SOURCE: Hallock, Thomas. “‘On the Borders of a New World’: Ecology, Frontier Plots, and Imperial Elegy in William Bartram's Travels.” South Atlantic Review 66, no. 4 (fall 2001): 109-33.

[In the following essay, Hallock traces the development of Bartram's Travels, noting its integration of contemporary artistic modes as well as its internal contradictions, and concludes by characterizing the work as one of America's first outstanding pastoral projects.]

such attempts I leave for the amusement of men of Letters

—William Bartram¹

As the movement in any pastoral away from politics will draw politicized critiques, the Travels of William Bartram holds a characteristically ambivalent place in the canon of American pastoral literature. Viewed against the environmental writings of its day, the book provides a refreshing alternative to the usual rhetoric of expansion and usurpation, and critics can not discuss the author, it seems, without eventually broaching some form of ethical judgement. Bartram on one hand provides a specimen model of what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “anti-conquest,” in that “natural history provided means for narrating inland travel and exploration aimed not at the discovery of trade routes, but at territorial surveillance, appropriation of resources, and administrative control” (39). Citing Pratt so they may dismiss her, on the other hand, sympathetic readers often argue that Travels marked the edges of a discourse. Joshua David Bellin writes that the book “unsettles” frontiers, registering “doubts about the absoluteness of Euro-American conceptions of, and claims to, the continent” (3). Ecological critics tend to equate veneration for the natural world with social tolerance. In the Bartram chapter from his remarkable study on the Appalachian Trail, Ian Marshall writes:

Perhaps the insights of ecology could do more to advance the cause of multiculturalism than any amount of politically correct preaching about tolerance and respect for others. … To recognize the advantages of diversity and the verities of interrelationship and interdependency—that is the ecological way of knowing. And it is a habit of mind that translates to the human realm, involving a movement out of self and toward consideration of others, both other living things and other people.

(45-46)

An analogy to the outside world—natural and vaguely benevolent—allows a slave-holder and accomplice to republican expansion—however guarded his positions may have been—to be cast as a lonely voice against imperialism. That these judgements enter a textual reading at all points to the slippery quality of good pastoral writing.

This essay argues that William Bartram artfully defined his status as a border figure and made his the kind of text for which scholars would want to offer apologies. Celebrated by poets but chided in reviews in the 1790s, Travels now stands as the first bona fide classic of pastoral writing in the United States.² Such an ambivalent reception, a position at both the margins and center of a culture, may be attributed to biography and to the book's long gestation. Travels in some sense began as a father-son Florida tour in 1765-66. Using a small stipend which came with the elder Bartram's appointment of Botanist to the King, the two journeyed to Carolina, down the coast of Georgia and into central Florida (Berkeley 221-35). A journal by William does not survive but John's notebook (later excerpted for William Stork's promotional tract, An Account of East Florida) would become the first ur-text of Travels. Most of John's Diary, in contrast to his often impassioned correspondence, catalogues the uses of a recently-ceded territory in flat, turgid prose—a planter outside Charleston “made surprising improvements in draining salt marshes & converting them into excelent rice fields.”³Travels would unfold over the following decades through oppositional, but empowering, generational dynamics. At a time when William was floundering through a string of professional failures (including a disastrous turn as a planter), the British patron and member of the Royal Society, John Fothergill, offered fifty pounds yearly for a southern tour. Still the son-of-John-Bartram, William left Charleston in 1773, recrossed many sites that he had covered the previous decade, lost himself on new side-paths and excursions, and remained in the wilderness much longer than anyone had expected or requested (Slaughter 172-75). The book evolved quite slowly, as William found a public voice that could capture the veneration his father expressed only in private writing, and as the republic also defined itself.

The various drafts of Travels capture this development. An initial Report to Dr. John Fothergill, largely the reward for a patron, combines an itinerarium, field notebook, and botanic report in a remarkably plain style, and lacks the self-conscious drama of the later tour. As a work of science, the Report balks before the very questions that give shape and meaning to Travels. A description of Florida limesinks, for example, noticeably fails to offer commentary:

I thought it worth your notice, & for that end have indeavourd to give a true Idea of them by a description of their natural & simple appearance: altho the cause & design of them appear evident, yet I am not capable of entering into the various dark mazes in the progress of Nature, & will detain you no longer on my notions of this subject.

(Report 156)

Elsewhere the author promises to provide only “the outward furniture of Nature;” he does not trouble the reader with “particular causes or design by Providence, such attempts I leave for the amusement of Men of Letters & Superior genius” (Report 138). The scope of his work expanded only as William undertook these “attempts” himself, and by 1783 a manuscript was completed that would contain the core of Travels. This recently recovered version recounts lost years in the South with a more defined persona, and it uses Quaker theology to portray the wanderings as a religious quest. Long meditations on the divine operations in nature, held against a corrupt civilization, give the text its idiosyncratic feel. Although the spiritual singularity was later toned down by editors, the manuscript nonetheless shows that an organizing and thematic framework was in place.

With the publication of Travels in 1791, Bartram presents what began as a private journey for public consumption. Douglas Anderson, Christopher Looby, Charles H. Adams, and others note that the work provides a parallel or “small scale model” of the Revolution,⁴ and revisions to the manuscript underscore those pressures by moving from near-antinomianism to national themes. The genetic text shows little interest in expansion, as its editor Nancy Hoffmann observes, and portrays nature as a source of inspiration rather than as commodity. The Quaker influence, perhaps suspected as closet Toryism, was squelched; a typical substitution would be “Spirit” (in Native Americans) for the lower-case and theologically-neutral “principle” (Hoffmann 157). Botanic notes in the 1791 version answer the market demand for utilitarian information and the earlier persona of a “philosophical pilgrim” becomes Puc-Puggy—a benign hybrid character who straddles two worlds, and who epitomizes the republic's contradictory frontier and Indian policies.⁵ A discursive flexibility, born from several stages of revision, qualifies Travels tenuously as an example of the “anti-conquest,” as the natural history provided a means for surveillance and control. But that was just one mode, and Pratt's term—the “anti-conquest”—has the clear-eyed focus of a contemporary morality tale. The power of Bartram's text lies in its ability to work the in-between, colonialist setting of the early national frontier. To anticipate later conquests misses the slippery position that the post-Revolutionary years and the author's experiences afforded.

An extended textual history to Travels instead yields a highly ambivalent work: one that serves as both a critique of American spatial politics and an early contribution to the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, a utilitarian natural history that was an elegy for disappearing ecologies. Bartram wavers between so many positions that the search for perspective becomes its own theme. From the opening pages, William establishes his nature against his father's practical reports. A difference unfolds over generations, one is left to assume, as the two men appear to embody the shift from a colonial/neo-classical to a national/romantic environmental ethos. In nature, the first paragraph opines, “Men and manners undoubtedly hold the first rank. …” But that prosaic note, following an upper-case reference to JOHN BARTRAM, bursts into religious euphoria by the next paragraph: “This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless pattern 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” (li). The remainder of the introduction swims between the pressures that would contribute to the work's formation. A botanic catalogue leads into a geographic overview of the United States, then toward a spiritual epiphany, then through a short Florida ramble that is, in current terms, ecocentric: a flower is described, then a spider on a leaf of that plant, then insects and bumble-bees, then a bird that eats that bee, then back to the flower via the species that the red thrush prefers (lviii-lx). In contrast to John Bartram's Diary, the introduction emphasizes the interdependence of natural species—not their uses by man. A short defense of Native Americans closes the paragraph and the result, a dizzying excursion through several modes, distills the contradictions that would work themselves out over the next five hundred pages.⁶

This blend of voices and genres shows that William Bartram had defined the material that was necessary for articulating the peculiar role in which he had found himself. Travels resonates powerfully, both within and against an imperial discourse, because it synthesizes several layers from a long composition process. The ambivalence that results is especially rich, as critics have noted, because his position paralleled debates that lay before the new nation. On one hand, an ideology of progress across space remained prevalent throughout the early republic and would appear in any piece of geographic writing of the time. William Bartram is not above advancing such a view, and surveys border regions for future development. He would visit planters, botanize on the edges of their farms, and express the compulsion to have marshes drained into arable fields. Yet a veneration for wilderness, often read as an empathy with its inhabitants, also fuels his prose. Bartram nursed a deep biocentricism that set him at the borders of a literature, and the immersion in place would move his almost contemporary ethos beyond John's more mainstream views. This shift would render possible a response to an early national anxiety, the need to define an individual and society as American. Negotiating the tensions that Gordon Sayre identifies in contemporaneous reports of Indian mounds (243), Bartram maintains an ambivalence that softens political pressures through aesthetics. The erstwhile developer expresses astonishment over “wild scenes of landscape;” Puc-Puggy, meanwhile, may exclaim “how is the mind agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world!” (120) But the cause for this exclamation would remain significantly ambiguous, and does not necessarily set the work against expansion. Was this new world, in other words, central Florida or a geographically-defined republic? And what would become of Native Americans as the nation increasingly defined itself through wilderness? A response does not require pioneering methodologies or archival research, only a clear-headed review of the text, with attention to its construction and elisions and to loose strands in the existing scholarship.

TRANSFORMATIONS, PERSONAL AND POLITICAL

Put in the simplest of terms, the lasting resonance in Travels comes from its ability to weave into plot what were and still are topics of national debate. Thomas Slaughter notes in a popular biography how the strained relations between a father and son would translate into cultural anxieties that persist to this day:

Compared to his father, William was a more romantic, less constrained, celebrant of wild nature. William also had mixed feelings about civilization as a consequence of his inability to find a place where he fit. Whether he realized the complex, sometimes conflicted, nature of his thinking, he didn't edit the Travels for false consistency. That's why some readers have pegged him—based on their reading of this one writing of his—as a natural, who favored the wild over civilized life, while others have seen him—again based solely on a reading of the Travels—as another European exploiter of virgin lands and native peoples.

(Slaughter 185)

The younger Bartram presses ethical positions by hovering between environmental ethos, thereby framing future usurpations and ecological changes against a set of open questions. A skepticism over civilization, carried over from the genetic text, would seem to anticipate present and presumably more enlightened views. (For this reason, Travels fits comfortably into a canon of pastoral literature that privileges later authors like Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold while glossing earlier, and sometimes, equally uninteresting colonial writers.) The narrative operates through archetypes, in classic Adamic form, as the individual steps outside society, meets a raw nature that he cannot control then reforges a new identity through that experience (Arner 133). This well-worn plot does not define man in wilderness, so much as it traces a progress from familiar settlements into trackless beyonds. There could not be of course a more European motif. Leo Marx's observation that a pastoral derives from the “urge to withdraw from civilization's growing power and complexity” (9) indicates the dichotomy at the root of any classically “green” mythos. And so competing Bartrams—father and son, the exploiter and the natural, the manuscript and print personae—find commerce in a single text.

This pattern will become evident by the close of part 1, the Carolina and Georgia tour, which provides a kind of keynote to Travels. “At the request of Dr. Fothergill, of London,” the narrator sets out, “I embarked for Charleston” (1). Having received these instructions from the metropolitan center, he follows the steps of securing a route, checking the political waters, and gathering letters of introduction. When Bartram crosses the line into “wild” country, he lets the reader know. “It may be proper to observe,” he notes on the Altamaha River, “that I had now passed the utmost frontier of the white settlements on that border” (14). His entrance (in case readers miss the shift) gets punctuated by an encounter with a lone Seminole, who appears in caricature with a “countenance angry and fierce.” The two shake hands, only for the narrator to learn later that the stranger had earlier resolved to kill the next man he met. This episode, while taken from experience, probably occurred in 1776. By folding the scene into the opening pages of the work (1773 in literary time), Bartram telegraphs the thematic ends of his plot. Each succeeding venture onto the frontier, following some sort of trial, would force the often solitary pilgrim to clarify an understanding of Native Americans and their land. Richard Slotkin observes of this passage that the traveler “descends into the wilderness, finds a kindred spirit in an Indian, and emerges with moral wisdom,” but this private change gets freighted with imperial politics. Before returning to the settled regions in part 1, Bartram reviews a controversial Creek cession of Cherokee claims.⁷

Part 2 develops the thematic germ into a fully-realized narrative. Like the shorter Carolina tour the Florida section follows the movement from society to wilderness, and as the solitary wanderer forges an identity for himself, he suggests a new direction for his culture. The literal route moves up the St. John's, crosses Florida twice, and after a (shortened) second upriver adventure, closes with a catalogue of southeastern fauna. Over this loosely-constructed, 250-page stretch, the pilgrim charts a psychic development that would correspond with national anxieties. Editors have noted that Bartram rearranged the order of the earlier Report, folding the second St. John's trip into a longer journey;⁸ this reshuffling emphasizes a movement to a more organic community in the wilderness. The result would be a hybrid identity, a creative response to the disjunction between the early republic and place. Bartram suggests that, somewhere on the “middle ground” of central Florida, he had become native to the physical environment. Yet the ideological implications for this frontier narrative, at least in Bartram's hands, have come under surprisingly little scrutiny. The work rarely receives examination as a coherent whole (critics usually deal with passages in isolation), and ecological readings often focus upon the veneration of wilderness for its own sake—sometimes addressing form, but rarely addressing the role that wilderness served in light of expansion.⁹ Yet a political thrust, what the eleven chapters of the Florida tour set out to do, becomes clear by the end of the section. In the penultimate chapter (chapter 10), Bartram pauses the travelogue to offer a lengthy discourse on fauna. It is a strange digression, one that includes observations from years later,¹⁰ and the gap in chronology begs the question why such information gets disclosed here. A more conventional organization might have tucked the natural history into an appendix, creating an equivalent to the ethnography in part 4.

The intention was to destabilize lines between the personal and scientific. In keeping with an affective science, the tableau opens with Bartram at Spalding's lower store. He is “drawing some curious flowers,” awaiting the schooner that would return him to Georgia, when a diamondback rattler slithers into camp. At first the naturalist tries to ignore the ruckus that follows, but a group of Seminoles call his name—it being Bartram's “pleasure,” they amusingly protest, “to collect all their animals and other natural productions of their land.” Puc-Puggy should now “collect” the “natural production” of a pit viper. He clocks the snake with one blow of a stick, cuts off its head and carries the trophy home. (Three Seminole men later try to scratch blood from the white hero to make him “more mild and tame,” a gesture that may have been teasing or may have been meant to “appease the manes of the slain rattle snake” [166-67]). This wonderfully related story makes possible the shift from a narrative-experiential to descriptive-taxonomic mode, and in narrative logic, outlines the path that a particular specimen took from field to cabinet. Bartram files the snake head in his collection, draws it and sends the sketch to London. The zoological drawings would eventually work their way into the British Museum, and the episode from Travels provides the pretense for an overview of Southern fauna (Ewan 79).

The taxonomizing comes at the very end of the journey and notably follows a series of criss-crossing excursions throughout East Florida. Again, why there? The arrangement of these chapters points to a question of legitimacy; it asks the readers to ask how one comes to know. For early national writers especially, an emphasis upon gathering would signify its own kind of cultural revolution. Consider by contrast the opening of Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, the standard source on American birds: with an “inclination … being much suppressed by my residing too far from London, the center of all science, I was deprived of all opportunities and examples to excite me to a stronger pursuit after those things to which I was naturally bent.” The ornithologist then moves from the “center of all science” to a periphery. “Virginia was the place,” the colonial author continues, “where I arrived the 23rd of April 1712” (137). One best describes the continent by inhabiting it, Bartram suggests, by losing one's self within its space and not just visiting. His narrative links an often directionless travelogue and the taxonomic tables because the basis of authority had been wandering. The discussion of snakes—and in fact, the entire chapter—begins with the story of how he obtained a sample upon the eve of his departure. The catalogue that follows is accordingly both authoritative and anecdotal, scientific and poetic. Herpetological notes come with an apology for the author's pacifism, his reluctance to kill a rattler in other cases, and biographical reflections on John Bartram (168-69). The table corrects several omissions by Catesby, and offers a gentle but persistent defense of what was presumably a Revolutionary method. By remaining in one place through the course of seasons, through what Puc-Puggy calls his “peregrinations,” one discovers and better understands a wider variety of species (180).

These corrections reflect a growing sense of independence, a kind of literary analogue to Charles Willson Peale's famous raising of the curtain, that was imagined over an American border region. Yet the premium upon place would remain unique to Bartram. More than any work of its time, Travels defines the world ecologically, taking into account “the full diversity and complex unity of nature.” It organizes flora and fauna around ecosystems; where a Linnaean model divided and classified, Charles Adams notes, “William Bartram remained open to the possibility of unity and complexity in all forms of life” (“Reading” 70). What the language indicates, the mixture of the technical and poetic, is a shift to recognize authority from both sides of the Atlantic. It speaks for a way of knowing that is experiential and therefore rooted in locale. The innovation in narrative strategy, I would argue, responds to an uncertainty over the republic's colonial roots. Bartram offers a corrective to imported government and culture: not so much an allegory for the past war as the product of a society's still tenuous identification with the physical terrain. His word for four years in the South, “peregrinations,” uses a prefix that is strikingly non-linear. In a very different book, Timothy Dwight would distinguish the term “emigration” (to leave Europe) from “immigration” (wherein a “stream of population … flows into the United States” [Dwight 4:200]). As Dwight would monitor environmental changes wrought by the colonization of New England, the older landscapes that he documents hold less appeal. Bartram by contrast describes a tangential path; he internalizes a pre-settlement countryside by wandering the periphery or perimeter.

The premium on place, especially when set against other republican accounts, may help explain the elegiac quality of Travels. For the resonance in Bartram's pastoral impulse comes from his continual effort to graft the conventional narrative of progress onto a more ecological form of writing. In the midst of his catalogue, the naturalist apologizes by emphasizing the commercial value of his work. Puc-Puggy describes how he figured out a puzzle; he cites the advantage of inhabiting a region and (in a semantic equation between himself and his subject) notes that ornithology is best practiced by “residing a whole year at least in the various climates from north to south to the full extent of their peregrinations.” Behind the haphazard process of discovery lurks a need for the son of John Bartram to redeem himself:

There may be perhaps some persons who consider this enquiry not to be productive of any real benefit to mankind, and pronounce such attention to natural history merely speculative, and only fit to amuse and entertain the idle virtuoso; however, the ancients thought otherwise, for with them, the knowledge of the passage of birds was the study of their priests and philosophers, and was considered a matter of real and indispensible use to the state, next to astronomy, as we find their system and practice of agriculture was in a great degree regulated by the arrival and disappearance of birds of passage, and perhaps a calender under such a regulation at this time, might be useful to the husbandman and the gardener.

(178)

The conflicting personae of Travels here find a textual venue. William manages to negotiate, even if only for a moment, between the utilitarian basis of republican natural histories and a pilgrim soul. And this commerce between the two worlds may just be the real destination of Travels. The book offers an appreciation of wilderness against a backdrop of rapid change; it establishes an identity that is fully attached to neither Anglo nor Native American societies but somehow capable of embodying them both.

What brought the narrative to this moment? The account of migration suggests a kind of imaginative claim to the continent, but it does so through partly biographical tensions. Caught between pragmaticism and a veneration that his father felt but did not publicly express, William invariably would have to contradict himself, and an unsteady pastoralism saves the work from committing too deeply to any one side. Travels presents the classic instance of a machine in the garden, but as remains the case always in the American pastoral, an elegy comes at the face of changes that the author does not completely reject. This is not to say, as with most “green” writers, that Puc-Puggy was ready to turn back the dumptrucks of civilization. For his romanticism reflects an awareness of incipient change that came with expansion, nor does a categorized wilderness ever move the work beyond the expediencies of an Anglo-European natural history. Even by establishing himself on the borders of print culture, William apparently would remain within the discursive boundaries of his genre. That part 2 closes between a biocentric and anthrocentric stance, therefore, should come as no surprise. He had been working the narrative to that ambivalence over the previous nine chapters. A review of the unit will show how the highly personal transformation, from son of John Bartram to Puc-Puggy, could supply the fabric for national myth.

Following the plot that part 1 had established, the Florida tour begins with a farewell to the more settled regions. The narrator again collects letters of introduction and cannot view the Atlantic barriers islands without suggesting why they have remained undeveloped (37-43). A route up the St. John's from the abandoned Fort Picolata (near St. Augustine) carries the author across a difficult psychological landscape. He had visited the post in 1765, and further upriver was the site of his old plantation—a stinging reminder of his past lack of focus. These memories being what a traveler struggles to leave behind, the path—or the literary one at least—delivers him to an increasingly solitary state. Settlements have a way of disappearing from the text (the Report to Fothergill reads more like an agricultural report), and the narrator makes no mention of the former homestead when he approaches it. Any repressed doubts surface only as meditations on a new identity. When a companion quits the “hardships and dangers” of exploration, the philosophical pilgrim declares his purpose:

continually impelled by a restless spirit of curiosity … 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.

(48)

The statement poises William Bartram, the son of the Botanist to King George III, on the verge of becoming Puc-Puggy, a complete individual who could serve an American republic on his own terms.

Biographical pressures and a larger historical geography would provide the grist for plot. Following the traveler into the wilderness and toward a more complete realization of self, chapter 4 closes with a scene of primitive fellowship outside corrupt society. In a passage that editors would tone down from the genetic manuscript, Bartram joins a backwoods feast: “The simple and necessary calls of nature, being satisfied,” he joyously notes, “[w]e were together as brethren of one family, strangers to envy, malice and rapine.”¹¹ Companions disappear from the narrative and leave the hero bare before nature. The beginning of a solitude is painted with an appropriately flamboyant brush. “At the upper end of this bluff is a fine Orange grove,” the text explains:

Here my Indian companion requested me to set him on shore, being already tired of rowing under a fervid sun, and having for some time intimated a dislike of his situation, I readily complied with his desire, knowing the impossibility of compelling an Indian against his own inclinations … when labour is in the question; before my vessel reached the shore, he sprang out of her and landed, when uttering a shrill and terrible whoop, he bounded off like a roebuck, and I lost sight of him.

(74)

A trader actually accompanied the “solitary traveler” to Spalding's upper store (Report 151-54); what the account sacrifices in accuracy, however, it gains in dramatic effect, as the scene—punctuated by the “shrill and terrible whoop”—foreshadows an extended immersion in the natural sublime. What better cauldron for psychological change, after all, than a lonely wanderer in a hostile wilderness? After this scene, the narrator experiences nature in its most terrifying forms—the alligators and the hurricane (not then in season) that usually appear in anthologies. These encounters are followed by a series of highly-charged effusions, where nearly every paragraph starts with an exclamation: “What a most beautiful creature is this fish before me! (97)”; “What a beautiful display of vegetation is here before me!” (98); “Behold … a vast circular expanse before you” (105). The border experience works through a standard plot (one that is every bit as Anglo-European as the unreliable Indian who abandons Bartram). These familiar chapters require little commentary, except to note how the sublime jars the unproductive son toward a new self. The allegorized journey would allow the author to articulate the polarities that he embodied. By casting observations from two ascents of the river as one tour, the author sets up the christening of Puc-Puggy, and the theme shifts from the classic man-in-wilderness to a white-man-among-Native-Americans. After exploring the St. John's, William joins a trading company to the Alachua Savanna, then crosses the isthmus again en route to Talahasochte, a Seminole town on the Suwannee. Textual evidence suggests that these lateral journeys represented the core of Travels,¹² and the bio-historical tensions of the introduction would converge by the latter half of part 2. The setting would provide a medium within which one could contrast utilitarian reportage and a proto-romantic ecological sense, balancing the pressures of an expanding nation and the rights of Native Americans.

A psychic transformation foments a new social self, and the Alachua Savanna provides the grounds wherein a private and public William Bartram meet. It is, appropriately, where his identity as a botanist is recognized. (This identity, in turn, renders as possible the catalogue that closes chapter 10.) In Cuscowilla, a Seminole town that bordered the savanna, Cowkeeper renames the author and opens the country in one sentence:

He received me with complaisance, giving me unlimited permission to travel over the country for the purpose of collecting flowers, medicinal plants, & c. saluting me by the name of PUC PUGGY or the Flower hunter, recommending me to the friendship and protection of his people.

(118)

The apparent innocence with which Puc-Puggy is received, however, betrays the obvious uses of exploration. On one hand, Bartram had earned the trust of Native Americans. Travels (and his unpublished writings especially) show a concern for indigenous peoples that was exceptional for eighteenth-century America. But as the preface to an account by John Bartram would note, “knowledge must precede a settlement” (Observations iii), and plant gathering rarely served the neutral function that Cowkeeper is portrayed to assume. Just a few pages prior to the promise of “unlimited permission,” Puc-Puggy would identify “a fine situation for a capital town” (115). William would adopt the Seminole name as his own, in other words, but he was grounded in the politics of a civilization moving across space.

Attempting to establish an identification with place on the most uncertain of terms, the author must wrestle with problems that were endemic to republican frontier politics. Through what narrative machinery, the book asks, could an Anglo-American become native to the continent? Standing on the edge of the savanna, contemplating “the unlimited, varied, and truly astonishing native wild scenes of landscape,” Bartram bursts out in an unconscious quote of the Tempest, “how is the mind agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world!” (120). In keeping with standard aesethic formulas, this “native wild landscape” conveys an equivalent social order. Anthropomorphic hills and groves “re-echo” the “cheerful, social voices” of the “lordly bull” and cattle; “squadrons” of horses, and “civilized communities of the sonororous crane, mix together.” When a hunter appears on the scene, the “bounding roe … erects the white flag” as a warning to his “fleet and free associates” (119-20). Dusk finds the cranes returning to their roost as one unit:

The sonorous savanna crane, in well disciplined squadrons, now rising from the earth, mount aloft in spiral circles, far above the dense atmosphere of the humid plain; they again view the glorious sun, and the light of day still gleaming on their polished feathers, they sing their evening hymn, then in a strait line, majestically descend, and alight on the towering Palms or lofty Pines, their secure and peaceful lodging places.

The travelers follow suit: “All around being still and silent, we repair to rest” (121). Although a private and poetic epiphany, one that could be set on the page as verse, the scene speaks to the ideological geography of a new nation. The Alachua Savanna seems to slide between the stages of Anglo-American space, embracing both neo-classical environmentalism and a contemporary biocentrism. Cuscowilla itself straddles that temporal-spatial frontier line which presumed to split settlement from wilderness. With seemless transitions, the scenery moves from settlement to farm to wilderness. The plain will remain a border region even to the native inhabitants, while the “town stands on the most pleasant situation”; Bartram writes, “such a rural scene, is not be imitated by the united ingenuity and labour of man” (123). Alongside the savanna, villagers maintain a farm so that a portion of nature remains undeveloped—where even the deer can raise their “white flag” and escape a Seminole hunter. This sense of an historical geography explains the fascination with ruins that Gordon Sayre has elsewhere examined (239-42). “Passing through a great extent of ancient Indian fields,” Bartram notes evidence of “the ancient Alachua, the capital of that famous and powerful tribe.” He remarks upon “stately trees,” the abandoned orange groves and “luxuriant herbage,” and he explains how thousands once gathered to play ball on these “happy fields and green plains” (126). The question that has been identified in Indian monuments also informs Bartram's portrayal of the Alachua Savanna: what kind of nation could the back country nurture?¹³

But the artistry here comes from the ability to weigh the prospects of expansion versus existing uses for the land, and a commerce between a social and natural order, where cranes fly in “squadrons” and bulls bellow “socially,” gets embedded so deeply into the prose that neither author nor audience need examine its implications too deeply. A remarkably slippery account results. Bartram fails either to endorse or castigate civilization as he knows it; instead, he allows the text to amble within the dichotomies that his contemporaries defined. He negotiates a still-open problem through what would become a national pastoral. On a second journey across Florida, Bartram again encounters some sandhill cranes. He provides a simple but majesterial account of the bird, describing its height and wingspan, the shape of its body, its plumage, and he makes a breathtaking analogy between the sound of quills in flight and the creak of an ocean vessel. Like Audubon who would follow him, however, Bartram revels over what has been killed. His companions dress the fowl for soup, and while Puc-Puggy may prefer its “seraphic music in the etherial skies” to the food in his dish, William would still eat (140). A similar if not more serious conflict surfaces at Talahasochte. The natives again give Bartram leave to wander the territory, this time equating his role of botanist with a symbolic adoption:

The king in particular complimented me, saying that I was as one of his own children or people, and should be protected accordingly, while I remained with them, adding, ‘Our whole country is before you, where you may range about at pleasure, gather physic plants and flowers, and every other production. …’

(150)

But three pages earlier, Bartram had recommended soil for “Corn, Rice, Indigo, Sugar-cane, Flax, Cotton, Silk, Cochineal and all the varieties of esculent vegetables” (148). The frontier again is sited for future plantations. Although he had conceded in the prior passage that development would depend upon the Seminoles (“sovereigns of these realms”), the author shows an alarming ability to shift allegiances. He skirts the vague boundary between admiration and (for lack of a better word) consumption.

Although Travels has been described as generally formless, as not “tidy” (Irmscher 37), a movement nonetheless is visible by the close of part 2. The trust shown to Puc-Puggy in central Florida anticipates the coming scientific catalogue. A Seminole chief again opens the land, “Our whole country is before you,” and this permission leads to the insistence that Puc-Puggy gather the “production” of a rattlesnake. William would define a national space after the symbolic adoption by natives. He would describe a creolized region, one that Americans could occupy, or “peregrinate” through, and therefore catalogue on their own terms. Travels maps out a wilderness that moves so seemlessly across arbitrary boundaries of the frontier that readers to this day are loathe to scrutinize its historical basis—which is, of course, what pastoral writing does.

EXPANSION AND ELEGY

Ethical judgments invariably creep into readings of Bartram, and he has been approached from this angle since the 1790s. The first reviewers took Travels as a critique, chafing in particular against the author's erstwhile sympathy for native ties to the land. “The savage alone,” an early commentator would gripe,

might be expected to lament the loss of his hunting grounds; and if he be thus driven to betake himself to any kind of agriculture, he is made a more sociable and useful being by the alteration. On such a continent, there will always be groves enough for the botanist. … Swamps, crocodiles, wild beasts of prey, snakes, lizards, musquitoes, rank grass, weeds, and all their putridity, are unfriendly to man, and the enumeration of them is not very inviting to adventurers.

(qtd. Slaughter 244-45)

These reviews strengthen the claim that Bartram should be read as a liminal figure, a lead that recent critics are wont to follow. Seemingly in sync with a contemporary ecological conscience, his portrayals of both wilderness and its inhabitants pushed the limits of republican expectations. As some scholars note, Travels gives as much voice to Native Americans as was then possible; Bellin argues that one should “acknowledge, even in the texts which regard their dispossession, the ability of the Indians to engage their dispossessors in debates over the celebration and use of the land” (19). He means, I think rightly, that Bartram allows at least the traces of conflict to surface in his narrative. Ian Marshall uses Puc-Puggy as a morality tale.

Yet the compulsion to implicate or absolve an author from an imperial context fails to address what a work like Travels manages to accomplish as narrative; that is, to imagine an alternative set of relations without endangering the culture that it purportedly critiques. Bartram would remain always a republican writer, if not a marginal one, and the castigations—especially when read against his more conventional turns—indicate the pressures that framed his book. The counter-narrative that he provides, after all, would depend upon the very ideological geography that he purportedly “unsettles.” Herein lie the vagaries—and the suggestive power—of a frontier myth. As settlement must precede a wilderness, the tension between conquest and anti-conquest gets woven into the fabric of plot. My point may seem tendentious, since Bartram held enormously progressive views toward both nature and Native Americans, but even his most impassioned pleas on their behalf (the equation between land and people being his, not mine) invariably returned to the usual thinking of an empire across space. In a manuscript from the late 1780s, “Some Hints & Observations concerning the civilization of the Indians, or Aborigenes of America,” Bartram makes two puzzling assertions. He first argues that the “Muscoges or Cricks” were “strongly inclined to our modes of civilization,” willing to adopt Anglo-European agriculture, when in fact they were not (Waselkov and Braund 197-98). Second, he stakes a claim on the basis of conscience that equates the continent's future with the republic. “Let us my Brethren convince the world,” Bartram writes,

that the Citizens of the United States are Men in every Sense. Let us support our dignity in all things. Let our actions, in this memorable age of our establishment, as a nation or People, be as a Mirror to succeeding Generations. Let us leave to our Children, a monument inscribed with Lessons of Virtue, which may remain from age to age, as approved examples for their Posterity: that they, in similar cases may say to one another; see how benevolently, how gratefully[,] how nobly, our forefathers acted!

(Waselkov and Braund 198)

With its address to the future, this vexing document parallels the pastoral strategy that governs Travels. Bartram argues for fair treatment on the basis of Native Americans' capacity to adopt a largely white economy, then puts its persuasive thrust behind the anticipated legacies of the Revolution. The manuscript is elegiac before the fact and organized around apology.

Regardless of sincere hopes for peace, Bartram would always provide a way around the brute pressures of expansion. An appeal to later generations—oppositional on the surface only—strengthens the identification of a self in republican community, and like Travels, “Short Hints” anticipates future usurpations. The author in this way registers the prospects of loss without confronting their causes; he regrets expansion while paradoxically contributing to the literature of expansion. An elegy for the lost garden, Leo Marx noted decades ago, was rendered possible by the inescapable truth of the machine. Pastoralism accordingly operates in Travels against a backdrop of incipient land development. Even the most cherished passages, where the author is rapt within an entirely contemporary view, can revert to the level of a utilitarian report. On his return from Talahasochte, Bartram would re-visit the site of his prior transformation, the Alachua Savanna. His second portrayal of the plain reveals a developer's side, not Puc-Puggy's. “Next day we passed over part of the great and beautiful Savanna,” the narrator explains,

whose exuberant green meadows, with the fertile hills which immediately encircle it, would if peopled and cultivated after the manner of the civilized countries of Europe, without crouding or incommoding families, at a moderate estimation, accomodate in the happiest manner, above one hundred thousand human inhabitants, besides millions of domestic animals; and I make no doubt this place will at some future day be one of the most populous and delightful seats on earth.

(158)

One might discount this nod to utilitarian literature as pro forma, but no amount of qualification (“without crouding,” “accomodate in the happiest manner”) can palliate the blunt language of usurpation here—what Pratt calls the “anti-conquest.” An awareness of change lurks behind or, better put, defines an identification with the back country in its then-current state. In this case, Bartram was aware of designs by the planter Joseph Bryan (whom he visited in 1776) to secure a 99-year lease for the savanna.¹⁴ That the Seminoles did not agree does not change the mood of this passage.

As a desire to evade lies at the crux of Travels, narrative and counternarrative together provide a governing structure. The discovery of a new social identity may drive the plot of part 2, but a central vantage point remains the republican plan; the author's aesthetics are tied to the prospects of change, even if oppositionally. Border regions are portrayed as anterior to civilization, and a politics of progress across space—while softened by symbolic adoptions—would inform Bartram's representations of both the wilderness and its inhabitants. Although elsewhere in the book and in manuscripts especially, the author would provide fair and accurate descriptions of southeast peoples, the private author must define his voice in a print community. The faith that an Other would join the march of progress allowed him to accept the name Puc-Puggy while being aware of plans to develop lands that were clearly being used. The outcome of the southern territories would become its own story, as the close of the Jeffersonian plan led to removal and new configurations in frontier narratives, but this moment of irresolution for the time being would yield rich results in Travels. The story of a personal transformation bridges eighteenth-century and romantic attitudes toward nature and natives, and the resulting pastoralism (bolstered by pleas for fairness) creates a wilderness that is at once European and local. The evolution of a persona would provide the solution for a work that sought to incorporate the spatial geography of the new republic, a growing identification with place, and an inclination to be indigenous to the continent. A literary natural history, an early masterpiece of environmental writing in the United States, materializes from the open conflicts of that specific moment. A measure of the work's genius, a coup for its plot, is the continued compulsion of readers to echo an apology that was made over two hundred years ago.

Notes

1. William Bartram, Report (156). This quotation has relevance as well for the author: my thanks to Nancy Hoffmann, John Hiers, Gary E. Cooper, Julie Armstrong, and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their help with this article.

2. On literary significance, see N. Bryllion Fagin; reception is discussed in The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist Edition, ed. Francis Harper (xviii-xxviii); a standard geneology that places Bartram at the beginning of a tradition is Thomas J. Lyon (276-81).

3. John Bartram Diary of a Tour (13); In John Seelye's words, “we have only to lay one journal next to the other to measure the generational gap” (41).

4. See Douglas Anderson (13), Christopher Looby (260-61), Charles H. Adams, “William Bartram's Travels. A Natural History of the South” (114). Edward J. Cashin, by contrast, explores the absence of a political context (663-72).

5. On the genetic text, see Nancy Hoffmann (51-68); on Quaker politics and voice, see Slaughter (195-96).

6. Critics describe Travels as anything from “polyphonic” to a “ragbag”: on the various rhetoric modes, see Larry R. Clarke (435); Charles H. Adams, “William Bartram's Travels. A Social History of the South” (119); James Dickey (ix); N. Brillion Fagin (102); Christoph Irmscher (37).

7. Slotkin (326); for discussions of the New Purchase, see Eve Kornfield (300) and Joshua David Bellin (1-3); on Bartram and the lone Seminole, see Waselkov and Braund (35, 231).

8. See Francis Harper's notes in Travels (353), A Report to Dr. John Fothergill (130).

9. Ian Marshall mines Travels for a contemporary, multicultural allegory in “Puc Puggy in the Nantahalas: The Turning Point of William Bartram's Travels” (35-50).

10. Bartram confesses that “I have never travelled the continent south of New Orleans,” when to this point he had not been West of Florida (Travels 179).

11. Travels (71). The draft reads, “we contemplated no other pleasure than what naturally arises from the rational and moderate gratification of the Passions & Appetite given to us by the Great and bountiful Deity” (Hoffman 153).

12. Bartram began to describe the Florida plain while still in the woods and he folded this draft, with corrections, almost verbatim into the later manuscript. A 1786 broadside later used this scene to promote the work (Slaughter 188).

13. On Bartram's stylized response to the environmental politics of the American Revolution, see also Adams, “William Bartram's Travels. “A Natural History of the South” (115), Anderson (14).

14. Alan Gallay (94, 145-46), Waselkov and Braund (202, 243).

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