William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design—Selected Art, Letters & Unpublished Writings (review)

Colleagues, cease for a moment your anxious complaints about the crisis in scholarly publishing, and buy and enjoy this book! It is printed entirely on heavy gloss paper and includes more than one hundred color illustrations, some of which have never before been reproduced, and many others of which were previously available only in lower-quality black and white. It lists for fifty dollars but is available from online bookstores for twenty to thirty dollars. The two coeditors and nine other contributors, as well as the publishers, the designers, and the donors who must have provided subventions, all deserve our gratitude. If all you do is gaze at the pictures it is still a bargain as a coffee table book.

Part 1 of the volume, edited primarily by Thomas Hallock, is a selection of letters to and from John and William Bartram, dating from the 1750s to the 1840s. The letters have been transcribed from a remarkable number of archives, most in Philadelphia but also in Uppsala, Sweden; Nantes, France; Charleston, South Carolina; and Australia. An eighteen-page appendix provides a full calendar of the correspondence of William Bartram, including lost documents and partial transcripts in others’ hands. Hallock’s goal in part 1 was a survey that illustrates aspects of William’s life not well revealed in his 1791 Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Many who have read Travels have an image of a romantic naturalist prone to enthusiastic apostrophes filled with Latin binomials such as liquidambar styraciflua and magnolia grandiflora. Hallock and Nancy Hoffman reveal the life of a complex man who struggled to build a livelihood apart from his father’s seed and nursery business, who never married or had children but still mentored many nephews, nieces, in-laws, and students, and who successfully recovered from a broken leg and persistent eye problems to remain active into his late seventies. And best of all, The Search for Nature’s Design allows readers to better appreciate Bartram the artist, for alongside many letters are the stunning botanical illustrations that were sent under the same cover. Through a more careful examination of William Bartram’s art alongside his writings, readers’ interpretations of Travels may change. For instance, the Arcadian wilderness in Bartram’s map of “The Great Alachua Savana” near modern Gainesville, Florida, contrasts with letters that more strongly emphasize the nearby Seminole Indian village that hunted and fished on the Alachua.

Part 2, “Selected Manuscripts,” edited primarily by Hoffman, includes nine manuscript works attributed to William Bartram, some of them published for the first time. The selections reflect his wide interests and talents over a long life: botany and botanical art, pharmacy, ethnology, as well as morality, spirituality, and metaphysics. The longest of the nine is a draft manuscript of part of Travels, including his voyage up the St. John’s River in Florida and a harrowing encounter with alligators. Hoffman invites us to read this draft alongside the published version and a 1773–74 “Report” William sent to his patron John Fothergill (first published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society in 1943). By comparing these three texts, Hoffman suggests, one can estimate the revisions done by his publishers, and measure the increasing use of the Latin binomials and of the passive voice characteristic of the scientific observer.

Reading the draft alongside the correspondence in part 1 also shows how in the 1760s William had traveled the St. John’s River with goals distinct from those revealed in the later manuscript: he attempted to establish a plantation there, aided by slave labor. The result was quite different from the “earth mostly high & fertile producing a many grand Laurel magnolias & gloriously fluttering palms and charming fruitful orange Groves” of the later draft (304). In 1766, Henry...