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4 The Two Williams Science and Connections in West Florida Robert J. Malone Bartram’s journey through West Florida differed in several ways from his travels in East Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. He found no Choctaw or Chickasaw counterparts to the relationships formed with Creeks and Cherokee in the eastern colonies, relying primarily on the hospitality of white settlers and the labor of slaves.1 Many of the colonial settlements he visited were either new or on the fringe of ruin, few of them possessing the stability of a Charles Town, Augusta, or St. Augustine, and their inhabitants struggled to survive in this area beyond the edge of empire. One of these settlers, identified by Bartram simply as a gentleman from New Richmond (Baton Rouge), had settled in West Florida in 1774, the year before Bartram’s visit. This friend of Bartram’s, who was most likely William Dunbar (ca. 1749–1810), had received a superior education in the sciences, including advanced astronomical training in London. He would assist Bartram through a combination of intellect and hospitality unmatched in the Travels. Bartram’s visit with Dunbar, and the circumstances surrounding the encounter, cast light on the whole of the Travels , providing a novel context for Bartram’s narrative, and demonstrating the challenges in examining the extent of scientific networks in West Florida. Because Bartram never names the gentleman from New Richmond, he left us scant evidence that Dunbar is indeed that person.The fact that there are other gentlemen who could have served as Bartram’s host provides clues to the rapid ascent of science in West Florida. William Bartram’s emphasis on the Carolinas, Georgia, and East Florida has led historians to focus on these sections, and rightfully so. Bartram’s Travels , for example, arguably the most powerful passages, immortalize the flora, fauna, and people of these regions. Indeed, the first 375 pages of his 481-page opus dwell on these eastern colonies. When he at last announces in the summer of 1775 that a “company of adventurers” will take him to West Florida for a The Two Williams 55 “long and hazardous” journey, it appears almost as an afterthought.2 Of course, had not illness forced him to curtail his trip, the scope of his narrative would have grown considerably, but as it turned out, even his abbreviated narrative of the lower Mississippi River Valley provides a glimpse of a nascent scienti fic network forming west of the Apalachicola and Chattahoochee rivers, the boundary between East and West Florida. Bartram spent little time in West Florida but benefited from the hospitality and training of unnamed naturalists . These naturalists, many of them Scottish immigrants, would eventually form a network from Philadelphia to the southern latitudes of the Mississippi River. West Florida As Bartram prepared to visit the interior of North America, readers of the Travels sense his excitement over the westward phase of his journey, a journey that would take him into unfamiliar lands. This was country that he and his father had been unable to visit during their trip together ten years earlier, and Bartram had been looking forward to exploring West Florida for many years, the colony playing an important part in his master plan to discover “rare and useful productions of nature.”3 In fact, the trip west to the Mississippi River would fulfill a dream of his father’s:“Oh! if I could but spend six months on the Ohio, Mississippi, and Florida, in health,” the elder Bartram had exclaimed , “I believe I could find more curiosities than the English, French and Spaniards have done in six score of years.”4 John Bartram probably guessed correctly what he could have discovered in this verdant country, but in the 1760s the area still lacked the stability needed for exploration—at least the stability required by an aging Quaker botanist. By 1775, British dominance provided enough security to allow the son to explore where the father could not. What awaited Bartram in West Florida? Land along the Mississippi River boasted some of the richest loess in the world, its deep soil able to nurture an astonishing variety of plants. But in the 1770s, North American boundaries remained ill defined, even though Spanish, French, and English surveyors and cartographers had produced numerous maps throughout the century. Many of these charts, based on second-hand information, reflected national desires more than accurate coordinates. With British domination following the French-Indian War, scores...

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