8 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



mechanical ingenuity. The house at Kingsessing in which Wil- 

 liam was born, and which has been described in numerous 

 articles, had been built by John Bartram himself. In a letter to 

 Jared Eliot the pride of a skilled craftsman is unmistakable. " I 

 had been used to split rocks to make steps, door-sills, window- 

 frames, pig and water troughs. I have split rocks seventeen feet 

 long, and built four houses of hewn stone, split out of the rocks 

 with my own hands. . . . " ^^ An example of his son's mechan- 

 ical skill is a fine, well-made table preserved in the Bartram 

 Memorial Library at the University of Pennsylvania. 



In his perplexity over William's career, John Bartram turned 

 to Benjamin Franklin for advice. The latter offered to teach the 

 boy the printing trade, but his offer was not accepted. Franklin 

 then suggested that William be taught engraving, and that sug- 

 gestion, too, was declined. Instead William, at eighteen, was 

 placed with a Mr. Child, a Philadelphia merchant. There are 

 no records to indicate just what he felt and thought of himself 

 as a merchant. Four years later, in 1761, he set up as a trader at 

 Cape Fear, North Carolina, where his uncle William had settled 

 when a young man. He was not successful; evidently he did not 

 follow his father's practical advice to pay " at convenient times 

 ... a complaisant visit to the Governour and most of the chief 

 persons, letting them know that thee art come into their country 

 in the way of trade . . . " ^^ It is improbable that young Bar- 

 tram, whose " disposition was that of a rover rather than that 

 of a steady worker . . . gentle, modest and contemplative, 

 . . ." ^° would follow such advice and prove a successful trader. 

 Hence when his father, in 1766, now almost sixty-six years old, 

 invited his son to accompany him on a botanical expedition in 

 the South, William did not hesitate to close his business and 

 turn explorer. On this trip he helped his father explore the 

 sources of the river San Juan (St. Johns) , ascending the river 



"^ " Bartram's Garden." By M. L. Dock. Garden and Forest, March 25, 1896, 

 p. 122. 



" Letter '" To William Bartram, Marchant in Cape Fear, North Carolina." 

 Bartram Papers, Vol. I. In the manuscript Division of the Pennsylvania His- 

 torical Society, Philadelphia. 



*"Fox, op. at., p. 186. 



