Bartram’s Search for Truth

he balanced qualities of Bartram’s prose style help to explain his relation to an important issue in late 18th century aesthetics: the problem of Truth in artistic representation and whether a factual or imaginative rendering was preferable. For the Romantics the issue was crucial, for they urgently insisted that poetry was a superior means to Truth, which they regarded as mysterious and hidden, while science could only examine the visible aspects of this world. Bartram does not share this bias; he speaks for an age in which science and poetry coexisted as “sister muses.”(139) Throughout the Travels, Bartram tries to remain faithful to the facts, even while developing them imaginatively for his readers. The generalizations he derives are neither solely poetic or scientific, but philosophic, and their strength rests on the balance of these polar oppositions.

Except for his controversial discussion of the American alligator (mentioned earlier), Bartram’s Travels are filled with exacting observations based on strict empirical evidence. He does not merely describe the clay at the Buffalo Lick, but gives us the full experience:

“I could discover nothing saline in its taste, but I imagined an insipid sweetness.”(140)

In his quest for Truth, he rejects “vulgar fables” about the glass snake, which supposedly could “repair itself after being broken into several pieces.”(141) In his treatise on the Indians accounts of whom were often distorted by earlier writers, Bartram consistently argues for a judicious evaluation of their customs and values:

“They must, I think, claim our approbation, if we divest ourselves of prejudice and think freely.”(142)

By thinking freely, in response to the actual scenes he witnesses, Bartram distinguishes himself from the philosophical travelers of 18th century tradition, who depended on general principles to interpret their particular experiences. He discovered new and rare species of plants growing in the wild because, although armed with ideas about their likely habitats, he was free to modify his opinions to suit the actual contents of his travels. Some later botanists, not quite divested of their own prejudices, have doubted the reported abundance of these rare species; but one Doubting Thomas has agreed that Bartram’s claims were perfectly justifiable.(143) This scientific verification helps to substantiate Bartram’s poetic descriptions, like his account of Lake George in Florida. There the water was so transparent that it seemed almost illusory, “a paradise of fish” existing in what seemed “the peaceable and happy state of nature which existed before the fall;” for he supports this fanciful suggestion with some hard evidence: the water is so transparent that the fish can readily see each other; no hiding places exist for predators; thus, all species exist “on an equality with regard to their ability to injure or escape from one another.”(144) His benevolent interpretation of this scene rests upon empirical realities, not mere sentiments, and that happy balance of fact and idea lies at the center of Bartram’s version of Truth.

Footnotes

139. Earnest, John and William Bartram, op. cit., p. 217.

140. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., p. 39, Harper, p. 26.

141. Ibid., p. 196, Harper, p. 125.

142. Ibid., p. 490, Harper, p. 310.

143. John K. Small, “Bartram’s Ixia Coelestina Rediscovered,” Journal of the New York Botanical Garden, XXXII (July 1931), pp. 155–161.

144. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., p. 168, Harper, p. 106.