions America is a vast, still garden, planted and denizened with species that have names but no one to use them. It is known, but not truly inhabited.

Notes

1. William Bartram, Travels (Philadelphia: James and Johnson, 1791).

2. John Hendley Barnhart, “Bartram Bibliography,” Bartonia 12 (1931): 51-2.

3. Lane Cooper, “A Glance at Wordsworth's Reading,” Modern Language Notes 22 (April 1907): 110-17; John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930); N. Bryllion Fagin, William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1933).

4. Robert D. Arner, “Pastoral Patterns in Bartram's Travels,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 18 (1973): 133-46; Wayne Franklin, Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America (Chicago and London: Univ of Chicago Press, 1979); Thomas Vance Barnett, “William Bartram and the Age of Sensibility,” diss. Georgia State Univ., 1982, 49, 52.

5. Barnett 50; Fagin 6-9.

6. Joseph Ewan, ed. William Bartram: Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968) 6.

7. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, The Life and Travels of John Bartram (Talahassee: Univ. Presses of Florida, 1982) 278.

8. Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735-1799 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1965) 14.

9. Ewan, Drawings 6.

10. Hindle 13, 27.

11. William Darlington, Memorials of John Bartram and Humphrey Marshall (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blackiston, 1849) 344.

12. Darlington 347-48.

13. Darlington 346.

14. The only mention of the Travels before 1786, when Enoch Story, Jr., proposed to publish it, was by Johann David Schoef, who saw the manuscript in 1783. Travels: Naturalist's Edition, ed. Francis Harper (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958) xxi.

15. Linnaeus called John Bartram “the greatest Natural Botanist in the World.” Fagin 2.

16. Fagin 10.

17. William Bartram, Travels, ed. Mark van Doren (New York: Dover, 1955) 19. Unless otherwise identified, citations to William Bartram's Travels refer to this edition. Travels presents few textual problems. I prefer the widely available Dover edition to the out-of-print Yale (see note 14).

18. Ewan, Drawings 20.

19. Ewan, Drawings 11.

20. Fagin 11.

21. John W. Harshberger, The Botanists of Philadelphia and Their Work (Philadelphia: n.p., 1899) 87.

22. Joseph Ewan, “Early History,” A Short History of Botany in the U.S., ed. Joseph Ewan (New York: Hafner, 1969) 26.

23. Fagin 25.

24. Ewan, Drawings 3-34, 11, 9.

25. Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962) 1.

26. Berkeley and Berkeley 61-76.

27. Bartram, Travels 15.

28. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964) 183.

29. Bartram, Travels 15.

30. Bartram, Travels 15.

31. Bartram, Travels 16.

32. Peter Kalm, Peter Kalm's Travels in North America: The English Version of 1770, ed. Adolph B. Benson, 2 vols. (New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1937) 2: 642.

33. Bartram, Travels 18.

34. Ewan, Drawings plates 12 and 22.

35. Philip C. Ritterbush, Overtures to Biology: The Speculations of Eighteenth-Century Naturalists (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1964) 1.

36. François Delaporte, Nature's Second Kingdom: Explorations of Vegetality in the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1982) 5.

37. Ritterbush 59.

38. Bartram, Travels 21.

39. Bartram, Travels 24-25.

40. Bartram, Travels 26.

41. Berkeley and Berkeley 36.

42. Bartram, Travels 369-70.

43. Frans A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans (Utrecht: International Association for Plant Taxonomy, 1971) 118.

44. Bartram, Travels 370, 369n.

45. William Bartram, Travels: A Facsimile of the 1792 London Edition (Savannah, Ga.: Beehive Press, 1973) plate 1, facing page 18. Illustration from William Bartram, Travels, ed. Mark van Doren (New York: Dover, 1955). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

46. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973) 133.

47. Foucault 134.

48. Foucault 135.

49. Bartram, Travels 33-55.

50. Bartram, Travels 33-34.

51. Bartram, Travels 35.

52. William Bartram, “Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773-74: A Report to Dr. John Fothergill,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society n.s. 33 (1943):135.

53. Bartram, Travels 35.

54. See, for example, L. Hugh Moore, the latest in a brief tradition of Bartram critics who finds that Bartram's science is less than, and a part of, his romantic theories, particularly the “eighteenth-century aesthetic theory of the beautiful, sublime, and picturesque.” Moore is right in pointing to the importance of these aesthetic categories. He has mistaken how they relate to Bartram's science, and blurred over the varying endorsements that each of them gets in the Travels. “The Aesthetic Theory of William Bartram,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 9 (1983): 18.

55. Janice G. Schimmelman, “A Checklist of European Treatises on Art and Essays on Aesthetics Available in America through 1815,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 93 (1983): 116-21.

56. Bartram, Travels 29.

57. Bartram, Travels 30.

58. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 57-58.

59. Burke 57-86.

60. Bartram, Travels 36; Burke 31.

61. Burke 5.

62. S. H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in 18th-Century England (New York: MLA, 1935) 42.

63. Burke 54.

64. Burke 11, 13, 15.

65. Bartram, Travels 30, 56, 64, 65, 73, 94, 102, 107, 131, 160, 163, 196, 279, 286, 274, 316, 341, 363.

66. Monk 92.

67. Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque (New York: Putnam, 1927) 1.

68. Hussey 83.

69. Bartram, Travels 150.

70. Bartram, Travels 151.

71. Bartram, Travels 155-56.

72. Bartram, Travels 94.

73. My discussion of Bartram's treatment of the native Americans is indebted to Mary Louise Pratt's identification and discussion of the manners-and-customs portrait in her “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 120.

74. Bartram, Travels 44.

75. Bartram, Travels 45.

76. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965) 143. Pearce assumes that all of Bartram's descriptions depict the natives as noble savages. He sees no distinction between the accounts obviously influenced by literary models and those influenced by natural historical models.

77. Bartram, Travels 201.

78. “The World was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide,” Paradise Lost XII. 646-47.

79. Bartram, Travels 289.

80. Bartram, Travels 290.

81. Bartram, Travels 110, 111, 113.

82. Bartram, Travels 164-65.

83. Bartram, Travels 164.

84. Bartram, Travels 164-65.

85. Bartram, Travels 250-51, 269, 296.

86. Bartram, Travels 301-2.

87. Bartram, Travels 357-62.

88. Bartram, Travels 366-67.

89. Bartram, Travels 284.

90. Bartram, Travels 285-86.

91. Bartram, Travels facing 381; separate title page of part 4.

92. William Bartram, “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society 3 (1853): 1-81.

93. Bartram, Travels 15.

94. Bartram, Travels 198.

95. Ewan, Drawings 36.