Like many of the classic works of American literature, William Bartram's Travels is structured around a three-part pastoral pattern that begins with the naturalist's withdrawal from society, focuses upon an encounter with nature, usually intensely personal and fraught with ambiguities, and ends either with the explorer's return to civilization or with some ironic qualification of pastoral idyllicism. In its broadest sense, the book is enclosed by this thematic and narrative pattern, starting with Bartram's departure from Philadelphia in April of 1773 and concluding in the final sentence of Part iii with his return to that city and to his father's house on the banks of the Schuylkill River in January 1778; the fourth part is totally devoted to the Indians Bartram encountered on his journeys, and while it is thus loosely related to the main body of the Travels, its separate title page suggests that he thought of it as a separate composition. At the heart of the book, of course, are the explorations of Georgia, the Carolinas, and East and West Florida which supplied so much raw material for the imaginations of Coleridge and Wordsworth, among others.¹ Bartram's emotionally and philosophically complex experiences with nature are registered by the disparity of styles employed in the book, now mundanely scientific and purely factual, now soaringly poetic and highly figurative. The tension between the styles enforces the tension in Bartram's mind between cultivated and untrammeled nature, productive and merely picturesque or sublime landscapes, garden and wilderness.² The style, in other words, dramatizes a rhythm of consciousness³ which underlies the whole of the Travels and which in various ways provides the work with unity and meaning.

In the first two sections of the Travels, Bartram's ambivalent feelings toward the wilderness are most strikingly evident in a number of brief, largely self-contained episodes which can be isolated from the body of the text for convenience in discussion. The two landscapes, garden and wilderness, are juxtaposed in his lament for a “venerable grove”⁴ on the shores of Lake George which he had visited fifteen years earlier in the company of his father. At that time, he says, “in that uncultivated state it possessed an almost inexpressible air of grandeur” (99). Now, however,

all has been cleared away and planted with indigo, corn, and cotton, but since deserted: there was now scarcely five acres of ground under fence. It appeared like a desart to a great extent, and terminated, on the land side, by frightful thickets, and open pine forests.

(100)

There appears to be a contradiction here, for Bartram alternately praises one “uncultivated state” and characterizes another as a “desart” bounded by “frightful thickets.” A closer look at the “uncultivated” countryside reveals, however, that Bartram's appreciation of the earlier scene had depended upon his perception of unity and order in the landscape. As he describes it,

what greatly contributed towards completing the magnificence of the scene, was a noble Indian highway, which led from the great mount, on a straight line, three quarters of a mile, first through a point or wing of the orange grove, and continuing thence through an awful forest of live oaks, it was terminated by palms and laurel magnolias, on the verge of an oblong artificial lake, which was on the edge of an extensive green level savanna. This grand highway was about fifty yards wide, sunk a little below the common level, and the earth thrown up on each side, making a bank about two feet high. Neither nature nor art could any where present a more striking contrast, as you approached this savanna.

(99)

Bartram's style in this passage becomes almost a metaphor for the idea of order which he sees underlying “untamed” nature. The elements of his sentences, particularly of the first sentence, are neatly parceled into separate clauses and phrases, their relationship to each other defined by grammatical rules of modification and their boundaries firmly established by commas. In the same way, Bartram's eye perceives each feature of the landscape separately, then in juxtaposition one to the other, and finally as part of a vista into which all elements are integrated by means of the implicitly metaphoric “striking contrast,” a phrase that suggests the rules of formal landscape painting.⁵ Providing linear visual unity for the entire composition are the Indian highway and the geographical and mathematical lines of demarcation associated with it. The eye travels along the straight road, which is three quarters of a mile long, about fifty yards wide, and lined with embankments about two feet high; the road passes a point of the orange grove and ends at a stand of palms and laurel magnolias, which is on the verge of an artificial lake, which is on the edge of the level savanna (my emphasis). Demonstrably, Bartram's aesthetic appreciation of the uncultivated depends upon man-made refinements, the remnants of an ancient civilization which create geometrical designs on the landscape, not upon wilderness. The artificially defined spatial relationships, which imply chronological sequences as well, are precisely what he misses in the “desarts” and “frightful thickets.”⁶

In the animal kingdom, Bartram seeks (and most often is able to convince himself that he has found) a moral order corresponding to the physical order which he values in the landscape. Thus he argues the basic benevolence of the rattlesnake (267-73) and the wolf (158-59). So, too, when his life is threatened and then spared by a Seminole renegade, he offers the reader this profitable speculation:

Can it be denied, but that the moral principle, which directs the savages to virtuous and praiseworthy actions, is natural or innate? It is certain they have not the assistance of letters, or those means of education in the schools of philosophy, where the virtuous sentiments and actions of the most illustrious characters are recorded, and carefully laid before the youth of civilized nations: therefore this moral principle must be innate, or they must be under the immediate influence and guidance of a more divine and powerful preceptor, who, on these occasions, instantly inspires them, and as with a ray of divine light, points out to them at once the dignity, propriety, and beauty of virtue.

(22-23)

When Bartram cannot detect evidence of this underlying moral principle and cannot ground his pastoral idyllicism firmly in the ideas of order and benevolence, the result is often a version of the pastoral which admits reality and thus brings subtle irony to bear against the idea of retreat into nature. At times, Bartram seems to be aware of the pastoral design he is creating, though not of all its implications, as when he extols the rural hospitality he received on the island of St. Simon. “Our rural table,” he writes, “was spread under the shadow of Oaks, Palms, and Sweet Bays, fanned by the lively salubrious breezes wafted from the spicy groves” (61). For music, he and his host, who seems a character fitted for residence in Oliver Goldsmith's Auburn in its happier days, enjoy the

responsive love-lays of the painted nonpareil, and the alert gay mock-bird; whilst the brilliant humming-bird darted through the flowery groves, suspended in air, and drank nectar from the flowers of yellow Jasmine, Lonicera, Andromeda, and sweet Azalea.

(61)

Altogether, he paints a scene of beauty, innocence, and ease to rival Eden before the Fall.

In the very next paragraph, however, he apparently wishes to remind us that there is another side to nature, a destructive and anarchic one, and so he contrasts the birds' singing with the roar of the ocean to the east: “the solemn sound of the beating surf strikes our ears; the dashing of yon liquid mountains, like mighty giants, in vain assail the skies; they are beaten back, and fall prostrate upon the shores of the trembling island” (61).⁷ The defeat of the assaulting waves signals a victory for order and for the ideal pastoral environment, but the threatening power of the ocean functions to contain Bartram's rhetorical flight within a vision of reality that is markedly different from the one represented by his insistence upon underlying order and harmony.

A similar tension between ideal and actual is generated in the following episode, which makes use of the tripartite pastoral pattern of withdrawal, encounter, and return identified at the outset of this paper:

Whilst my fellow travellers were employing themselves in collecting fire-wood, and fixing our camp, I improved the opportunity in reconnoitring our ground; and taking my fusee with me, I penetrated the grove, and afterwards entered some almost unlimited savannas and plains, which were absolutely enchanting. …

How happily situated is this retired spot of earth! What an elysium it is! where the wandering Siminole, the naked red warrior, roams at large, and after the vigorous chase retires from the scorching heat of the meridian sun. Here he reclines, and reposes under the odoriferous shades of Zanthoxylon, his verdant couch guarded by the Deity; Liberty, and the Muses, inspiring him with wisdom and valour, whilst the balmy zephyrs fan him to sleep.

Seduced by these sublime enchanting scenes of primitive nature, and these visions of terrestrial happiness, I had roved far away from Cedar Point, but awakening to my cares, I turned about, and in the evening regained our camp.

(107-108)

The key words in this passage are to be found in the last paragraph: “seduced,” “enchanting,” and “visions.” The “visions” are explicitly contrasted to the geographical reality represented by Cedar Point, mention of which ties Bartram firmly to the actual physical universe. Both “seduced” and “enchanting” suggest unreality and an excess of fantasy, as if Bartram were always conscious that the imagined life of his “naked red warrior” is more fairy tale than fact, a poetic rather than a possible existence. The very luxuriance and richness of nature seem to indicate danger, and the traveler awakens to his cares with something of the sense of relief experienced by the speaker of Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” turning his back on the dark and deep forests to return to the routine of work in the world of the village. On the one hand, the woods offer an aesthetic experience that provides a necessary psychological release from the spiritually deadening duties of normal daily life; on the other hand, it is precisely this routine which keeps man from going out too far and in too deep, from becoming totally a creature of natural instincts who does nothing but sleep while balmy zephyrs fan him. Bartram here appears to reject his own vision of terrestrial happiness in favor of the organized white man's world of work.

Nor is this the only paradise which Bartram discovers to be an illusion. Observing the “innumerable bands of fish” (166) in the “Elysian springs” (168) near Lake George, one of the scenes that helped to inspire the crystal fountains and subterranean rivers of Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” he calls attention to the peaceful behavior of the inhabitants of the deep. Here alligators, gar, trout, bream, catfish, spotted bass, and other fish swim around each other “with free and unsuspicious intercourse. …” There are “no signs of enmity, no attempt to devour each other …” (167). But this, Bartram warns us, is no peaceful kingdom, no piscatorial Garden of Eden. Although this “paradise of fish” seems to exhibit the “happy state of nature which existed before the fall,” it is all deception.

For the nature of the fish is the same as if they were in Lake George or the river; but here the water or element in which they live and move, is so perfectly clear and transparent, it places them all on an equality with regard to their ability to injure or escape from one another …

(168)

The central tension in this passage is generated between pre- and post-lapsarian states of nature, between innocence and corrupt aggressiveness. It is significant that Bartram identifies post-lapsarian nature as reality, for this identification implicitly suggests that hostility and violence lie at the heart of the natural world, not benevolence and moral order as he had earlier asserted in his account of the generous Indian who spared his life. His view of nature in the “paradise of fish” episode reminds us of Ishmael's perception that the beautiful undulating surface of the ocean is also a mask for voracious sharks. The more thoroughly one becomes acquainted with nature, the more he learns of her subtleties and deceits.

Thus it is that in the third part of the Travels Bartram pays increased attention to the unpleasant and sinister sides of nature. The general conformity of the book to the pastoral pattern of withdrawal, encounter, and return is, of course, largely accidental, since any narrative of exploration necessarily follows the same development. But it is a fortunate accident nevertheless, for it underlines a change in attitudes which the text reveals from Parts i and ii to Part iii, the excursions into the land of the Cherokees and thence into West Florida. If the first two sections are characterized by many encomiums to wilderness, or at least to Bartram's personal version of uncultivated nature, the third section reverses the emphasis. Bartram now experiences more depressing and frightening moments than exhilarating ones. He begins with a zest for discovery, and on several occasions, driven by the “restless spirit of curiosity” (73), he braves the wrath of Indians and the elements to venture into undiscovered country. His sense of mission is explicitly stated:

My chief happiness consisted in tracing and admiring the infinite power, majesty, and perfection of the great Almighty Creator, and in the contemplation, that through divine aid and permission, I might be instrumental in discovering, and introducing into my native country, some original productions of nature, which might become useful to society.

(73-74)

There is never any serious doubt about his fulfilling the second part of his goal, and his conviction that God operates benevolently through nature can survive even the challenge of the rattlesnake. But as his travels continue, evidence begins to accumulate that the wilderness is not, in fact, under the guidance of moral law, but that it is hostile or at best indifferent to man. Like Thoreau climbing “Ktaadn,” Bartram becomes aware of the threatening and chaotic attributes of nature.

At first, the sinister side of the natural world shows itself in the broad sweep of a landscape which is inhospitable to travelers. Journeying from Fort James in the Carolinas, Bartram gazes upon

chains of hills whose gravelly, dry, barren summits present detached piles of rocks, which delude and flatter the hopes and expectations of the solitary traveller, full sure of hospitable habitations; heaps of white, gnawed bones of ancient buffalo, elk and deer, indiscriminately mixed with those of men, half grown over with moss, [which] altogether, exhibit scenes of uncultivated nature, on reflection, perhaps, rather disagreeable to a mind of delicate feelings and sensibility, since some of these objects recognize past transactions and events, perhaps not altogether reconcileable to justice and humanity.

(322)

In a book characterized by eighteenth-century circumlocution and indirection, this passage is remarkable for its equivocation, as if Bartram sensed that the implications of this scene of “uncultivated nature” would eventually lead him to a point where to continue exploration would be to challenge and perhaps to disprove the idea of natural benevolence. The barren summits testify to nature's deceitfulness, her power to thwart the hopes and expectations of man. Then, says Bartram, perhaps the sight of human bones scattered in this wasteland is rather disagreeable to some people because perhaps the bones are evidence of actions not altogether reconcileable to justice and humanity (my emphasis). So many qualifications and evasive negatives indicate, I think, a mind seriously engaged in debate with itself and genuinely uncertain as to the outcome.

Emerging from this valley of dry bones, Bartram continues his journey to the Cherokee town of Sinica and travels the next day to Fort Prince George Keowe in the Vale of Keowe. The valley is surrounded by “lofty, superb, misty and blue mountains” and is “at this season enamelled with the incarnate fragrant strawberries and blooming plants, through which the beautiful river meanders” (330). Bartram greets the prospect as ample recompense for the hardships of his journey, yet his passage in praise of the vista curiously devotes more attention to his remote situation and to his difficulties than it does to a description of the valley itself.

Abandoned as my situation now was, yet thank heaven many objects met together at this time, and conspired to conciliate, and in some degree compose my mind, heretofore somewhat dejected and unharmonized: all alone in a wild Indian country, a thousand miles from my native land, and a vast distance from any settlements of white people. It is true, here were some of my own colour, but they were strangers; and though friendly and hospitable, their manners and customs of living so different from what I had been accustomed to, administered but little to my consolation: some hundred miles yet to travel; the savage vindictive inhabitants lately ill-treated by the frontier Virginians; blood being spilt between them, and the injury not yet wiped away by formal treaty: the Cherokees extremely jealous of white people travelling about their mountains, especially if they should be seen peeping in amongst the rocks, or digging up their earth.

(331)

From dark thoughts such as these, the Vale of Keowe offers a temporary sanctuary, and Bartram becomes a sojourner in Elysium. He compares the valley to the “Fields of Pharsalia or the Vale of Tempe” (354). It is, in short, a terrestrial paradise, and about it hangs the rich odor of ripe strawberries. Here he and his companion, a young trader, come upon a band of Cherokee virgins “collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalizing them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.” The “sylvan scene of primitive innocence” proves too great a temptation and, “nature prevailing over reason,” the two men approach the “joyous scene of action.” There follows a passage charged with sexual innuendo which ends with the maidens whom Bartram and his friend have cornered in a grove “half unveiling their blooming faces, incarnated with the modest maiden blush, and with native innocence and cheerfulness, … [presenting] their little baskets, merrily telling us their fruit was ripe and sound.” Had it not been for the watchfulness of the Indian matrons, Bartram confesses, there is no telling “to what lengths our passions might have hurried us, thus warmed and excited …” (357). Even in this apparently idyllic interlude, then, two concepts of nature are juxtaposed and contend for supremacy: natural innocence, as represented by the young Indian virgins, and instinctual nature, particularly sexual aggressiveness, on the part of the two white men. The contextual ambiguity of the maidens' offering their “ripe and sound” fruit suggests that Bartram may again be bringing a gentle irony to bear against the ideal of innocence in a garden setting.⁸

Two days after this event, Bartram sets out from the Vale of Keowe for the territory of the Overhill Indians, who are presently “in an ill humour with the whites, in consequence of some late skirmishes between them and the frontier Virginians …” (359). His determination to explore their country in spite of their hostility reminds the reader of his earlier decision to go to St. John's Island in East Florida in spite of the Indian trouble that had recently developed. Then he had persevered, but now the outcome is far different. When the old trader, Mr. Galahan, parts company with him, he feels the depressing weight of the solitude and oppressiveness of the wilderness descend:

I was left again wandering alone in the dreary mountains, not indeed totally pathless, nor in my present situation entirely agreeable, although such scenes of primitive unmodified nature always pleased me.

May we suppose that mankind feel in their hearts a predilection for the society of each other; or are we delighted with scenes of human arts and cultivation, where the passions are flattered and entertained with variety of objects for gratification?

I found myself unable, notwithstanding the attentive admonitions and persuasive arguments of reason, entirely to erase from my mind those impressions which I had received from the society of the amiable and polite inhabitants of Charleston; and I could not help comparing my present situation in some degree to Nebuchadnezzar's, when expelled from the society of men, and constrained to roam in the mountains and wildernesses, there to herd and feed with the wild beasts of the forests.

(360)

So far as any single moment in so rich and diverse a book can be identified as crucial without exaggerating its importance, this dark moment when Bartram discovers God's curse on Nebuchadnezzar rather than the evidence of benevolence he had anticipated finding marks the psychological turning point of his travels. In his Introduction, he had advised the traveler to search out God's endless abundance in nature and had, in fact, made natural variety the underlying theme of his prefatory remarks. When he employs the term nature, he includes, of course, men and manners, but the bulk of his Introduction he devotes to a celebration of the variety of wild nature. Now, however, he thinks only of the “variety of objects for gratification” that may be found in “scenes of human arts and cultivation.” The awesome solitude of the wilderness appears at last to have overcome his psychological resources and left him defenseless to despair.

In this context, the allusion to Nebuchadnezzar is especially enlightening, since it associates madness with the wilderness. Perhaps unwittingly and certainly without full awareness of all he was implying, Bartram casts himself in the role of one who has been stricken by God, an outcast from humanity by divine decree, and thus the passage stands in stark contrast to his earlier proclamation of his sense of mission. The rational mind proves ineffectual in combating the despair engendered by the wilderness and by the loneliness of Bartram's surroundings, for the wilderness inspires emotions far more powerful than rational thought. In terms of the biblical allusion and of Bartram's primitive psychological analysis of his state of mind, the wilderness is both the cause and the symbolic setting of man's degeneration into a bestial or semi-bestial condition in which the irrational dominates the rational. At this moment in his travels, Bartram has arrived at a point as close to the divine and natural heart of darkness as he will ever go. Two days later, still pushing on slowly towards the Overhill Indians' territory, he abruptly decides that the “slow progress of the vegetation in this mountainous, high country” (366) makes the journey scarcely worth the effort. “I suddenly came to a resolution to defer these researches at this time” (366), he tells us, though we have seen this resolution forming for some time. In a few days he has returned to the Indian town and the company of Mr. Galahan. Thus his “lonesome pilgrimage,” as he aptly termed his trip through Cherokee country, comes to an unsuccessful conclusion.

We might pause here to speculate why the Carolina wildernesses should have proved so frightening and depressing to Bartram when even his battles with the alligators in East Florida did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm for exploration. Three reasons can be advanced. The first is that he had by this time been three years absent from Philadelphia, most of which he spent in wilderness environments. Long exposure may have helped to intensify whatever negative reactions earlier experiences might have begun. Second, Bartram spends much of his time alone in this aborted expedition, and, as some of the passages already quoted show, the loneliness he felt greatly affected his response to his surroundings. The third reason, and probably the decisive one, is that the wilderness of the Carolinas is a very different country from East Florida. As the abundant references to mountains, cascades, and waterfalls establish, it is a mountainous area where forests are tall and dense, emphasizing the darkness and the gloom, and where hills slope down to narrow valleys which do not provide the visual relief of the savannas. For the most part, it is a wilderness which surrounds and contains the human figure. That Bartram responded to this difference and that sweeping vistas were necessary parts of his psychological landscape are revealed in his account of his passage through a forest in which he saw “vast heaps of … stones, Indian graves undoubtedly.”

After I left the graves, the ample vale soon offered on my right hand, through the tall forest trees, charming views, which exhibited a pleasing contrast, immediately out of the gloomy shades and scenes of death, into expansive, lucid, green, flowery fields, expanding between retiring hills, and tufty eminences. …⁹

(348)

After Bartram returns from the wilderness area of the Carolinas, he immediately begins preparations for the journey into West Florida. In this expedition, he never ventures into the wilderness alone, but always has human company, even if, as he says, it is only three slaves. He spends almost as much time describing the plants that flourish in cultivated gardens on plantation estates as in discussing the wild vegetation (429, 436, and 469, for example). This is not accidental, since he does not stray far from settlements of some sort, Indian or white, and consequently this section of the book is the least interesting to read. Admittedly, the region was more inhabited than other areas he had explored, excluding his early excursions into Georgia, and possibly there were simply fewer natural wonders to relate. But even his first glimpse of the storied Mississippi River does not seem able to inspire the old enthusiasm or stimulate his imagination. When we recall his poetic flights in praise of the Altamaha and compare them with his attempt to portray the Father of Waters as “a prospect of the grand sublime” (428), chiefly in terms of depths and distances, who does not feel that Bartram's ardor for the wilderness and for scenes of wild magnificence, even if only for the carefully controlled wilderness of his mind, has cooled considerably?

Moreover, the few encounters with wild nature that Bartram does experience in West Florida carry forward the established theme of nature's hostility to man, to human enterprise, and to rational modes of consciousness. Bartram devotes more space to an account of the extreme heat and tormenting flies of Florida than he gives to the Mississippi, and when he describes the insects as “evil spirits,” “persecuting spirits,” and “demons” (385-86), he employs a metaphor that, perhaps unintentionally but nevertheless significantly, links the Florida wildernesses to the demon-haunted woodlands of medieval legend and fable. Nor does he attempt to argue the benevolence of these insects as he might have done earlier. The heat and flies combine to sap the energy of the entire company with which he is traveling. “The animal spirits sink under the conflict,” he writes, “and we fall into a kind of mortal torpor rather than refreshing repose; and startled or terrified at each others [sic] plaintive murmurs and groans” (386). Almost literally, the wilderness seems to have extinguished all human faculties and to have reduced the travelers to the level of beasts, communicating with each other in inarticulate groans.

One misery succeeds another, as Bartram and his companions are drenched by a heavy thunderstorm which, however, temporarily revives them. For a brief moment, they contemplate the familiar smiling face of nature: “The birds sung merrily in the groves, and the alert roe-buck whistled and bounded over the ample meads and green turfy hills” (387). Yet even now the implicitly metaphoric “meads” suggests that Bartram is describing more a landscape of the mind than of actuality. The sinister side of nature reappears when he develops the symptoms of a fever, which quickly grows worse and threatens his sight and his life. Though he recovers, vision in his left eye is seriously impaired (418, 436). Mosquitoes plague the travelers, swollen rivers confront them with nearly impassable barriers, and Indians once again pose a problem that necessitates a change in the proposed route of travel. In the end, his ill health causes Bartram to cut short his trip into West Florida, but the reader is left with the distinct impression from the brief four chapters recounting these final experiences with the wilderness that the traveler was not disappointed to be forced to end his explorations.

This reading of the last part of the Travels depends, of course, upon emphasis, not upon any absolute shift in attitude. Ambivalence characterizes Bartram's responses to nature throughout the book, but in Part iii his reactions seem to be more negative than positive, a reversal of Parts i and ii. There is one important piece of biographical evidence in support of this interpretation, which is that Bartram did not undertake another expedition, even though he was later offered the chance to head a group of naturalists who were to explore the identical territory of the Overhill Indians which he had wished to visit in his travels. His attendant spirit, curiosity, seems to have deserted him in this instance, and perhaps we need look no further than the last hundred pages of the Travels to discover sufficient explanation.

Although it is not an attempt at fiction, Bartram's account of his travels, in its concentration upon man's confrontation with nature and in its use of the central device of the journey of withdrawal, can be recognized as an important piece of American literature related to such works as Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Cooper's Prairie, Melville's Moby-Dick, Faulkner's The Bear, Dickey's Deliverance, and to the non-fiction essays Nature and Walden. Like these later writers, Bartram can reconcile garden to wilderness, order to chaos, benevolence to hostility, and beauty to terror only through the force of imaginative metaphors or transcendent vision, and for him, as for them, the psychological tension is reflected in the style and form of his narrative. If the line of descent from the Travels to these and other works of later American literature is not direct, there is nevertheless sufficient family resemblance to establish the authenticity of the lineage beyond dispute.

Notes

1. The indebtedness of English romantics, and of certain American romantics as well, is discussed in John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton, 1927), Ernest Earnest's John and William Bartram: Botanists and Explorers (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1940), Nathan Fagin's William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1933), and Josephine Herbst's New Green World (New York: Hastings House, 1954). Of these, Fagin's offers the most comprehensive treatment of Bartram's influence on later literature.

2. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), 54-55, briefly notes Bartram's negative responses to the wilderness.

3. The phrase is Leo Marx's in “Pastoral Ideals and City Troubles,” JGE [Journal of General Education] 20 (1969), 251-71. See also his The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967) for a discussion of some of the tensions of the American pastoral.

4. William Bartram, Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida … (Philadelphia: James & Johnson, 1791), 100. Further references to the Travels are to this edition and will be noted in the text by page number only.

5. Elsewhere in the Travels, Bartram shows the artist's sensitivity to tones of color, especially to shades of green (335-36, for example), and to perspective and line (esp. 102, 179-80, and 187-88).

6. This reading of Bartram's passage differs widely from that of Josephine Herbst, who is inclined to accept his “uncultivated nature” at face value. See New Green World, 256.

7. Note Bartram's use of alliteration, particularly of sibilant s's as counterpoints to the weightier consonants, to convey the sound of the sea.

8. Bartram most often romanticized the noble savage he encountered in the American wilderness, but, as his tale of the unfortunate trader with the conniving Seminole wife (111-12) demonstrates, he was not totally blinded by the appearance of virtue and innocence; he could also see to moral realities lying under the appearances.

9. Additionally, we might note that mountainous scenery was not much appreciated by any traveler during the first half of the eighteenth century and for a good while thereafter. See Ola Elizabeth Winslow, “Seventeenth-Century Prologue,” Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, ed. Clarence Gohdes (Durham, N. C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1967), 27, and Samuel Holt Monk, “The Sublime in Natural Scenery,” The Sublime (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960), 203-32.