in botany after reading a book on the subject and began sending seeds and cuttings to a
fellow Quaker in London. Encouraged to seek out more, he embarked on increasingly
ambitious journeys into the wilderness, sometimes traveling over a thousand miles
through the rugged mountains. Though he was entirely self-taught, never learned Latin,
and had scant understanding of Linnaean classifications, he was a prize plant collector,
with an uncanny knack for finding and recognizing unknown species. Of the 800 plants
discovered in America in the colonial period, Bartram was responsible for about a quarter.
His son William found many more.
Before the century was out, the eastern woods were fairly crawling with botanists--
Peter Kalm, Lars Yungstroem, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz, John Fraser,
Andre Michaux, Thomas Nuttall, John Lyon, and others pretty much beyond counting.
There were so many people out there, hunting so competitively, that it is often not
possible to say with any precision who discovered what. Depending on which source you
consult, Fraser found either 44 new plants or 215, or something in between. One of his
uncontested discoveries was the fragrant southern balsam, the Fraser fir, so characteristic
of the high ranges of North Carolina and Tennessee, but it bears his name only because
he scrambled to the top of Clingmans Dome just ahead of his keen rival Michaux.
These people covered astonishing sweeps, for considerable periods. One of the
younger Bartram's expeditions lasted over five years and plunged him so deeply into the
woods that he was long given up for lost; when he emerged, he discovered that America
had been at war with Britain for a year and he had lost his patrons. Michaux's voyages
took him from Florida to Hudson's Bay; the heroic Nuttall ventured as far as the shores of
Lake Superior, going much of the way on foot for want of funds. They often collected in
prodigious, not to say rapacious, quantities. Lyon pulled 3,600 Magnolia macrophylla
saplings from a single hillside, and thousands of plants more, including a pretty red thing
that left him in a fevered delirium and covered "almost in one continued blister all over"
his body; he had found, it turned out, poison sumac. In 1765, John Bartram discovered a
particularly lovely camellia, Franklinia altamaha; already rare, it was hunted to extinction
in just twenty-five years. Today it survives only in cultivation--thanks entirely to Bartram.
Rafinesque-Schmaltz, meanwhile, spent seven years wandering through the Appalachians,
didn't discover much, but brought in 50,000 seeds and cuttings.
How they managed it is a wonder. Every plant had to be recorded and identified, its
seeds collected or a cutting taken; if the latter, it had to be potted up in stiff paper or
sailcloth, kept watered and tended, and somehow transported through a trackless
wilderness to civilization. The privations and perils were constant and exhausting. Bears,
snakes, and panthers abounded. Michaux's son was severely mauled on one expedition
when a bear charged him from the trees. (Black bears seem to have been notably more
ferocious in former times; nearly every journal has accounts of sudden, unprovoked
attacks. It seems altogether likely that eastern bears have become more retiring because
they have learned to associate humans with guns.) Indians, too, were commonly hostile--
though just as often bemused at finding European gentlemen carefully collecting and
taking away plants that grew in natural abundance--and then there were all the diseases
of the woods, like malaria and yellow fever. "I can't find one [friend] that will bear the
fatigue to accompany me in my peregrinations," John Bartram complained wearily in a
letter to his English patron. Hardly surprising.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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