John Bartram (1699-1777)

Botanist

Sources

Philadelphia. John Bartram was a farmer who, because of his interests in botany and his tireless fieldwork, became one of America’s finest naturalists. Bartram was a simple Quaker who lived at the outskirts of Philadelphia, the scientific center of the middle colonies. Open to new ideas, he allowed some of the greatest minds of the eighteenth century to guide his scientific research. He was friends with the Philadelphia scientists Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Breintnall. James Logan, one of the most influential Philadelphia sponsors of science, introduced Bartram to Latin, the medium of scientific correspondence. Logan loaned science books to Bartram, helped him master the microscope, and turned his attention to the great Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. Bartram was never a great thinker but rather was an active fieldworker who traveled thousands of miles throughout America collecting specimens of plant life.

Journeys. There were few regions of colonial British America that John Bartram did not visit. In 1738 he journeyed eleven hundred miles through Maryland and Virginia and crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains. Four years later he journeyed up the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains, paralleled the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Rivers of Pennsylvania, and crossed the Allegheny Mountains to upstate New York and Lake Ontario. He took note of the topography of the land and described Native American customs. His account of the journeys was subsequently published in London as Observations on the Inhabitants, Climate, Soil, Rivers, Productions, Animals, and Other Matters Worthy of Notice (1751). Beginning in 1754 Bartram took his son William, the future naturalist and ornithologist, on his travels. They journeyed to Florida in 1765 and ascended the Saint John’s River to its source. In the same year King George III made John Bartram the Royal Botanist of America.

Correspondence. Bartram’s journeys often occurred at the instigation of his correspondents. Beginning in the 1730s and continuing to his death forty years later, Bartram received requests for plant and animal specimens from English and European scientists. Bartram and the Englishman Peter Collinson were lifelong friends, though they never met. Collinson heard about Bartram’s abilities and, being a collector, initiated a correspondence with the American. Bartram fulfilled Collinson’s endless requests for specimens of sarsaparilla, hellebore, cypress, white cedar, laurel, locusts, and butterflies. Bartram was so accommodating that Collinson found other patrons for his activities: Mark Catesby, Linnaeus, Sir Hans Sloane, Dr. John Fothergill, J. F. Gronovius, and other leading European scientists. Bartram often received payment for his work, making him the first professional scientist in America. He also received seeds from the gardens of his correspondents, which he added to his own five-acre botanical garden at Kingsessing, near Philadelphia. Bartram’s garden was so exotic and varied it was the talk of the colonial American scientific community.

Sources

Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, The Life and Travels of John Bartram (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1982);

Helen Cruickshank, ed., John and William Bartram’s America (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957).