Xanadu

John and William Bartram, father and son, were brilliant naturalists, writers, and explorers. William, in addition, was an artist of genius. Brought up in the Quaker faith, in the Quaker city of Philadelphia, they worked for several years as a team, discovering new species of plants and exploring little-known regions. And yet they were strikingly different in temperament. John Bartram was in many ways a typical man of the Enlightenment, in a city that welcomed such views. Eighteenth-century Philadelphia, with its tolerant Quaker governance in religious matters, was an incubator of wide-ranging scientific and artistic creativity. Bartram’s friends and associates included the statesman-scientist Benjamin Franklin, the artist-physician Benjamin West, the museum founder, naturalist, and artist Charles Willson Peale. These were versatile men who excelled in multiple fields and recognized no limits to their undertakings.

John Bartram’s universe ran like orderly clockwork, with human projects in accord with an intelligible divine plan. He made a good living by traveling into the wilderness of Florida and Georgia and collecting new specimens of plants, which he then sold to aristocratic clients in England. It was a business arrangement, not without its dangers, but John Bartram had learned to minimize the risks of his profession. He expected his son William to follow the same industrious principles. In one sense, he was vastly disappointed, for William’s genius turned out to be of a highly idiosyncratic kind.

William Bartram was brought up in the Enlightenment world of clarity, fixed hierarchy, industry, and order. Almost from the start, however, he fit uneasily into this grid. Compared to his father’s friends, with their orderly ambitions and systematic undertakings, young William Bartram was waywardness embodied. His world was a world of accident. He made a lifelong practice of wandering from the beaten path; his best discoveries always came after slips and falls of various kinds. His accidents were lucky and his falls fortunate; serendipity could have been his motto.

Here is a typical passage from William’s account of travels in western Georgia, when he literally stumbled upon a new variety of wild rose:

Before we left the waters of Broad River, having encamped in the evening on one of its considerable branches, and left my companions, to retire, as usual, on botanical researches, on ascending a steep rocky hill, I accidentally discovered a new species of caryophyllata (geum odoratissimum); on reaching to a shrub my foot slipped, and, in recovering myself, I tore up some of the plants, whose roots filled the air with animating scents of cloves and spicy perfumes.

The passage could almost be taken as a microcosm of William Bartram’s life: He leaves his companions and enters the woods alone; he climbs a steep hill; he slips; he recovers his balance to find in his hand, by accident, a new discovery, which fills the air with its pungent perfume.

Melancholy and prone to depression, William’s psychological world was as vulnerable to unexpected slips and falls as the exterior world. During one of his rambles, he reflected on how accidents can interfere with the best-laid plans:

Thus in the moral system, which we have planned for our conduct, as a ladder whereby to mount to the summit of terrestrial glory and happiness, and from whence we perhaps meditated our flight to heaven itself, at the very moment when we vainly imagine ourselves to have attained its point, some unforeseen accident intervenes, and surprises us; the chain is violently shaken, we quit our hold and fall: the well contrived system at once becomes a chaos; every idea of happiness recedes; the splendor of glory darkens, and at length totally disappears; every pleasing object is defaced, all is deranged, and the flattering scene passes quite away; a gloomy cloud pervades the understanding.

For young William Bartram, the inner weather of moods and melancholy was as unpredictable as the outer. A hint of alienation steals into all his undertakings. He was, in crucial ways, more a member of the coming Romantic generation, that international movement dedicated to feeling and spontaneity and a deep-felt correspondence between the promptings of the natural world and the human heart. Bartram’s Philadelphia contemporaries admired his writings and drawings, complaining only of a want of accuracy here and there, and of an unfortunate penchant for inventive exaggeration. But it was a younger cohort, including the English Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, who found a kindred spirit in Bartram. These writers found in Bartram’s Travels, his meandering masterpiece of keen-eyed observation and emotional response, a map of a brave new world of imagination and reality.

William Bartram was born in 1739, along with his twin sister, Elizabeth. Their mother was Ann Mendenhall, daughter of Benjamin Mendenhall, a Quaker wheelwright—a craftsman who made and repaired wheels—who immigrated from England around 1686. Just four years earlier, the first wave of persecuted Quakers had responded to William Penn’s invitation to establish a colony of religious tolerance in the New World. Both Benjamin and his older sister Margery Mendenhall (1655–1742) made the journey to Philadelphia. My mother happens to be a direct descendant of Margery, which makes William Bartram and me distant cousins.

The Bartrams lived in a stone house on the banks of the Schuylkill, with broad, carefully planted grounds leading down to the banks of the river. The French traveler Crèvecoeur visited John Bartram’s estate in 1765, marveling at its well-ordered tranquility. “The whole store of nature’s kind luxuriance seemed to have been exhausted on these beautiful meadows,” he wrote of land reclaimed from the river. “Thence we rambled through his fields, where the right-angular fences, the heaps of pitched stones, the flourishing clover, announced the best husbandry as well as the most assiduous attention.”

Apprenticeship was the accepted method of embarking on a respectable career in the colonial cities. In his youth, William Bartram turned down apprenticeships in printing with Franklin and in medicine with Alexander Garden, the Georgia-based botanist after whom the gardenia is named. He trained instead with a shopkeeper in Philadelphia before joining the Quaker diaspora to newly opened lands in North Carolina. He borrowed money from his father in 1761 to establish himself as a merchant on the Cape Fear River, on the road between the coastal settlement of Wilmington and the inland town of Fayetteville.

William was a disaster as a merchant. In 1765, he shut down his business and joined his father, newly appointed by George III as the Royal Botanist for the American colonies, on a ten-month plant-collecting expedition into Florida and Georgia. In October, the Bartrams strayed from the path again and discovered a beautiful flowering tea plant they named, after Benjamin Franklin, Franklinia alatamaha. The plant is now extinct in the wild.

William was so taken with Florida that he decided, against his father’s wishes, to stay there and try to make a living as a planter of rice and indigo, another disaster. By 1767, he was back in Philadelphia, working as a day laborer. At the age of twenty-eight, with no clear financial prospects, he had become a concern to his family. Three years later, under pressure from creditors—one of whom was so frustrated by William’s insolvency that he threatened him with physical injury—William abruptly fled to his old haunts in North Carolina. “Poor Billy hath had ye greatest misfortunes in trade that could be & gone thro ye most grievous disappointments,” John Bartram wrote, “and is now absconded I know not whither.”

And then, by one of those fortuitous events, those confluences of human and natural coincidence that shaped his eccentric life, William received an extraordinary invitation, from a remarkable man named John Fothergill, which put his life on a different course altogether.

During his feverish quest for Cherokee clay, Josiah Wedgwood had consulted this same Dr. Fothergill, a brilliant Quaker physician in London, whose interests included botany, art, and global trade. As Wedgwood’s biographer writes:

The Doctor, who took great interest in scientific subjects, seems to have advised with him on this matter of foreign clays, and to have thought, as did merchants and many others who had already imported them in small quantities, that unless they were restricted to the manufacture of highly-prized porcelain, the difficulties and expense connected with their transit from so remote a region would render them too dear [expensive] to be available, to any remunerative extent, to either the importer or potter.

Quakers were banned from English universities, but Dr. Fothergill had received excellent medical training in Edinburgh. The first British physician to identify diphtheria, he became the leading doctor in London; he would probably have been named the King’s Physician if Quakers were not excluded from that position as well. Fothergill had close ties to the American colonies; his father and brother were Quaker missionaries there. “The two Fothergills, John and Samuel,” according to the Quaker historian Rufus Jones, “were highly endowed, broad in their intellectual outlook, refined and gentle in breeding, possessed of the best culture of their time.” Samuel Fothergill was sharply critical, after a visit in 1754, of Quaker ownership of slaves in North Carolina. “Friends have been a lively people here,” he wrote, “but Negro-purchasing comes more and more in use among them.”

By the time that Wedgwood consulted with him about Cherokee clay, John Fothergill knew a great deal about the Southern colonies. A new passion made him eager to know much more. For in addition to his many other interests, Dr. Fothergill had become a gardener and amateur botanist. In 1762, he bought a large estate in Essex, where he gradually assembled the most extensive botanical garden of his time, with hothouses and greenhouses that held more than 3,400 distinct species of exotic plants from around the world. He was in touch with the Swedish botanist Linnaeus concerning the classification of previously unknown plants, and he was keen to add to his remarkable collection.

To find new plants, someone had to be willing to go into the wilderness and brave the dangers of the American outback. Among Fothergill’s close friends in the American colonies was a prominent Quaker merchant and scientist named Peter Collinson. It was Collinson who had first inspired Fothergill’s enthusiasm for collecting American plants. Collinson had hired John Bartram to collect specimens, and the two had developed a lively trade in plants between the two continents, becoming close friends along the way. Collinson, in turn, had introduced Dr. Fothergill to John Bartram. When Collinson died, in 1768, Fothergill remarked that he was “the means of introducing more new and beautiful plants into Britain than any man of his time.”

Just before his death, Collinson had shown Fothergill some drawings executed by young William Bartram. Fothergill was impressed and wished for more. “I called upon my Friend [Collinson] one morning this summer,” he wrote John Bartram, “when he showed me some exquisite drawings of thy son’s. He proposed that I should engage thy son to make drawings of all your land tortoises. I wish he would be kind enough to undertake this for me.”

“To make drawings of all your land tortoises”: The more one learns about William Bartram, the more fitting this first commission seems. It combines two features that one finds in so many of William’s undertakings: ambitious sweep and peculiar, even hallucinatory specificity.

The offer could not have come at a better time, for it was against a backdrop of debt, failure, and flight that Dr. Fothergill’s interest in William Bartram’s drawings opened up a new future for a young man in crisis. Bartram successfully completed the series on tortoises. And then, in 1772, from his new base of operations in Charleston, South Carolina, William requested support from Fothergill for an ambitious plant-hunting excursion through Florida, a plan to which Fothergill agreed.

And that was the beginning of William Bartram’s epic travels, which extended to four solid years of wandering in the wilderness. At the end of those four years, Bartram was transformed; more Natty Bumppo than a typical Philadelphia Quaker, he became a man of the woods, at home with deer and rattlesnakes and on respectful terms with the native Indian population. After returning briefly to Philadelphia to outfit himself for his travels, Bartram boarded ship for Charleston, arriving in late March 1773, and then sailed to Savannah to finalize his plans.

Bartram alerted the local authorities on Indian affairs about his intentions to travel into Cherokee country. His timing was excellent. In June, up the Savannah River in the settlement of Augusta, there was to be a gathering of the chiefs of the Cherokee and Creek peoples. They were to meet with colonial agents concerning outstanding debts and other points of disagreement and conflict. The meeting would allow Bartram to seek arrangements with the Indians for safe passage within Cherokee country.

William Bartram, Great Soft-Shelled Tortoise

During the intervening weeks, as he waited for spring and the meeting at Augusta, Bartram whiled away the time exploring the sea islands of the Georgia coast. Crossing a narrow shoal from the mainland, he spent a whole day scrutinizing one of these islands and was particularly entranced by huge heaps of shells on the level sands, which he assumed were either brought there by Indians or created by the movement of the tides. Then Bartram looked more closely.

I observed, amongst the shells of the conical mounds, fragments of earthen vessels, and of other utensils, the manufacture of the ancients: about the center of one of them, the rim of an earthen pot appeared amongst the shells and earth, which I carefully removed, and drew it out, almost whole: this pot was curiously wrought all over the outside, representing basket work, and was undoubtedly esteemed a very ingenious performance, by the people, at the age of its construction.

Visual ambiguity of this kind, an earthenware pot masquerading as a woven basket, appealed to Bartram the artist.

As William Bartram set out along the Savannah River, bound for Augusta, his journey into the interior played out against two opposing landscapes. One was the volatile political situation, resulting from the breakdown of colonial rule and the fraudulent land deals that white settlers had made with the indigenous Indians. The other was the timeless natural landscape of the backcountry. Bartram, the Quaker naturalist, averted his eyes from the political conflict and acutely observed—as though salvation lay there—the burgeoning spring carnival of azaleas, mountain laurel, and trailing arbutus.

The meeting at Augusta ran its predictably ugly course. By the mideighteenth century, the Indians had come to depend on English traders and their products. Exchanging deerskins for rum, the Indians, as Bartram noticed, had lost their skills in traditional arts and crafts, no longer making the sorts of pots he had found on the coastal islands. At Augusta, the Indians’ mounting debt, mainly for liquor purchased from unscrupulous traders, was forgiven in exchange for land, “the merchants of Georgia demanding,” as Bartram noted dryly, “at least two millions of acres of land from the Indians, as a discharge of their debts.”

The Cherokee representatives at the Congress were already an endangered and demoralized remnant. Soundly defeated in the Cherokee War of 1760, when Lord Jeffrey Amherst dispatched British troops to pacify the region, they had little bargaining power and were reduced to supplicants instead. The warlike Creeks belittled them; the whites cheated them. The Cherokee delegation itself was riven into factions. The older chief known as the Little Carpenter, or Attakullakulla, favored accommodation with the whites; he himself had traveled to Great Britain and knew what his people were up against. The charismatic Dragging Canoe, younger and more intransigent, fiercely opposed the deal.

Despite Dragging Canoe’s objections, a treaty was eventually signed, and Bartram was invited to accompany the team of surveyors delegated to mark the boundaries of the newly acquired land. He proceeded to join what he scornfully called the caravan, which consisted of

surveyors, astronomers, artisans, chain-carriers, markers, guides, and hunters, besides a very respectable number of gentlemen, who joined us, in order to speculate in the lands, together with ten or twelve Indians, altogether to the number of eighty or ninety men, all or most of us well mounted on horseback, besides twenty or thirty packhorses, loaded with provisions, tents, and camp equipage.

This obscene parade was hardly the manner in which Bartram wanted to travel; he was relieved when the surveying party divided into three groups, and his team proceeded to the Quaker village of Wrightsborough, thirty miles from Augusta on the Little River. Nearby, Bartram was delighted to find a “sublime forest” of black oak rising “like superb columns.” The oaks measured “eight, nine, ten, and eleven feet diameter five feet above the ground,” and tapered “forty or fifty feet to the limbs.”

Equally impressive to Bartram’s eyes, and an uncanny parallel to the towering columns of trees, was a site of ancient Indian monuments along the river, displaying great geometrical sophistication, and offering a poignant contrast to the humiliated Indians at Augusta:

I observed a stupendous conical pyramid, or artificial mount of earth, vast tetragon terraces, and a large sunken area, of a cubical form, encompassed with banks of earth; and certain traces of a larger Indian town, the work of a powerful nation, whose period of grandeur perhaps long preceded the discovery of this continent.

After four more days of travel, Bartram’s party reached the Buffalo Lick, three or four acres of dazzling white clay at the foot of the Great Ridge, and one of the boundaries of the land ceded by the treaty. The sight was a breathtaking expanse of natural sculpture. Bartram was so curious about the nature of the clay that he actually tasted it.

The earth, from the superficies to an unknown depth, is an almost white or cinereous colored tenacious fattish clay, which all kinds of cattle lick into great caves, pursuing the delicious vein. It is the common opinion of the inhabitants, that this clay is impregnated with saline vapors, arising from fossil salts deep in the earth; but I could discover nothing saline in its taste, but I imagined an insipid sweetness. Horned cattle, horses, and deer are immoderately fond of it, insomuch that their excrement, which almost totally covers the earth to some distance round this place, appears to be perfect clay; which, when dried by the sun and air, is almost as hard as brick.

Bartram was right that this was not a salt lick. The sweet taste of the clay and the abundant excrement on the scene indicate that Bartram’s Buffalo Lick was in fact, as the geologist Louis De Vorsey notes, “an exposed bed of the mineral popularly known as primary kaolin and served the buffalo and other animals much as Kaopectate serves humans with stomach upsets.” Animals consumed the kaolin to reduce the acidity of their diets and to loosen their bowels. Although he was unaware of its significance, Bartram had discovered a trove of high-quality kaolin. This clay was suitable for porcelain production and was situated much closer to Charleston than the Cherokee deposits that Duché and Griffiths had tracked down in the distant mountains.

The surveying parties concluded their work amid mounting indignation from the Cherokees regarding the exact boundaries established by the humiliating treaty. Tensions soon erupted into violence. Two young Indians who had participated in the surveying work happened to ask for water at a settlement of white homesteaders. The settlers brutally murdered the Indians, as though in confirmation of Dragging Canoe’s skepticism.

After this incident, there was widespread fear of a new Indian war. Bartram’s plans to explore the Cherokee towns north and west of Augusta, deep in the Smoky Mountains, had to be postponed indefinitely. He returned reluctantly to Savannah, making plans to travel into east Florida instead, because the Indians there, he was told, “were not openly concerned in the mischief.”

During his two years in Florida, William Bartram became a collector of visions as well as plants. He bought a canoe and explored the area along the St. Johns River, with traders and Indians serving as his guides in this idyllic landscape. He learned to bring a startling specificity to his descriptions, drawing on his deep knowledge of natural history, his acute sympathy for wild animals, and his wide reading. He became a connoisseur of cormorants and rattlesnakes, hummingbirds and horseshoe crabs. Contemplating the snakelike contortions of the cormorant, he wrote that “if this bird had been an inhabitant of the Tiber in Ovid’s days, it would have furnished him with a subject for some beautiful and entertaining metamorphoses.”

Bartram was particularly dazzled by the underground rivers in Florida. Traveling along the upper St. Johns, amid orange groves and huge magnolias, he came across an astonishing sight:

The enchanting and amazing crystal fountain, which incessantly threw up, from dark, rocky caverns below, tons of water every minute, forming a bason, capacious enough for large shallops to ride in, and a creek of four or five feet depth of water, and near twenty yards over, which meanders six miles through green meadows, pouring its limpid waters into the great Lake George, where they seem to remain pure and unmixed. About twenty yards from the upper edge of the bason, and directly opposite to the mouth or outlet of the creek, is a continual and amazing ebullition, where the waters are thrown up in such abundance and amazing force, as to jet and swell up two or three feet above the common surface: white sand and small particles of shells are thrown up with the waters, near to the top, when they diverge from the center, subside with the expanding flood, and gently sink again.

Three times in this sexually charged passage Bartram resorted to the adjective “amazing,” as though helpless to describe what he had seen.

As Bartram peered down into the “absolutely diaphanous” waters of the basin, he saw “innumerable bands of fish” that, under ordinary circumstances, would be expected to feed on each other: “the devouring garfish, inimical trout, and all the varieties of gilded painted bream; the barbed catfish, dreaded sting-ray,” with the “voracious crocodile stretched along at full length” by the pool. He was stunned to see “no signs of enmity, no attempt to devour each other; the different bands seem peaceably and complaisantly to move a little aside, as it were to make room for others to pass by.”

For Bartram, this “paradise of fish” constituted a utopian vision of nature before the fall, a peaceable kingdom that might inspire humans to “make room for others.” At the same time, he realized that the “amazing and delightful scene” was to some extent an optical illusion. The water was so clear that bands of fish at different depths seemed to occupy the same plane.

But the very transparency of the water, in Bartram’s view, contributed to the peaceful scene. All predatory fish, as Bartram explained, “take their prey by surprise,” by hiding in weeds or shadows. “But here is no covert, no ambush; here the trout freely passes by the very nose of the alligator,” he noted, and “what is really surprising is, that the consciousness of each other’s safety, or some other latent cause, should so absolutely alter their conduct, for here is not the least attempt made to injure or disturb one another.” Of course, Bartram knew perfectly well that these marauding fish needed to find their prey somewhere, but he allowed himself to be seduced by the deeper meaning of the scene. The implication was that in a guileless world without hiding places, and with mutual transparency, peaceful relations among neighboring groups might actually be possible.

In Florida, Bartram made significant forays into Indian territory, asking his Creek and Seminole guides about their use of medicinal plants. As he traveled on foot and by canoe, he recorded what he saw in both words and drawings for his patron, Dr. John Fothergill. He drew a pair of huge alligators cavorting in the waves, snorting and writhing like Chinese dragons. He drew a sinkhole, opening like a sinister beckoning hand in the center of the landscape, with another alligator sidling toward it. He drew the Savanna crane, a “stately bird” about six feet in length, with a wingspan of eight or nine feet, and then he ate it: “We had this fowl dressed for supper and it made excellent soup.” He drew fish and birds and snakes and seashells.

These drawings, fusing pinpoint accuracy with visionary intensity, are portraits of woodland creatures; one feels that Bartram, in his Quaker way, has befriended them. As one lets one’s eye drift to the penciled-in backgrounds, one finds a parallel world in miniature: tiny deer with antlers spread, tiny ships with sails unfurling in the breeze, even tiny towns springing up above distant horizons.

Ever since the gathering of tribes at Augusta, William Bartram had hoped to return to the Cherokee lands in the Carolina outback. During the spring of 1775, relations with the local Indians were sufficiently peaceful for Bartram to retrace his previous journey to Augusta and push his travels farther, toward the remote Cherokee encampments deep in the Smoky Mountains, which were known as the Overhill towns.

Bartram started down the same trail that Duché and Griffiths had followed. This time, with no “caravan” to impede him, he traveled alone. Following the Little Tennessee River, he reached the Cherokee village of Cowee, where he stayed in the house of the same guide that Griffiths had employed, the experienced trader Patrick Galahan, whom he described as “an ancient respectable man… esteemed and beloved by the Indians for his humanity.”

A younger trader in the area slyly offered to show Bartram “some curious scenes amongst the hills,” and led him to a former Indian settlement. On their return, they ascended a ridge and were met with an astonishing sight:

A vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields; a meandering river gliding through, saluting in its various turnings the swelling, green, turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds; flocks of turkeys strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of floriferous and fragrant native bowers… disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalizing them, staining their lips and cheeks with the rich fruit.

This “sylvan scene of primitive innocence” was, in Bartram’s view, “perhaps too enticing for hearty young men long to continue idle spectators.” Seeking to play “a more active part in their delicious sports,” they cautiously approached the girls.

Now, although we meant no other than an innocent frolic with this gay assembly of hamadryades, we shall leave to the person of feeling and sensibility to form an idea to what lengths our passions might have hurried us, thus warmed and excited, had it not been for the vigilance and care of some envious matrons who lay in ambush, and espying us, gave the alarm.

The young satyrs eventually caught up with the nymphs, at which point the girls, “incarnated with the modest maiden blush, and with native innocence and cheerfulness, presented their little baskets, merrily telling us their fruit was ripe and sound.” What happened next Bartram leaves to our imagination.

Amid such distractions, Bartram still had his eye resolutely on the Overhill towns to the west. He had engaged a guide and “protector” to the region, but the man failed to show. Ignoring the advice of local traders, who warned that the Overhill Indians had lately been in an “ill humor” toward the whites, Bartram determined to travel alone. It was with an ecstatic, devil-may-care attitude that he headed deep into the mountains. He felt as though he had been “expelled from the society of men, and constrained to roam in the mountains and wilderness, there to herd and feed with the wild beasts of the forests.”

In the strange and almost manic mood in which he traveled, Bartram’s meetings with Cherokee warriors in the woods assumed a dreamlike quality, as though he had entered a peaceable kingdom like the bands of fish in the crystal fountain. As he crossed a branch of the Tennessee River, a band of Indians suddenly materialized out of the dark trees. Bartram recognized the Cherokee supreme chief Little Carpenter himself and his armed entourage. “I turned off from the path to make way, in token of respect,” Bartram wrote. He introduced himself, explaining that “I was of the tribe of white men, of Pennsylvania, who esteem themselves brothers and friends to the red men.” The warriors accepted this friendly overture and allowed Bartram to continue on his solitary way.

As though to keep his bearings in these volatile surroundings, Bartram catalogued the plants as he traveled upward, like an exotic mantra: “Panax ginseng, Angelica lucida, Convallaria majalis, Lalesia, Stewartia, Styrax.” Reaching the summit of the most elevated peak, he “beheld with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains.”

Bartram’s descent down the western side of the mountain slope was gentle for a few miles; then it abruptly plunged downward. As so often in Bartram’s narrative, it was with the temporary loss of his footing that he made his discoveries:

My changeable path suddenly turned round an obtuse point of a ridge, and descended precipitately down a steep rocky hill for a mile or more, which was very troublesome, being incommoded with shattered fragments of the mountains, and in other places with boggy sinks, occasioned by oozy springs and rills stagnate sinking in micaceous earth: some of these steep soft rocky banks or precipices seem to be continually crumbling to earth; and in these moldering cliffs I discovered veins or strata of most pure and clear white earth, having a faint bluish or pearl color gleam, somewhat exhibiting the appearance of the little cliffs or wavy crests of new fallen snowdrifts: we likewise observe in these dissolving rocky cliffs, veins of isinglass (Mica S. vitrum Muscoviticum), some of the flakes or laminae incredibly large, entire and transparent, and would serve the purpose of lights for windows very well, or for lanthorns.

Bartram appended a footnote to this serpentine sentence: “Mica nitida: specimens of this earth have been exported to England, for the purpose of making Porcelain or China ware.” Bartram had literally stumbled upon the great clay pits where Duché and Griffiths had ended their own journeys in quest of Cherokee clay.

After his slippery, sliding discovery of the veins of Cherokee clay, with visions of new-fallen snow and well-lit windows, Bartram’s buoyant mood abruptly changed. It was as though he were waking from a dream. The vegetation, as though in response to his suddenly barren inner landscape, lost its profuse variety.

Leaving the great forest I mounted the high hills, descending them again on the other side, and so on repeatedly for several miles, without observing any variation in the natural productions… and perceiving the slow progress of vegetation in this mountainous, high country; and, upon serious consideration, it appearing very plainly that I could not, with entire safety, range the Overhill settlements until the treaty was over, which would not come on till late June, I suddenly came to a resolution to defer these researches at this time, and leave them for the employment of another season.

The wavering sentence, with its peculiar dips and turns and its curious evasion of feeling, raises more questions than it answers. Had Little Carpenter somehow warned Bartram to go no farther? Had the vegetation really become so dull just a few days after some of Bartram’s most ecstatic evocations of botanical plenitude? Had he already achieved his goal in entering the wilderness and had his vision? In any case, as Bartram concludes without further explanation, “next day I turned about.” He returned to Galahan’s house near Cowee, where he inspected the Indian mounds there, before retracing the long route back to Georgia, arriving in Charleston in June 1775.

And there, like Rip Van Winkle awaking from a dream, he learned some surprising news. The Revolutionary War had begun in April, with the battles in Lexington and Concord, just as Bartram was heading into the hills on his solitary journey.

10.

During the fall of 1786, while perched precariously in a cypress tree in his father’s garden by the Schuylkill River outside Philadelphia, William Bartram lost his footing and fell twenty feet to the hard ground below, breaking his leg in several places and effectively putting an end to his travels. Now visitors came to him, as George Washington did the following summer, along with James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who were attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The publication of his Travels, in 1791, sealed his reputation as the greatest naturalist of his time.

When the purchase of western lands from Napoléon extended the borders of the United States far beyond the limits of Bartram’s earlier excursions, President Jefferson asked Bartram to serve as adviser in natural history to the explorers Lewis and Clark. Citing his age and physical disabilities, Bartram politely declined. Living quietly in the stone mansion built by his father, with his menagerie of domestic and wild animals, he continued to reflect on his travels. He was amused by the behavior of his clever pet crow, Tom, who “enjoyed great pleasure and amusement in seeing me write, and would attempt to take the pen out of my hand, and my spectacles from my nose.”

A late addition to the Travels was a short section called “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians,” prompted by questions submitted in 1788 by a young Philadelphia naturalist called Benjamin Smith Barton. Still recovering from his fall, Bartram was also suffering from eye problems so acute that, as he told Barton, “I have been obliged to write the greater part of this with my eyes shut, and that with pain.”

A question about Indian art elicited a particularly intense run of paragraphs from Bartram. Barton, with typical European prejudices, had wondered whether Indian paintings preserved “the memory of events,” and whether they used “signs or symbols to denote attributes or qualities of various kinds.” In other words, were Indian paintings merely representational, or did they convey abstract ideas such as courage or virtue?

Bartram, in his vivid and almost hallucinatory memory of Indian paintings he had seen, on walls and human bodies and buffalo hides, sidestepped Barton’s question, with its hierarchical assumptions about the superiority of abstract concepts over mimetic depiction. Suddenly, the art of the Creek Indians rose up in his memory as vividly as on the first day he saw it:

The paintings which I observed among the Creeks were commonly on the clay-plastered walls of their houses… they were, I think, hieroglyphics, or mystical writings, for the same use and purpose as those mentioned by historians, to be found on the obelisks, pyramids, and other monuments of the ancient Egyptians, and much after the same style and taste, much caricatured and picturesque; and though I never saw an instance of the chiaro-oscuro, yet the outlines are bold, natural, and turned or designed to convey some meaning, passion, or admonition, and thus may be said to speak to those who can read them. The walls are plastered very smooth with red clay; then the figures or symbols are drawn with white clay, paste, or chalk; and if the walls are plastered with clay of a whitish or stone color, then the figures are drawn with red, brown, or bluish chalk or paste.

Bartram remembered how all kinds of trees and flowers and animals were depicted, along with human figures in various attitudes, “some very ludicrous and even obscene; even the privates of men are sometimes represented, but never an instance of indelicacy in a female figure.” Bartram added that the most beautiful paintings he had seen among the Creek people were tattooed on the skin of the chiefs. Whole scenes played out across the torsos and limbs of warriors: “a sketch of a landscape, representing an engagement or battle with their enemy, or some creature of the chase,” a deer, perhaps, or a wild turkey. Such paintings, in Bartram’s view, were “admirably well executed, and seem to be inimitable.”

11.

Bartram’s Travels had a volcanic impact on the English Romantic poets. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with his far-ranging appetite for other worlds, the more exotic the better, was enthralled by the book. “This is not a Book of Travels, properly speaking,” he wrote, “but a series of poems, chiefly descriptive, occasioned by the Objects, which the Traveler observed.—It is a delicious Book; & like all delicious Things, you must take but a little of it at a time.”

For Coleridge, Bartram’s intense descriptions of plants and soil became poetic metaphors for his own experiences and for people he knew, such as his close friend, poetic collaborator, and walking companion, William Wordsworth. While reading Bartram’s Travels, he wrote, he “could not help transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and metaphor of Wordsworth’s intellect and genius”:

The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their back above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic, black oak; the magnolia magniflora; fraxinus excelsior; plantane; and a few stately tulip trees.

At Coleridge’s urging, Wordsworth read Bartram with kindred excitement, and was enthralled by the description of strawberry fields and Indian nymphs, which he worked seamlessly into his narrative poem “Ruth,” about a young and vulnerable Englishwoman. She is mesmerized, tragically, as it turns out, by an adventurous young man who has recently returned from America, full of stories about wondrous plants that “hourly change their blossoms.”

He told of girls, a happy rout!

Who quit their fold with dance and shout,

Their pleasant Indian town,

To gather strawberries all day long;

Returning with a choral song

When daylight is gone down.

But it was Coleridge’s great poetic fragment “Kubla Khan” that drew most directly and profoundly from Bartram’s Travels. Kubilai Khan was the Mongol ruler of China who founded the Yuan dynasty, beginning in the thirteenth century, and presided over an immense empire. In his opening lines, Coleridge summoned Kubilai’s pleasure palace at his summer quarters of Xanadu, as described by Marco Polo and other visitors.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Coleridge claimed that the poem came to him in an opium dream after he fell asleep reading about early China and that he was hurriedly writing the lines down, as though from dictation, when a stranger, “a person from Porlock,” interrupted him, leaving the poem a fragment.

But in fact, “Kubla Khan” arrived in Coleridge’s consciousness festooned with delicious passages from Bartram’s Travels. Bartram’s underground river in Florida, which “meanders six miles through green meadows” before jetting into a “crystal fountain,” flowed directly into Coleridge’s poem:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean…

It is interesting to speculate on the subtle chemical reaction by which Samuel Purchas’s narrative of travels in sixteenth-century China, which Coleridge was reading as he fell asleep, combined with Bartram’s meandering river and crystal fountain, with opium as the catalyst. The notion of pleasure was presumably at the heart of this transformation, the “delicious” quality that Coleridge found in Bartram. For Coleridge, Bartram was almost as potent a drug as opium.

12.

When William Bartram made his solitary journey to the Overhill towns of the Cherokee people, he was traveling the same route as his clay-mad predecessors, the potter Andrew Duché and Josiah Wedgwood’s agent Thomas Griffiths. It was Bartram, in turn, who bequeathed the imaginative richness of the Southern landscape to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Perhaps fittingly—for such is the strange circularity of this exchange—Coleridge was a close friend of Josiah Wedgwood’s son Thomas (a fellow opium addict) and received a generous annuity from the Wedgwood family. It is pleasing to imagine that Cherokee clay, dug from the Carolina outback and worked into the recipe for the popular jasper ware, helped fund the composition of “Kubla Kahn.” They were, one might say, dug from the same source.

Coleridge and Wedgwood, in their differing ways, were both digging for China in Carolina. Coleridge, with Bartram’s travels on his mind, made poetry from the story of the great Mongol ruler in China; Wedgwood, with his Cherokee clay, made his exquisite pottery reminiscent of fine china. Bartram, searching for specimens for his patron, John Fothergill, was also digging for China—as he identified exotic tea plants and ginseng in the American forests.

A metaphor might be drawn from the gardens of Fothergill and the potteries of Wedgwood. Exotic plants like ginseng and porcelain clays for making china were dug from the rich earth of North America and transported to England, where they thrived in new surroundings and inspired new artistic creation. Similarly, Bartram’s Travels served as a rich repository of metaphors for later writers, “transplanted” to new literary uses. Just as there was a global trade in plants and materials, there was a parallel trade in verbal structures and ideas. And every once in a while, a restless genius came along—a Bartram, a Wedgwood, a Coleridge—who wandered from the familiar trail, risking falls and failure, and fused these new possibilities in unexpected ways, leaving lasting art for posterity.