LIFE AND CHARACTER 9 



nearly four hundred miles by one bank and descending by the 

 other. The report of these explorations, with observations on 

 the lay of the land, quality of the soil, and the vegetable and 

 animal productions, was sent to the Board of Trade and Planta- 

 tions in England, where it was ordered published " for the 

 benefit of the new colony." 



This exploration trip was fruitful to William Bartram. From 

 his earliest childhood he had seen plants in his father's garden, 

 but many of them were transplanted, cultivated by the skill and 

 knowledge of his father. Now at last he saw them, and others 

 he had never seen, growing in the woods, naturally, without the 

 aid and direction of man. He had had an earlier opportunity to 

 observe plants in their native habitat when his father had taken 

 him along, in 1753, on a trip to the Catskills,^^ but then he had 

 been but fourteen years old and, besides, the plants of the Cats- 

 kill region are not so different from those of Pennsylvania as 

 are those of the South. The beauty of Florida fascinated him; 

 he refused to return home, and persuaded his father to help him 

 establish himself as an indigo-planter on the St. Johns River. 

 This business venture, too, proved unfortunate. A graphic pic- 

 ture of his pathetic condition at this time is contained in a letter 

 to John Bartram, written on August 9, 1766, by Henry Laurens, 

 who later became famous as President of the Continental Con- 

 gress and as one of the signers of the peace treaty with England. 

 Laurens had visited Bartram at his plantation and he thus sum- 

 marized his impressions: 



... In fact, according to my ideas, no colouring can do justice to the 

 forlorn state of poor Billy Bartram. A gentle, mild young man, no wife, 

 no friend, no companion, no neighbor, no human inhabitant within nine 

 miles of him, the nearest by water, no boat to come at them, and those 

 only common soldiers seated upon a beggarly spot of land, scant of 

 the bare necessities, and totally void of all the comforts of life, except 

 an inimitable degree of patience, for which he deserves a thousand 

 times better fate ; an unpleasant, unhealthy situation, six negroes, rather 

 plagues than aids to him, of whom one is so insolent as to threaten his 

 life, one a useless expense, one a helpless child in arms, . . .^- 



*^ D/cL of Am. Biog., II, 27, gives the year of this trip as 1755; but the head- 

 ing of a paper in The Bartram Papers, Vol. I, in John Bartram's handwriting, 

 reads: " A Journey to the Catskill Mountains with billy 1753." 



"Memorials, 440-441. 



