yi WILLIAM BARTRAM 



be so illuminated with wisdom, and our hearts warmed and ani- 

 mated with a due sense of charity, that we may be enabled .... 

 to perform our duty towards those submitted to our service and 

 protection, and be merciful to them, even as we hope for mercy " 

 (p. 101). 



It has already been suggested that Bartram's impulse to study 

 animals and to champion humane treatment for them owed a 

 great deal of its intensity to his own kindly temperament, to the 

 influence of his upbringing and his age, and to his keen sense 

 of the beautiful and the unspoiled. These elements, and espe- 

 cially the last, also gave rise to his " primitivism," or to what 

 is generally understood by this word — the assumption of the 

 superiority of the primitive, the assumption of a Golden Age in 

 the past, the admiration of the Noble Savage, of the unsophisti- 

 cated and the innocent. If, as Hoxie Neale Fairchild states, the 

 conceptions of a Golden Age and a Noble Savage represent 

 " a protest against the evil incidental to human progress," a 

 looking back " from the corruptions of civilization to an imagi- 

 nary primeval innocence," ^® then Bartram was quite an ardent 

 protestant. Everywhere in his writings are exclamations against 

 the ravages of civilization on the face of nature and the mind 

 and heart of nature's child, the Indian. 



Primitive nature is beautiful. The landscape on the banks of 

 the " Alatamaha " charms Bartram with its " scenes of primitive 

 nature, as yet unmodified by the hand of man " {Travels, p. 49) . 

 In order to continue his travels he actually has to " break away " 

 from an '" inchanting little Isle of Palms," a " blessed unviolated 

 spot of earth! " (p. 157). Even deserts, "vast spaces of gravel 

 and plains of flat rocks . . . entirely destitute of vegetation," 

 appeal to him, for soon he comes upon groves of " low, spread- 

 ing Live Oaks, Zanthoxilon, Ilex, Sideroxilon, &c. and here and 

 there . . . the pompous Palm tree, gloriously erect or gracefully 

 bowing towards the earth," and he finds the contrast "pleasing" 

 and a "wild Indian scene of primitive unmodified nature, ample 

 and magnificent" (p. 243). His love of "unmodified nature" 

 affects him with " extreme regret, at beholding the destruction 

 and devastation which has been committed, or indiscreetly exer- 



^' The Noble Savage. Columbia University Press, 1928, p. 2. 



