Thomas P. Slaughter

John Bartram was the greatest collecting botanist of his day, and personally introduced fully one quarter of all the plants that reached Europe from the New World during the colonial period. He established one of the first botanical gardens in America and turned it into a commercial nursery, linking Europe and America with a mail-order business in seeds and plants. He was a founding member of the American Philosophical Society, a Quaker disowned by his Meeting for heresy, and a central character in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. His son William was America's first great native-born natural historian and important painter of nature, developing his own surrealist style. He was the author of Travels, America's first significant book of natural history - a work that inspired the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, provided wilderness settings for the novels of Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper, and influenced the nature-based philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau. Through the lives of the Bartrams, Slaughter illuminates changing American attitudes toward science, religion, nature, and commerce. He also addresses questions of parenthood, race and gender relations, and evocations of the self. Tracing the origins of environmental ethics, often believed to be distinctively modern, to the early nineteenth century, he portrays the two Bartrams as philosophical innovators in their opposition - considered radical at the time - to sport-hunting and the wholesale destruction of rattlesnakes, and in their beliefs in the volition of plants and the common spirit animating all living things. The Bartrams' attempts to find both salvation and a living in nature, and their relationship - sometimes strained, sometimes touching - make for a moving story about the conjunction of nature with human nature and about the intellectual and emotional origins of their thought and spiritual outlook. This is what it meant to be a father, a son, a seeker of purpose and meaning, in that time long ago when the verdant wilderness still covered much of the North American continent.… (plus d'informations)

A grudging four stars for the reasons outlined below.

There are several problems with this book, some having to do with this edition and others having to do with this edition itself. First the edition.

This particular edition is the dreaded abridgment, even worse than the abhorred book club edition. I can only surmise the editors of Lakeside Classics wanted to keep the size of the volume more compact. Fortunately the omissions are in bulk and not in paraphrase. The editors also chose to use illustrations other than Bartram's originals for more than half of the pictures. Again, one can only surmise that the more colorful and accurate illustrations by Bartram's predecessor Mark Catesby and George Caitlin would be of more interest to the general reader.

The second issue is with Bartram's narrative itself. Bartram is notorious for exaggeration in size and quantity and license in chronology. Where 12 feet will do for an alligator's length, 22 feet is substituted. Similarly trees, storms, rivers, lakes, animals, and just about anything that will add to the astonishment of the reader is inflated beyond reason. Similarly events and occurrences are presented in a way to impress rather than accurately convey; an eclipse is interpolated that couldn't have occurred until at least a year after the expedition. This calls into question the rest of the chronology.

However, what one must keep in mind is that Bartram is one of the first American naturalists, a legacy he passed on to the likes of Audubon, Thoreau, and Muir. His wonder at the things in nature that he conveys is palpable and exciting. Bartram's awe at the previously unrecorded marvels he relates is conveyed to the reader. This alone makes the text a precedent for later American naturalists.

Many of the wonders natural, ecological, anthropological, and archaeological that Bartram first recorded were gone within only a few years. He was one of the earliest recorders of the vast prehistoric Ocmulgee Mississippian village near modern day Macon, GA.

I recommend anyone interested in this to seek the unexpurgated full account of Bartram's journey.… (plus d'informations)