Wonders of the Wilds

What is in the wilderness that lies beyond the Colonies? One of the relatively few men who know the details is Naturalist William Bartram, 37. For the past three years he has been traveling through wild country from the Carolinas to West Florida. The son of John Bartram, the famous Philadelphia botanist, William recently passed through Fort Charlotte, South Carolina, and showed a TIME correspondent some travel journals that he has been keeping.

He is a short man with a wide brow, a benign expression, and a mission that even the Indians have noticed. They call him Puc-puggy (the flower hunter). William Bartram is collecting and classifying America's plants and seeds. He sends the most interesting specimens, or his drawings of them, to John Fothergill, a botanist and physician in London who is paying Bartram's expenses plus -L- 50 a year. What the current troubles between the Colonies and England will do to this arrangement is uncertain, though Bartram never gives politics a thought. He moves totally rapt in the world of nature.

So far he has meandered from Charles Town, South Carolina, to Jacksonburg, Florida, and back to Savannah, Georgia, with a number of exploratory side trips in between. Although the scientific descriptions in his journals can make for dull reading--some entries are mere lists of as many as 57 plants with Latin names--Bartram brings to his work keen powers of observation as well as a poetic, almost rhapsodic sensibility. When he sees a wild turkey, for example, he writes that it is "a stately beautiful bird, of a very dark dusky brown colour ... edged with a copper colour, which in a certain exposure looked like burnished gold, and he seemed not insensible of the splendid appearance he made."

The most striking thing about the journals is Bartram's joy in "scenes of nature as yet unmodified by the hand of man." The dark forests are not at all frightening to him. Rather, they are "delightful," "shady," "cool," "verdant." Except for a few references to "musquitoes," he seems either not to have encountered chiggers, horseflies and other such pests, or else to be oblivious to them. As to the real dangers of the wilderness, Bartram believes that studying nature reveals above all "the power of the Creator."

Being alone and unprotected in the wilds does pose a few hazards, however. In Florida Bartram went through one hurricane so strong that huge liveoak branches flew about in the air as if they were mere "leaves and stubble." Bartram also records that he has met venomous snakes: the "bastard rattle snake" and the "large and horrid" moccasin, which has a bite that is "always incurable." He has seen wolves, bears and wildcats too, but to date the only creature that has actually threatened his life is the Florida alligator.

It is a particularly awesome beast, at least in Bartram's description: "Behold him rushing from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail, brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder." Nonetheless, when Bartram's cockleshell of a boat was attacked by a giant alligator on a Florida lake, the naturalist beat at it with a club "until he withdrew sullenly and slowly into the water, looking at me and seeming neither fearful nor in any way disturbed."

As for the Indians, whom other travelers have found to be fickle and fierce, Bartram has had no trouble. Indeed, he sees the red men as dwellers in a sort of paradise, well supplied with food and shelter. The Seminoles of Florida, he writes, are "as blithe and free as the birds of the air, and like them as volatile and active, tuneful and vociferous." All Indians are a long way from being ignorant savages, he observes: "These people are both well-tutored and civil ... It is from the most delicate sense of the honour and reputation of their tribes and families that their laws and customs perceive their force and energy." If these Indian tribes have anything to fear, Bartram continues, it is "the gradual encroachments of the white people" on their territory.

Having witnessed a ceremony in which the merchants of Georgia received at least 2 million acres from the Creeks and Cherokees as "a discharge of their debts," Bartram has no doubt that the encroachments will continue. Nor will his own words, if they are ever published, dissuade Americans from pressing ever deeper into Indian lands. Wherever he goes, he reports on natural marvels--enchanting springs, crystal lakes, whole hillsides blazing with azaleas, potentially rich farm lands --that are sure to entice others to brave the wilds and tame them too. Bartram himself is next going into the largely unexplored territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi that is controlled by the Creek and Choctaw Indian tribes. He looks forward to the wonders--and the solace --that he will surely continue to find in America's vast wilderness.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.