The Future As Seen Through the Past

o some readers, Bartram’s Travels may seem surprisingly unhistorical. His original journey coincided with the tumultuous years of the American Revolution (1773–1777), and his book was published just after the Constitutional Convention, yet it makes no direct references to these important events.(208) Usually Bartram’s tendency is to be straightforward and unambivalent about his opinions, and outside the Travels he strongly supported American independence. He was on cordial terms with several Founding Fathers, including the first three Presidents, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, who subscribed to publication of the Travels.(209) Jefferson was especially sensitive to Bartram’s book as a product of the new nation.

The vision of America that Bartram’s Travels conveys is not of its accomplished history, the rebellion and separation from European masters; but rather of its potential history, the promise for a future that lay ahead, where all men of good will could realize their dreams of peace and fruitful industry. It was Bartram’s epic mission to give both American and European readers a vision of this New World that captured its immensity and fresh beauty; but also to show, chiefly through his studies of the Indians, that the New World was really a land of great antiquity, not raw and uncultivated as most Europeans assumed. As Donald Peattie notes, Bartram was one of the first American naturalists to catch the authentic feeling of American scenery.(210) He also gave the world its first clear vision of the American South, a region not well known to the civilized world; a florid, subtropical world, full of exotic mysteries that astonished readers in great cities. In this sense, Bartram’s epic design is not unlike that of the modern American novelist, William Faulkner, whose mythical history of the South begins with early stories about the Creek and Choctaw Indians.(211) Faulkner tells a tragic story, rather like Gibbon’s, of the decline and fall of a mighty empire; Bartram’s account anticipates Faulkner’s by describing the land even before the Indians arrived, yet his story is essentially hopeful rather than tragic.

This historical optimism is justified by the very configuration of the immense land Bartram traverses, for it contains many natural wonders that reinforce his benevolent view of creation. The Buffalo Lick in Georgia is an example; there the earth has literally offered itself up to animals as a form of nourishment, sustaining(212) them just as the continent was expected to support its human settlers. The sea islands of Georgia, as yet thinly inhabited in Bartram’s day, suggest an ideal place for plantations, blessed with a means of “extensive and secure island navigation.” His accounting, of the wild fauna in Florida, with its “great number of dear, turkeys, bears, wolves, wildcats, squirrels, racoons, and oppossum.”(213) emphasizes the utter wildness and abundance of this unsettled country, a point manifestly clear in his joyous prospect” of the Alachua savannah in Florida: “A landscape of low country, unparalleled as I think;…making a circular sweep to the right, and containing many hundred thousand acres of meadow…”(214) How intoxicating these descriptions must have seemed to readers, whose landscape was tame and crowded with inhabitants. Coleridge was especially impressed by Bartram’s description of the Isle of Palms, a “blessed unviolated spot of earth,” that probably served as a model for the sacred gardens of Xanadu depicted in Kubla Khan. Everywhere that Bartram wanders, he invokes pictures of open and uncultivated land, a great arena where the history of man’s civilized progress is yet to be played, amidst these “unlimited, varied, and truly astonishing native wild scenes of landscape and perspective, …placed on the borders of a new world!”(215) The farther west he travels, fulfilling an almost instinctive impulse on the part of American traveler-writers,(216) the more his vision of limitless prospects for civilization widens into vatic prophecy. The fields of vegetation he sees in western Florida form:

“the most extensive Canebrake that is to be seen on the whole earth ... there appears no bound but the skies, the level plain, like the ocean, uniting with the firmament…softly touching the horizon, represent the most magnificent amphitheatre or circus perhaps in the whole world.”(217)

When he reaches the western part of North Carolina, “a world of mountains piled upon mountains,” he takes in his most expansive prospect of America, envisioning in the lands beyond a glorious future still to come: “scenes of mountainous landscape, westward, vast and varied, perhaps not to be exceeded any where.”(218)

Yet Bartram’s vision of America is not solely of grandeur and immensity; it is highlighted by his sensitivity to the beauty of individual forms. His lively aesthetic sensibility is constantly apparent in descriptions of specimens like the Live Oaks, which are “evergreen, and the wood almost incorruptible, even in the open air;”(219) or the Laurel Magnolia, whose flowers “are the largest and most complete of any yet known.”(220) These objects he sees as symbolic of America’s uncorrupted potential, and this thematic purpose is most apparent in his description of the Bald Cypress, like the others, a new tree to European readers and thus emblematic of America:

“The Cupressus disticha stands in the first order of North American trees. Its majestic stature is surprising; and on approaching it, we are struck with a kind of awe, at beholding the stateliness of the trunk, lifting its cumbrous top towards the skies, and casting a wide shade upon the ground, as a dark intervening cloud, which, for a time, excludes the rays of the sun ... forming a grand straight column eighty or ninety feet high, when it divides every way around into an extensive flat horizontal top like an umbrella, where eagles have their secure nests, and cranes and storks their temporary resting places;…”(221)

Similar descriptions are the Azalea and Lesser Magnolia species,(122) that symbolize this Edenic region. Bartram focuses on flowering trees and shrubs, the most astonishing botanical productions in the South, and thus most likely to impress foreign readers. All of his important botanical discoveries are showy, conspicuously flowered plants, like the evening primrose, “perhaps the most pompous herbaceous plant yet known to exist”(223) or the Gordonia, a flowering tree, of the first order for beauty and fragrance.”(224) The latter species Bartram consciously recognizes as a symbol of the American character, naming it Franklinia in honor of Benjamin Franklin, hero of the Republic and fellow founder (with Bartram’s father) of the American Philosophical Society. Interestingly enough, Bartram’s literary apotheosis of this plant has been verified by history. He returned seeds and specimens to Philadelphia and successfully propagated the species. Since 1803, no botanist has discovered a specimen of Franklinia growing in the wild.(225)

Footnotes

208. In can be argued that the values reflected in the Travels were so closely aligned with those of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, that no direct reference was necessary. Bartram may also have felt it inappropriate to mention the recent hostilities with Great Britain since his trip was made under Fothergill’s patronage. Francis Harper has suggested that his descriptions of war and peace between the Indians and whites may have been veiled allusions to the colonial struggle with Great Britain. For a discussion of this last theory, see: Harper, “Bartram and the American Revolution,” op. cit. .

209. Harper, Naturalist’s Edition, op. cit., p. xxii.

210. Peattie, Green Laurels, op. cit., pp. 179–198.

211. Malcom Cowley, Editor, The Portable Faulkner, New York, p. 60.

212. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., p. 39, Harper, pp. 25–26.

213. Ibid., p. 103, Harper, p. 66.

214. Ibid., pp. 116–116, Harper, p. 74.

215. Ibid., p. 189, Harper, p. 120.

216. Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Cambridge, 1969, (rev. ed. )

217. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., p. 233, Harper, p. 147.

218. Ibid., p. 363, Harper, p. 229.

219. Ibid., p. 85, Harper, p. 55.

220. Ibid.

221. Ibid., pp. 90–91, Harper, pp. 58–59.

222. Ibid., pp. 323, 339–340, Harper, pp. 204, 205.

223. Ibid., p. 406, Harper, p. 257.

224. Although Bartram first identified the species as a Gordonia, he later changed his opinion as this footnote from the Travels explains:

"On first observing the fructification and habit of this tree, I was inclined to believe it was a species of Gordonia; but afterwards, upon stricter examination, and comparing its flower and fruit with those of the Gordonia lasianthus, I presently found striking characteristics abundantly sufficient to separate it from that genus, and to establish it the head of a new tribe, which we have honoured with the name of the illustrious Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Franklinia Alatamaha.”

225. The first seeds of the Franklinia were actually collected by John and William Bartram during their southern trip of 1765. This was propagated successfully in the Bartram botanical garden. The first specimens were collected by William during his 1773–1777 trip. Ironically, the official credit for discovering the tree went to John Bartram’s first cousin, Humphry Marshall, who published the first description of the Franklinia in his Arbustum Americanum, 1785. For more information, see: Edgar T. Wherry, “The History of the Franklin Tree, Franklinia Alatamaha,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, XVIII (March 19, 1929), pp. 172–176; See also: Francis Harper and Arthur N. Leeds, “A Supplementary Chapter on Franklinia Alatamaha,” Bartonia, No. 19, March 8, 1938.