122 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



other travel writers who preceded him. There is neither vivid- 

 ness nor particularization in Catesby, Lawson, Byrd, or Carver. 

 Lawson, for instance, frequently deals with situations similar 

 to those described by Bartram, but they are neither dramatic nor 

 memorable. He too mentions the hospitality of the planters, 

 but in vague, general, and colorless terms. " About noon," he 

 says, " we reached another island . . . ; there lived an honest 

 Scot who gave us the best protection his Dwelling afforded. . . .^° 

 Not the slightest attempt at individualization or dialogue. He 

 also records encounters with Indians, but his record has no ele- 

 ment of possible conflict and hence no suspense. " The next 

 day about noon we accidently met with a Southward Indian, 

 amongst those that us'd to trade backward and forward, and 

 spoke a little English, whom we hir'd. . . ." ^^ One must con- 

 clude that it was not a mere accident that Bartram' s Travels has 

 remained a memorable book, a work of art in many respects, 

 while the accounts of Lawson and his contemporaries have to- 

 day but a mild historical interest. 



Writing, one feels, was a pleasant art for Bartram. There is 

 an ease about his style, a sense of effortlessness; he was a 

 traveler with creative ability, a combination not often found 

 among earlier travelers and seldom found among later travelers. 

 His father, for example, " seems always to have handled the 

 pen with a certain stiffness ... he evidently does not feel at 

 liberty with his inkhorn. It was this fact, doubtless, that tended 

 to lose in the dust of the past a name that otherwise would have 

 held its place with the greatest." ^* William Bartram' s name, 

 instead of being lost in the dust, is becoming more widely 

 known. His art is alive. He saw the American landscape clearly, 



*• John Lawson, op. at., p. 2. 



" Ibid., p. 20. 



*' Harper's Magazine, LX, 322. Also see Popular Science Monthly, XL, 834: 

 " His observations are minute and sagacious, and his language is simple, but 

 his sentences are loosely strung out, and the record is the barest statement of 

 facts." However, Middleton has indicated that John Bartram " on occasion 

 displayed an excellent command of English and an almost poetic finish in 

 description" (The Scientific Monthly, XXI, 210), which merely, if granted, 

 proves that William Bartram's descriptive talent is a flowering of a hereditary 

 proclivity. 



