The page of a notebook that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing on in 1798 records that his son Hartley, age two, fell down and skinned his knee and that in the swamps of Florida the dominant bull alligator bellows like nothing on earth to keep away fifty bachelor contenders for his wives. Hartley was comforted by being shown the moon, after which his father went back to making notes on William Bartram’s Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws (1791), a book that, as John Livingston Lowes’s classic study of Coleridge’s reading, The Road to Xanadu (1927), demonstrated in 574 scholarly pages, was a gold mine of images and exotic information. “I am,” Coleridge once said, “well up on the far out.”
Wordsworth, too, got a poem (“Ruth”) out of Bartram. The Travels had fans in Emerson, Carlyle, Thoreau, and Southey. It proved to be a book for poets. Hack reviewers doubted its veracity, and scientists, for whom it was intended, were cool toward so personal and episodic an adventure.
Bartram’s travels are the best kind of adventure in that they are the hardships and ad hocheroism of a quiet, city-bred Philadelphia Quaker. Lewis and Clark expected bears, hostile Indians, uncrossable rivers, and hyperactive weather. Bartram was looking for new species of plants, birds, and fish. The tropical storms he encountered, the mosquitoes in
