North American Naturalists: Bartram and Audubon

Abstract

For the first two years of the War of Independence, while the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill were being fought, William Bartram was searching the southern states of North America for undiscovered plants. At the beginning of the account of his adventures, published under the title Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida Bartram explains that he had been asked by Dr John Fothergill of London to undertake an expedition for ‘the discovery of rare and useful productions of nature, chiefly in the vegetable kingdom’. His picturesque descriptions include paddling through ‘innumerable millions’ of mating mayflies, hailing the yellow bream or sun-fish as ‘a warrior in a gilded coat of mail’, and noting that the noise of a beautiful green frog ‘exactly resembles the barking of little dogs, or the yelping of puppies’. Among his botanical discoveries was a rare flowering tree, which he had first seen with his father, John Bartram, during an expedition in the 1760s. William now named the tree the Franklinia, after Benjamin Franklin, who had obtained for the elder Bartram the salaried post of King’s Botanist. During the war, Franklin wrote from Paris encouraging the Bartrams to send botanical specimens to France: ‘If you incline, you may send the same number of boxes here that you used to send to England.