[In the following essay, Slaughter claims that, while Travels is a complicated work that has many facets, there is one message that Bartram wanted to voice more than any other: “all of nature is one … and infused with the spirit of its creator.”]

Is William Bartram's Travels poetry, readers have asked, fiction, or science? Are the author and the “philosophical pilgrim” the same person or different ones sharing the same name? Is the story true, readers have always wanted to know, or did the author alter the record and transfigure time—create, transform, embellish, recall things that never happened, and forget some that did? The answer to all these questions is yes; the book is all these things and more.

The Travels is a complicated story told by a person who wanted to tell the truth, but who didn't always know what it was; it was written by a man who didn't let smaller truths obscure larger ones that he wanted to share. William Bartram was a persona, a character in a book whom the author imagined back in his plantation swamp and whom he became over the course of his travels, in writing his Travels, in the garden after his traveling was done. The personal transformation was a self-conscious act, but the creation of the pilgrim's persona was not, so the book is richly autobiographical in ways that William never intended, didn't recognize, would never know, and would have denied.

Is the author of the Travels an Enlightenment figure, a Romantic, or a pre-Romantic writer? other readers have asked. Does the book bear structural resemblances to the novels, natural histories, or travel accounts of William's day? Again, the answer is that William and the book are all those things. Since the principal character in the Travels isn't a literal rendering of the author, since his story is an idealization of nature and self, the book should be approached cautiously as a biographical source, with attention to contextual materials and internal evidence that suggest it isn't always what it appears to be. The ancillary sources include William's life, the drawings he made on his journey, the three surviving manuscript chapters written and corrected in his hand, and the Report that he wrote for his patron, Dr. Fothergill, which parallels events in the Travels, but offers a strikingly different account of William's journey from April 1773 to January 1777.

In all these revelations about nature and self, William had but one message that he consciously shared, and he voiced it with a clarity and simplicity that defined who he became as he entered his forties and continued becoming for the last forty years of his life. All of nature is one, he believed, and infused with the spirit of its creator; this common soul reveals God and is an active spiritual presence in the natural world, an essence that connects all nature and makes the characteristics shared by animals and plants more significant than the differences among us. If such ideas sound familiar, it may be because they were inspired by John's strikingly similar philosophy. William's message was a distinctive combination of traditional notions, lessons learned at his father's knee, and visionary ideals of his own, a view of the natural world that had a greater kinship with both seventeenth-century spiritualism and nineteenth-century Transcendentalism than did the nature writings of such contemporaries as Crèvecoeur, Kalm, and Jefferson.¹

William accepted nature on its own terms—on God's terms, he would say. Wilderness was just as God intended without any improvement by man, without the clearing, tilling, and fencing that others, including his father, saw as natural beauty. No American of his day waxed so romantic about wilderness settings. The Travels is, among other things, an ode to unspoiled natural beauty. Inhale William's reverie on the Altamaha River:

How gently flow thy peaceful floods, O Altamaha! How sublimely rise to view, on thy elevated shores, yon magnolian groves, from whose tops the surrounding expanse is perfumed, by clouds of incense, blended with the exhaling balm of the liquidambar, and odours continually arising from circumambient aromatic groves of illicium, myrica, laurus and bignonia. … Thus secure and tranquil, and meditating on the marvellous scenes of primitive nature, as yet unmodified by the hand of man, I gently descended the peaceful stream, on whose polished surface were depicted the mutable shadows from its pensile banks; whilst myriads of finny inhabitants sported in its pellucid floods.²

Hear William's drawing of Florida's Alachua Savanna. Everything wondrous he has to say about the shared nature of all creation echoes there, too. The picture is really a series of mirror images that display the connections among animal and plant life. The central focus of the drawing is the lowland feature that begins with the sinkhole in the top center. The swamp is shaped like the leaf of a tree, with the streams running out of the sinkhole taking on the characteristics of both the veins of the large leaf and of branches leading to interior leaf-shaped lowlands and ponds. The cranes flying through the top right of the picture are reflected in two terrestrial features below them.³

The drawing evokes classical imagery, with the columnlike tree framing the foreground and left side of the scene. The elevated perspective of the viewer is also traditional in European landscape art, and is often interpreted as an expression of dominance, a declaration of control over nature by artists steeped in Western cultural conventions, who see with imperial eyes. As always for William, though, dominance and control are deeply troubling prospects, implying responsibilities that he's not prepared to accept, a confidence that he doesn't really have, and a hierarchical configuration of nature to which he isn't emotionally attached. He undermines these messages within his own portrayal by representing humans as less significant in the savanna than animals and plants.

If he had simply left out mankind altogether, implying our presence as the elevated viewers of the scene, our dominance would be clear; but he muddies the story by including at least some of us on his landscape. Humans are represented by the building in the lower central part of the drawing. We know from a key to William's map of the savanna that this structure stands for the Seminole village of Cuscowilla. Typical of William, where humans are visible in his scenes, our place is modest in scale and scope, not a dominating presence, more Eastern than Western in the way he situates mankind in nature. We saw this as well in the sketch of his father's house, in which William included a man dwarfed by his trees (page 36).

His drawing of the arethusa divaricata also portrays a tiny figure in a canoe and a town on the opposite bank. The lone paddler may again be the artist, as the fisherman may be in the sketch of John's house. Plants dominate; birds are an interior focus, detailed enough to discern species and their graceful ease gliding across the landscape. Humans are more remote, but we are part of the natural habitat, nonetheless. The meticulously drawn frame defines the portrait as a pose that freezes the subjects in place.

By representing Indians in the Alachua Savanna, the artist has left open the interpretive possibility that a European “we,” who exist above and outside the image field, rule this domain, thereby “othering” nature in ways typical of Western conventions of seeing dating back to the “discovery” of the Americas in the late fifteenth century. Since the drawing subverts such conventions, though, challenging the very perspectives it takes, this is a reading to which we shouldn't leap. Indeed, the fisherman and the paddler show that William sees the Cuscowilla Seminoles in nature just as he views the rest of us, including himself.

In William's landscape, there are flowers larger than the trees that surround them, which suggests that foreground and background don't have the relationship traditional in Western pictorial art. Animal size doesn't shrink as we move toward the top of the picture; the scene does not recede into either a distant horizon or a dim past. Our view takes in the whole savanna with the same focus and depth. Such novel perspectives imply a timelessness or, at least, that change comes slowly here.

As in William's description of the Altamaha, the wilderness present is “primitive,” “as yet unmodified by the hand of man,” still “peaceful.” The drawing stops time, as all pictures do, and constructs an unnatural view that bounds reality in ways our eyes and the terrain never could. It freezes a view into a scene; vision becomes a bounded field with a central focus and clearly defined edges that exist only in the artist's mind, telling us his story rather than reporting visual “facts” that anyone else would behold. The picture is true to William's feelings and to the sensations that others might experience at the savanna, thereby discerning a different “Truth” than his father perceived in the same place. In another subversion of the expected, the viewer looks backward in time from an imagined perspective beside the classical tree. This feature, which at its base so resembles the column William may have helped John build on his house, stands for the present, civilization, and the structures of man—including the artificial frame constructed by the artist—rather than simply evoking an idealized European past. The column is imposed to give shape, to define an edge of the image field, to hide from our eyes what exists beyond the lined borders that William draws.

As viewers, we are much closer to the column than we are to the savanna below. The idealized savanna is a memory, not just of the place that William saw, but of one that we must struggle inside our hearts to reach. It's an attempt to escape from the past through a back door, to a world that existed before the failures of William's life, before Europeans disturbed the savanna's tranquility, which is why he leaves out the roads that transect the “map” he sent to Fothergill.

The presence of commercial highways on this map would alter the story, dampen the emotional fires of sublimity that William is trying to stoke for the reader, and introduce change. This drawing not only stops time; it captures a moment now past. It's unclear whether this reflects an antidevelopmental prejudice, because like his father William can both admire nature on its own terms and imagine fences and fields as pleasant prospects. A letter that he wrote to Lachlan McIntosh about the savanna captures William's wilderness idyll and a developmental dream in the same paragraph.

The wide and almost unlimited prospect of this verdant plain varied with glittering pieces of water and jetting points of the hammocks forms a scene inchangingly beautiful. … The land about it very good and extremely proper for indigo, would grow good corn & c., the whole savanna in the summer and fall a meadow of very good kind of grass. … In short would those Indians part with this land, it would admit of a very valuable settlement and would be a very considerable acquisition.⁴

In the Travels as well, there are odes to wilderness beauty juxtaposed with developmental proposals. This isn't surprising in light of John's easy blending of these two ways of seeing one place. There are reasons to believe, though, that William experienced a tension between these two visions closer in some ways to those a modern advocate for unspoiled nature would feel than to what his father ever revealed. The adverb “inchangingly” from the letter provides a clue that William may have felt conflicted about developing this particular plot of land, perhaps more than he did about others that he witnessed in his travels. The invented word conflates “unchanging” and “inchantingly,” to use William's usual spelling, which implies that the savanna's beauty, its enchantment, would be shattered by change. A passage in his Report likewise contemplates

the wonderful harmony and perfection in the lovely simplicity of Nature tho naked yet unviolated by the rude touch of the human hand. Tho admitting that human inventions, arts and sciences to be a part in the progress of Nature, yet [they] are perpetually productive of innovations, and events, that show the defects of human policy; What a beautiful scenery is Vegetable Nature!⁵

What we see here are the opening eyes of a man who has a greater fear of the future, less confidence in science, commerce, and man, and a greater love of unspoiled nature than John had. 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 a 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. William was to some extent torn between the lure of the natural and the culture that was imbedded in him, but we tend to exaggerate the conflict that we feel more than he did, because we know that development will not end with farms, because of our own guilt, perhaps, our own sense of consumptive complicity in a culture that overdeveloped the land, drove the manatees out, and bulldozed Indian burial mounds for road-paving materials.⁶

What William did in his 1774 letter to Lachlan McIntosh and the Report to Fothergill was reverse the reportorial style of his father, using the more private genre of personal correspondence for his discussion of productive potential and reserving his most romantic prose for the public audience of the Travels. Where John presented a scientific persona in public writings, waxing romantic about nature only in letters to a close friend, William's public agenda was emotional and aesthetic, not advocacy for development and use. The Report to Fothergill is stylistically the closest of William's writings to John's published journals, adopting the tone of the philosophical reporter of size, distances, terrain, and “useful” plant life. The differences between William's Report and John's journals are also instructive, because William is a more active, visible presence even in his most philosophical pose than John ever was in his.

The Report covers the first two years of William's journey, 1773 and 1774, and was composed in two volumes, which are numbered separately and were apparently sent to Fothergill at different times. William corrected the spelling of only the second volume, suggesting that the first came wild from the field and the second was domesticated back in Charleston with a dictionary in hand. The Report's twentieth-century editor values it as “a far fresher document than the Travels, and … almost wholly free from the disturbing discrepancies that the discriminating student finds in the published work.”⁷ As a scientist himself, the editor sees William's reportage as “careless,” his memory as “faulty,” and his frequent inaccuracies as a “blind spot in his mental vision.” He's disturbed that William's lunar eclipse of 1773 actually occurred three years later, that his chronology is “sadly confused,” and that chapters of the Travels are shuffled out of the order in which events took place. The editor offers illness, damaged eyesight, and scandalous editing by the Travels's publisher as excuses for William. The Report is better “science” by modern lights and by the standards of John's published journals as well.⁸

The Report gets its starting date wrong, hardly an auspicious beginning for a “scientist,” revealing that William lost track of years early on. The opening is similar in structure to that of the Travels's first chapter, but there is no identity of language; some passages have more information, others less. He leaves out many of the philosophical flights of fancy that so richly adorn the book. Such phrases as “the face of the angry ocean” reveal William's authorial voice. He tells us in the Report that two horses washed overboard in his ocean journey and that he heard a good sermon in Georgia, delivered to a “respectable and genteel congregation,” which is the sort of detail that the reader of the Travels doesn't learn, but he leaves out any mention of a long visit with McIntosh upon his arrival and provides fewer particulars here than in the Travels about a clay urn that he found.

Like his father's journals, William's Report includes practical information about “the soil being very rich” and “very good mills.” Even such “useful” details, though, are cast in a less restrained prose: “the land flat, the soil sandy, but the country everywhere clad with green grass in the forests and beautiful savannas, richly painted over with various colored flowers.” There's no restraining the poet, no repressing the artist who sees color as paint—viewing landscape as “pictures from the surrounding painted hills.” Also differently from John, William sees abundant animal life—wolves, vultures, eagles, cranes, alligators, snakes, panthers, buffalo, scorpions, spiders, possums, fish, weasels, vast “herds and flocks of deer and turkeys bounding and tripping over the hills and savannas”—and witnesses signs of an animal presence even when fauna hide from his sight. Nor does he often dig beneath the surface, feel and taste nature as John did, “as I attempt only to exhibit to your notice the outward furniture of Nature, or the productions of the surface of the earth.”⁹

William smells nature, but he is irrepressibly visual in his Report. Where he digs, it isn't to explore rocks or determine the fitness of soil for crops; it's into the human past that he tunnels, through the burial mounds of “ancient civilizations” about which he wants to know more. The scariness of wilderness travel is more visible in William's account. Whether he's “enveloped in an almost endless savage wilderness” that damps his spirits “with a kind of gloomy horror” or finds a kind of sublime “terror” in the flight of a bald eagle, his Report is more emotionally accessible than John wanted his journals to be.¹⁰

Why did William retrace the trip that he took with his father in 1765, write a Report about the same places they “discovered” together, and botanize the same ground that he and John had already searched? John's journal was already published in multiple editions; why didn't William seek out a spot of his own? What had he lost the last time; what did he hope to find; what was he trying to say to his father, to others, and to himself? William tells much that John didn't, records things that John couldn't see, finds plants that they had both overlooked. Was he competing, revising his father; had he a need to better his father's courage, competence, science, and art? Perhaps he imagined a book about the emotional experience of travel in this wilderness as virgin literary ground. Maybe he wanted to see the “enchanted” Alachua Savanna again.

William's personal failures as a merchant, from which he fled in both 1765 and 1773, have a bright side in the story that he tells about the Alachua Savanna, for he won't be one of those harbingers of civilization who brings his wares here or who, like his father, shows others the way. By leaving the roads out of his picture, romanticizing the savanna in his Report, and mythologizing it in the Travels, he indicts the dominant culture that he represents, but from which he wants to distance himself, hide himself, find himself in a newer self than the one who sold pots, bought rice, accompanied his father, and owned slaves. William's view of the savanna as a refuge from time, trouble, and want also explains why he rotates the map's eastern features by ninety degrees, subverting any effort to find this special place in the world. A traveler can't reach William's savanna by walking down the roads that he draws on the map, making the idealized portrait and “Romantic” Travels more reliable guides to the terrain than the “scientific” Report and “objective” map. The scientist/editor of the Report got the story wrong, mistaking facts for truth, as perhaps William thought that John did, not realizing that William was a philosopher of the emotions, an even higher calling in his eyes than the philosopher of birds and flowers he also was.

William was not the same explorer for empire that his father became; it wasn't his intent to help Europeans master this place, to write a guide for locating, clearing, plowing, and fencing the scene that he drew. The map's artifices also imply that the Alachua Savanna is more a state of mind than a feature on the face of the earth. To see what William saw the viewer and reader must change as William was changing, as he wanted to believe, wanted us to believe, that he already had. He began writing while he was still in the woods, sketching a primitive outline for a section of the Travels on a scrap of paper from one of Fothergill's letters, drafting the manuscript chapter about the savanna while he was still in Florida, then correcting it back in Charleston, when he had a dictionary and a copy of Linnaeus's Systema Naturae close at hand.¹¹ The bracketed deletions and insertions in the manuscript conform exactly with the published version. Both the Travels and the draft have a much more extensive discussion of the savanna than the Report to Fothergill, which doesn't seem drawn from the manuscript any more than the Travels was drawn from the Report in any obvious sense.

William wrote the manuscript before he sent the second of the Report's two parts to Fothergill, where he corrected spelling and substituted scientific names for more general descriptions. Given this relationship among the three written texts, it makes sense to call the manuscript a field journal, even though it doesn't conform to botanists' expectations for what the genre looks like, even though scientists still lament that William's field notes are “lost.” Again, as in his drawings and published writings, William challenged form and convention in the way that he worked. His “notes” were more reveries, explications of states of mind, evocations of God in nature, and explorations of themes developed through the Travels, than they were dates, distances, and lists of flora and fauna that he saw as he crossed the landscape.

William added the lists of Latin names to his book for credibility's sake, to recover authority from a dead Roman past. They are now the passages that seem most antique, giving the Travels a clear border in time, just as the columnlike tree bounds his drawing of the Alachua Savanna in culture and place. The lists also add beauty, to some readers' eyes, even as they provide “facts” that the scientist craves. The poet James Dickey experiences the lists as

a kind of shade, and because the names themselves are strange, special and beautiful, and taken together with Bartram's descriptions of the creatures and plants they designate, call up an entire flora and fauna that hover with Edenic colors in the reader's uninformed—that is, still virgin—mind. A state of innocence not unlike Bartram's is possible for him, too.¹²

Although that is not an effect the author anticipated—a way that he calculated his writing—it is a cogent insight into why the book still lives long after science, literature, and art have adopted other fashions, when the authority of Latin has died yet again, when our innocence is a product of ignorance, as Dickey remarks. The reader is still with William under the trees, struggling with the same torments of alienation and self, and trying to find the redemption in nature that the sylvan pilgrim sought, that he found, that he promises us.

As the text written the nearest in time to William's visit and the one least recalculated for an audience of others, the manuscript chapter on the Alachua Savanna is a place to continue exploring nature's meaning for him. All other versions were revisions of this original story. Since the published section is the one he chose to represent the whole book when his editor produced a sample for recruiting subscribers in 1791, there is good reason to believe that it's the one that pleased him most and that he anticipated would appeal best to an audience of like-minded readers.¹³

Because William calculated the descriptions in the Report and the map so differently from the other depictions, the contrasting accounts provide access to the ways that William told his stories with different audiences in mind. With two drawings and three written accounts, William's literary encounters with the Alachua Savanna reveal the process of his personal transformation and desire to recast his tale for an audience of others in whose eyes he hoped to redeem himself as he refashioned who he really was. The revisions to this and the other two surviving manuscript chapters provide clues to the ways in which the transformation was incomplete, where he struggled to delete his “old” self from the text, and where he couldn't see that “Billy” was still part of him.

The principal variations from the manuscript chapters to the book are an editing for style, grammar, spelling, syntax, and tone, a shortening of the most rhapsodic commentaries about landscape, and deletion of some prayerful references to God. The revisions are toward a more secular, less romantic text that he hoped would be a more authoritative one. The changes consistently aim for scientific credibility, greater precision in naming, measuring, and counting than his methods of observation actually supplied. Since the “facts” are consistently erroneous, the changes are a ploy, but a psychologically complicated one, because at a conscious level William wanted to get the story right and was deeply hurt when people challenged his objectivity as a scientist. He doubles the acreage of the Alachua Savanna, overstates the magnitude of plains, rivers, and trees, writes “yards” when “feet” would be the accurate measure, and reports such phenomena as a 200-egg average for alligator nests when 40 is the real norm and a twenty-foot alligator, which is unlikely at best.¹⁴

These errors consistently exaggerate size, number, and distance, which suggests that William's “science” was calculated for literary effect. His numbers reported the true feelings of the sylvan pilgrim and are thus better considered guides to emotionality than lies, bad science, or failed efforts at literal counts. As such they reflect an eighteenth-century rhetorical revolution that also affected art. As Jay Fliegelman describes the philosophy behind this search for “natural” expression, it was a “new model of representation that defines truth as truthfulness to feelings rather than to facts,” in which “the misrepresentation of … [an] event serves to make possible the accurate representation of an emotion or emotions that otherwise could not be represented.”¹⁵ That is what William wanted—to share how he felt and elicit the same feelings in those who read his book or witnessed his art.

The emotion that William sought in these exaggerated counts was the sublime, which could be a product of size, number, variety, height, sound, beauty, or fear. Willing, indeed eager, to sacrifice mere numbers for emotional truth, he drew on the aesthetic theory that he'd been exposed to in school, of Joseph Addison, Lord Kames, William Hogarth, and Edmund Burke. He saw the same emotionality in the poetry of Mark Akenside, and he would have found it also in Jefferson's Declaration and Paine's Common Sense had he not been off in the woods when they first appeared. He would have plenty of time later, though, in the serenity of his family's garden, to read about the sublime in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Archibald Alison, William Smellie, and Gilbert White.¹⁶

Addison's Spectator essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” articulated a vision of nature as God's creation for improving men's souls. Since imagination is the vehicle for receiving God's lessons inscribed in nature, the imaginative faculty is elevated to new heights that are seized by artists, poets, novelists, and natural historians as the focal point of their work. In the latter part of the century, theories of the sublime, Deism, and Romanticism merge with classical traditions furthering this process of emotionalizing nature. So, for example, John's generation venerated Virgil's Georgics as both a poem and a didactic work on scientific agriculture, one that proclaimed a gospel of work and idealized rural life. William's contemporaries would find greater appeal in Virgil's Eclogues, which portrayed an Arcadian myth about an imaginary existence far removed from real life. The two pastoral visions aren't so much conflicting ones as celebrations of “natural” life in different forms. Emphasizing, as they do, alternative visions of nature, the poems appealed to the different tastes, different sensibilities, and different values of William and John. It was the concept of the sublime that fomented this process of change.¹⁷

Cultural transformations illustrated by the natural sublime redefined “imagination” even as it was becoming more highly esteemed. The more traditional role of the imaginative faculty, as defined by Samuel Johnson, saw poetry as the “art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling the imagination to the help of reason.” Others, more affected by the new sensibilities than Johnson, proclaimed that only by divorcing the poetic imagination from reason can poetry achieve the highest accomplishment.¹⁸ This, to be sure, was contested terrain, and William was not an exemplar of the most extreme advocacy of imagination over and apart from reason. However, he was affected by this revolution in artistic consciousness in ways that John, and many of William's readers, never appreciated.

Just as Thomas Burnet's The Sacred Theory of the Earth gave John a theoretical focus and The Morals of Confucius supported what he already believed, so there were books that either influenced William or reinforced his existing views. Mark Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, for example, illustrates one of the fissures between the writings of William and John. The poem and its didactic introduction endorse the powers and pleasures of the imagination, elevating subjective over objective perception. Theoretically indebted to Addison's essays on the sublime, Akenside seeks the emotional effects of nature on humanity.

With what attractive charms this goodly frame of nature touches the consenting hearts of mortal men

Having set the frame thus in the first line, Akenside celebrates “indulgent fancy,” and proclaims “Let Fiction come,” which, he predicts, will result in a liberating “Majestic Truth” superior to other claims to mere lower-case truths derived from nature.¹⁹

The key biological metaphor is the heart, not the mind, but Akenside's endorsement of an imaginative approach to nature isn't a call for aesthetic or emotional chaos. Indeed, the expectation is that universal comprehension and feeling will be achieved, uniting the senses of mankind with the revelations of the natural world. As Edmund Burke explains in his Philosophical Enquiry, “we do and must suppose, that as the conformation of their organs are nearly, or altogether the same in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all men the same, or with little difference.”²⁰

The goal was quite similar in some respects to that of John's generation, but the locus of exploration had changed. From a sensory search for physically discernible phenomena, the quest was now for emotional truths discovered by a man of universal feeling. The confidence of eighteenth-century aestheticians that they could identify and classify emotions was of a piece with the botanical enterprise and no more humble than scientists' faith in objective sight. If William was a reliable witness, his sensations upon experiencing nature would be substantiated by those of other writers and artists. He would convey those emotions in a fashion that elicited the same response in his readers, thereby replicating the discoveries of other nature poets and artists in the same manner that the Royal Society directed its philosophical travelers to achieve a high degree of “probabilism” by the use of identical scientific methods. The limits on the artist's discernment of Truth were those of talent, integrity, and imagination; any doubt or disbelief by readers was a very personal assault on the man of feeling.

Sublimity can be a pleasant and/or an awful experience, but must evoke a passion comparable to horror. As Burke explained,

whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.²¹

Such theories of the sublime led William to find terror even in the way that a bird flaps its wings.

… the eagle closes the points of his wings towards his body, and with collected power cleaves the elastic air and seems to rend the skies which indeed can be only equalled by the Terror of sudden and unexpected thunder.²²

The sublime helps explain the degree of emotionality William aims for in describing great beauty, such as that of the Altamaha River, and why he takes what Burke would call “delight” from frights that he survives. What William tries to capture is the degree of sublime astonishment that, according to Burke, is a state of the soul “in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”²³

William wants to appear credible in the same ways that John did, but some part of him with which he is not entirely in touch challenges the scientific method, thereby undermining his self-confidence and the reliability of his reporting in ways that trouble him. This leads him to edit his draft of the Travels by adding the sort of details, largely manufactured, that his father scrupulously noted when he traveled this same wilderness a decade before, melding the approaches of aesthetics and science, which weren't necessarily in conflict in any event. That's not to say that William got everything wrong, distorted the facts purposely, or that the book isn't “science” at all. It is the seminal source for much botanical and anthropological data, and the author intended the Travels to report what was true. It's simply that truth is elusive and William lacked the discipline and desire to tell what seemed to him sterile tales, to take careful notes, and to see specimens, locations, and relations in nature as John had. Even more importantly, William lacked John's confidence that Truth lay in those details rather than in the emotions with which he was more closely in touch, especially the darkness of the sublime. With the rest of his culture, but ahead of the crowd, William contemplated inner truth; state of mind assumed a greater significance for him than external “facts.”²⁴

In both its unedited and edited versions, William's chapter on the Alachua Savanna is the most moving passage that he ever wrote. It shows him at his greatest emotional height, inspired by the beauty of this most wondrous site and the poetry and aesthetic theories of the sublime that he read. He feared that his writing was too religious and waxed too romantical (an opinion with which reviewers agreed even about the edited, published version), but that's what the place meant to him. The first draft was emotionally honest; in the second he tried to refine the effect that it would have on his readers. He deleted descriptions of “inchanted ground,” “bewitching” birds, and fireflies as the moon's “ministering agents of Light”; substituted “elevated mind” for “inraptured soul”; changed “sacred” to “grand”; and removed the prayerful phrase that ended a paragraph: “O most bountifull & benificent Creator!” He dropped references to a flight of birds at sunset as a “solemn religious rite” and to their song as an “evening hymn.” And he eliminated the bracketed phrases from the passage below.

I am sensible that my countrymen, the refined civilised nations of white people, will conclude & say [to one another] these paradisial scenes are surely [are] nothing more than [the] mere visionary dreams [of the Sylvan Pilgrim] or [mere] phantoms of a sickly mind [or deranged imagination] [but such] Yet I speak but the truth.²⁵

William's audience is precisely the “refined, civilised nations of white people” to whom he refers, a readership about which we can detect in his tone a mix of fear and disdain. He dreads rejection, having felt it before, and thinks he can anticipate civilized men's reaction to him. Perhaps the “sylvan pilgrim” apprehends some truth in the rejection that he predicts. Is he merely a dreamer, who experiences “phantoms” in his “sickly mind,” a man cursed with a “deranged imagination”? No, he insists, answering himself rather than them, “I speak but the truth.” He toned down the passage's indictment of himself and made it a little less personal, a little less offensive and defensive at the same time, but essentially left his resentment, fear, and response. He also dropped another self-reference describing his “apprehensions” as “bewildered,” again perhaps because, although true, the depiction was too revealing, leaving him more vulnerable to a charge that he wished to deny.

William also deleted long passages that were even harder on his audience than those he left in. Having depicted nature's “rational system of social fraternal intercourse,” which rejects avarice and diminishes the impact of war, he compares humans unfavorably to our animal kin.

How unseemly it looks! How debasing to humanity to see every day and everywhere amongst what are called civilised nations such a disparity, such an inequality in the conditions and situations of men.

It appears to me to be within the reach or ability of a man to live in this world, and even in this depraved age and Nation to a good old age without greatly injuring himself or his neighbor and if one man can continue in a state of innocence as long as he lives why not all men? If they would unite seriously in the cause of righteousness we should gain upon the common enemy every day and in time it would be as easy and natural to do right as to do wrong. Is it not in the power of every one of us to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before God?

William apparently drafted this passage, along with the rest of the chapter on the Alachua Savanna, during or shortly after his visit in 1774. Although the Boston Tea Party had already occurred, it was by no means certain that an actual war would ensue. Even here, though, in this natural retreat from the failings of mankind and of a man, news reached William's ears of the “depraved age and nation” in which he lived. What a strong indictment of his country and countrymen, which it makes good sense to edit out after the war, during an era that celebrated independence and resented what was seen as Quakers' closet Toryism, when he was looking for a sympathetic audience to read his book.

William also deleted another passage that casts his peace testimony in a more positive tone: “I profess myself of the Christian sect of the people called Quakers and consequently am against War and violence in any form or manner whatever.” This line, too, might have narrowed his potential readership, offended others with different views and harsh feelings toward the Quakers, who were still denounced as traitors or cowards unwilling to risk themselves and their fortunes for liberty's cause. It was consistent with his pilgrim's persona, a biographical link between himself and his text, which might have seemed too personal, too preachy, and that wasn't even literally true.

William served, at least briefly, as a spy for Patriot forces in 1776 during his travels. He often said that Charles Thomson, his beloved college tutor and future secretary of the Continental Congress, had instilled “republican principles” in his mind. He also had family members who joined the “Free Quakers”—those who broke with the peace testimony to actively support the war in 1781; publicly praised some of the Revolution's leaders—dedicating his book to one (Thomas Mifflin) after another (George Washington) turned him down; rejoiced in American independence; and supported a nephew-in-law's application for an army commission later in life. No, this wasn't the real William he deleted to enhance his standing with readers. It was the Quaker pilgrim persona that he brought closer in line with the man he was and remained. Like his father, William's pacifism was contingent; there were, he believed, good reasons to fight, good causes to fight for, and bad people whom we have an obligation to kill. Such beliefs are not those of the Society of Friends, which makes no such exceptions, but a product of the Bartrams' shared view that violence was natural, however regrettable; one of nature's ways of balancing life.²⁶

Notes

1. On influences, for the debate over William's poetic versus scientific visions, and for characterization of his authorial identity within the context of existing genres, see Larry R. Clarke, “The Quaker Background of William Bartram's View of Nature,” JHI, 46 (1985): 435-448; Bruce Silver, “Clarke on the Quaker Background of William Bartram's Approach to Nature,” JHI, 47 (1986): 507-510; Thomas Vance Barnett, “William Bartram and the Age of Sensibility,” Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, 1982; Samuel Robert Aiken, “The New-Found-Land Perceived: An Exploration of Environmental Attitudes in Colonial British America,” Ph.D. diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 1971; Charlotte Porter, “Bartram's Travels and American Literature, or Why Did He Wait so Long to Publish?,” The Bartram Trail Conference and Symposium, Proceedings of the Symposium (1991): 59-64; L. Hugh Moore, “The Aesthetic Theory of William Bartram,” Essays in Arts and Sciences, 12 (1983): 17-35; Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb, 1992); Robert McCracken Peck, “William Bartram and His Travels and Books from the Bartram Library,” in Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, Contributions to the History of North American Natural History (London, 1983), 35-50; James Rosen, “William Bartram's Sketches: The Field and the Image,” Bartram Trail Conference, Proceedings of the Symposium (1991): 41-54; William L. Hedges, “Toward a National Literature,” in Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York, 1988), 190-191; John Seelye, “Beauty Bare: William Bartram and His Triangulated Wilderness,” Prospects, 6 (1981): 37-54; William Gummere, “William Bartram, A Classical Scientist,” Classical Journal, 50 (1955): 167-170; Bruce Silver, “William Bartram's and Other Eighteenth-Century Accounts of Nature,” JHI, 39 (1978): 597-614; N. Bryllion Fagin, William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore, 1933); Charlotte M. Porter, “The Drawings of William Bartram (1739-1823), American Naturalist,” Archives of Natural History, 16 (1989): 289-303; Mary S. Mattfield, “Journey to the Wilderness: Two Travelers in Florida, 1696-1774,” Florida Historical Quarterly, 45 (1967): 327-351; Clive Bush, The Dream of Reason: American Consciousness and Cultural Achievement from Independence to the Civil War (London, 1977); Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, MA, 1986); Christopher Looby, “The Constitution of Nature: Taxonomy and Politics in Jefferson, Peale, and Bartram,” EAL, 22 (1987): 252-273; Berta Grattan Lee, “William Bartram: Naturalist or ‘Poet’?” EAL, 7 (1972): 124-129; Edward Nygren, “From View to Vision,” in Nygren, ed., Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1986), 3-81; Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago, 1990); William Martin Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind (New York, 1941); Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore; Roxanne M. Gentilcore, “The Classical Tradition and American Attitudes Towards Nature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1992; Kastner, Species of Eternity; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT, 1973); Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven, 1991); Patricia McClintock Medeiros, “The Literature of Travel of Eighteenth-Century America,” Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1971; Amy R. Weinstein Meyers, “Sketches from the Wilderness: Changing Conceptions of Nature in American Natural History Illustration: 1680-1880,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985.

2. WB, Travels [Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (Philadelphia, 1791; London, 1792; New York: Penguin Books, 1981)], 64-65.

3. Amy R. W. Meyers, “Imposing Order on the Wilderness: Natural History Illustration and Landscape Portrayal,” in Edward J. Nygren and Bruce Robertson, eds., Views and Visions: American Landscapes before 1830 (Washington, D.C., 1986), 105-131. I owe my initial insight into William's drawings of the Alachua Savanna to Meyers, who sees his linkage of animals and plants “through reflections of form” (121).

4. WB to Lachlan McIntosh, July 15, 1775 [sic, 1774], HSP, Dreer Autograph Collection. The corrected dating was made by Francis Harper, ed., WB, “Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773-74: A Report to Dr. John Fothergill,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new series, 33 (Philadelphia, 1943), 188.

5. WB, Report, 140.

6. Francis Harper to Charles F. Jenkins, June 25, 1939; March 31, April 19, May 18, 1940; February 12, 1941, Academy of Natural Sciences, MSS/Archives, Coll. 15.

7. WB, Report, 123.

8. Ibid., 134.

9. Ibid., 136, 138.

10. Ibid., 160, 164.

11. Outline, BP, box 4, 24, identified in finding aid: “seems to be Wm. Bartram's notes re book on travels (1772).” It is unclear how the document was dated 1772, but it was certainly written before 1777.

12. James Dickey, Introduction, WB, Travels, viii-ix.

13. Francis Harper, “Proposals for Publishing Bartram's Travels,” The American Philosophical Society Library Bulletin (1945): 34.

14. Moore, “Aesthetic Theory of William Bartram,” 27-28; WB, Report; Francis Harper, ed., The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist's Edition (New Haven, 1958).

15. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, 1994), 60, 76, and passim.

16. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, John T. Goldthwait, trans. (1764, 1799; Berkeley, 1960); Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Edinburgh, 1790); William Smellie, The Philosophy of Natural History (Edinburgh, 1790; Philadelphia, 1791); Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton (London, 1789).

17. Virgil, The Eclogues, trans. by Guy Lee (New York, 1984); Virgil, The Georgics, trans. by L. P. Wilkinson (New York, 1982); Gentilcore, “The Classical Tradition”; Tuveson, “Space, Deity, and the Natural Sublime.” [Modern Language Quarterly, 12 (1951): 28-38.]

18. Tuveson, Imagination as a Means of Grace, 1, 6, 26.

19. Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination. A Poem in Three Books (London, 1763), v, vi, 15, 16.

20. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1767), 7-8.

21. Ibid., 58.

22. WB, Report, 164.

23. Ibid., 95 and passim.

24. Tuveson, Imagination as a Means of Grace, 26.

25. WB, MS journal, “A Journey from Spaldings lower Trading House to Cuscowilla & the Great Alachua Savanna,” HSP, BP, small Bartram volumes.

26. Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sports, 2 (1832), iii; Francis Harper, “William Bartram and the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 97 (1953): 571-577.

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

AHR: American Historical Review

APS: American Philosophical Society

BP: Bartram Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

cpb: William Bartram, commonplace book, privately owned

EAL: Early American Literature

gb: William Bartram, garden book, Academy of Natural Sciences

HSP: Historical Society of Pennsylvania

LC: Library Company of Philadelphia

JB: John Bartram

JHI: Journal of the History of Ideas

NEQ: New England Quarterly

NYHS: New-York Historical Society

PC: Peter Collinson

WB: William Bartram

WMQ: William and Mary Quarterly