Philadelphia’s most eminent naturalist, was a living legend. He was the son of John Bartram, formerly the “King’s Botanist” before the Revolution. The elder Bartram had been revered in America and all over Europe both for his expertise in New World plants—Linnaeus considered him the world’s most accomplished botanist—and for a series of expeditions he had made to collect plants and explore the continent. William, who from an early age showed an enthusiasm for drawing birds and trees, accompanied his father on several of these trips, most importantly in 1765 to northeastern Florida where he stayed on and established an indigo plantation near the banks of the St. John’s River. The enterprise failed. But in 1773 William returned to Florida and again explored its northeastern palmetto jungles and savannas over the course of a four-year sojourn among the area’s planters and the native Seminole Indians. In 1791, Bartram published a book, Travels through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, based on the field journals he kept during his expedition. It offered a vivid account of a wild place that seemed to Bartram a kind of Garden of Eden, and included detailed lists and descriptions of the many plants and animals he had encountered. Bartram’s description of the Alachua savanna, an immense opening of sawgrass and wetlands just south of present-day Gainesville, evoked the intoxicating wildness of the place:
The extensive Alachua savanna is a level, green plain, above fifteen miles over, fifty miles in circumference, and scarcely a tree or bush of any kind to be seen on it. It is encircled with high, sloping hills, covered with waving forests and fragrant Orange groves, rising from an exuberantly fertile soil. The towering Magnolia grandilora and transcendent Palm, stand conspicuous amongst them. At the same time are seen innumerable droves of cattle; the lordly bull, lowing cow and sleek capricious heifer. The hills and groves re-echo their cheerful, social voices. Herds of sprightly deer, squadrons of the beautiful, fleet Siminole horse, flocks of turkeys, civilized communities of the sonorous, watchful crane, mix together, appearing happy and contented in the enjoyment of peace, ’till disturbed and affrighted by the warrior man. Behold yonder, coming upon them through the darkened groves, sneakingly and unawares, the naked red warrior, invading the Elysian fields and green plains of Alachua.
Travels was an instant sensation, though it was better received in Europe, where it quickly went through nine editions, than in the United States, where reviewers complained about Bartram’s ornate style and his high regard for Florida’s Indians. Bartram undeniably overcooked his prose, but in recounting his many adventures with the people and animals of the southeastern United States, he was often hugely entertaining. In one of his most talked-about escapades, Bartram described his killing of a large rattlesnake. In a momentary rage after nearly stepping on the angrily coiled specimen while hiking through a swamp near St. Augustine, Bartram whacked the animal with a stick and then cut off its head. He was instantly overcome with guilt—Bartram regarded the rattlesnake as a marvelous example of natural form and function—though he felt a different sensation after dragging it back to camp and being served a portion of its flesh when the local governor had it cooked up for dinner the same evening. Bartram admitted he could bring himself to taste the meat, but not swallow it.
This kind of adventure was riveting to casual readers, but Bartram earned even more respect for his enlargement of what was known of the country’s natural history. Bartram drew sketches of and described snakes, frogs, turtles, and many sorts of mammals, bringing them to life with sometimes startling immediacy. He reported that Florida swamps in the springtime reverberated with the bellows of male alligators, and that when these reptiles issue their calls, “vapor rises from their nostrils like smoke.” Bartram discovered a great many species not previously known to science, from the gopher turtle to the Florida panther. Among his most significant contributions were observations on bird migration. Bartram noted the transitory appearance in Florida each fall and spring of the many birds that bred in the North and overwintered in the South. And he assembled a new list of American birds—215 in all—that nearly doubled Jefferson’s compilation. Bartram probably had even more bird data than he included in Travels, and his use of unconventional naming schemes in place of Linnaean binomials denied him full credit for many species he was certainly the first to formally describe. But later naturalists came to regard Bartram’s Travels as the true starting point of American ornithological study. Three years after the book first appeared, Bartram was the only American named to an international list of “all living zoologists.”
Bartram was sixty-three when Alexander Wilson came to Gray’s Ferry, and was busy drafting illustrations for Elements of Botany, the first botany textbook published in America. Wilson’s schoolhouse was less than a mile from Bartram’s Garden, which he soon discovered. Long devoted to rambling before and after his teaching day, Wilson loved hiking among the unusual and stately trees and shrubs that abounded in the garden. He was more quickly acquainted with Bartram’s cypresses and azaleas than he was with Bartram himself, as it apparently took the shy schoolteacher the better part of a year to become a regular visitor at the old stone house built by Bartram’s father three-quarters of a century earlier.
But by the spring of 1803, Wilson was corresponding with Bartram and was spending time in the famous naturalist’s library, where he was learning plant and animal classification. He had also begun taking drawing instruction from Bartram’s niece. Wilson regretted not having more free time to pursue these new interests, and remarked how difficult it was to draft proper images when he was forced to work by candlelight. In March, he sent a note to Bartram thanking him for his letters of encouragement, which he said were like “Bank Notes to a Miser.” Wilson worked on images of birds and flowers, and drew an interesting shrub Bartram had pointed out to him, sending the picture—which he deemed a “feeble imitation”—to Bartram with a request that he supply its Linnaean and common names.
One of the works Wilson studied in Bartram’s library was an age-mellowed copy of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands that the book’s author, the English naturalist Mark Catesby, had presented to Bartram’s father. It was, before Bartram’s Travels, the most complete and the most beautiful zoology of North America. The two-volume book consists almost entirely of 220 etchings of plants and animals that Catesby had observed and drawn during two lengthy expeditions to the New World between 1712 and 1726. The pictures depict animals familiar now in North America, but also some that were completely unknown to Wilson. The schoolteacher’s head, for years preoccupied with grammar lessons and the figures of the calculus, now filled with colorful images of fishes and reptiles and mammals and, especially, birds. The first volume was devoted to birds. Wilson saw birds that he knew and some that he didn’t, many depicted in ways suggesting their personalities. In Catesby’s most ambitious drawing, a bald eagle with wings outstretched and talons flaring dives high above a river to capture a fish that has just fallen from the grasp of an osprey seen hovering helplessly in the background. The complexity of this drawing—it is one of only two in which Catesby drew a landscape as a backdrop—is remarkable, and the fact that most of the rest are much simpler indicates how expensive and time-consuming engraving and coloring prints could be. Some of Catesby’s animals are posed against neutral backgrounds; most are either perched on or standing by trees or shrubs that are carefully classed and named.
Catesby had a soft style—the original drawings were made in water-color—but he used bold, saturating colors. There is an arresting degree of detail in the engravings, with the lines of even the softest feathers clearly delineated. His blue jay is typical. The bird stands on the limb of a smilax bush in a scolding posture, its tail cocked high and its head canted upward with its beak open to reveal a wagging tongue. The bird’s signature crest is erect, and the fine feathers along its belly stand out excitedly.
Wilson found Catesby’s book irresistible, and he seemed to begin thinking almost immediately about undertaking a project to expand on it. With only a hundred species of birds represented, the Natural History wasn’t even close to a comprehensive catalogue of North American species. But Catesby had found the right approach in using the available printing techniques and figuring out how to market such a book.
There were several ways of reproducing drawings or paintings. All were labor-intensive and expensive. Images were typically traced and then cut into wood or engraved on stone or metal, usually copper. When these templates were inked and pressed