then narrowing and winding to the river’s still-mysterious origins among
swampy springs in the neighborhood of Melbourne—more than miles
of first dark, vegetation-stained, and then blue waters, moving slowly (for
the gradient is almost flat), a rare northward-flowing highway. The south-
ern reaches of the St. Johns—the ‘‘upper’’ river, owing to its flow direction—
are the blackest, illustrating metaphorically, one could say, Jodie’s frustra-
tion as well as south-sailing Europeans’ apprehensions, centuries earlier,
as they encountered lean prospects and considerable danger, not only from
native peoples on the banks, but from huge populations of alligators and
deadly snakes.^5
About midway, chronologically, between the Spaniards and the fictional
Jodie, the first great American-born naturalist, William Bartram, sailed,
paddled, botanized, and camped along the St. Johns. William (–)
was a son of John (–), the first famous Bartram naturalist, who
established on his farm near Philadelphia North America’s largest and best-
known plant nursery and pleasure garden and who corresponded with and
sent specimens to every important European taxonomist, including Swe-
den’s Carl von Linné (Linnaeus). John sailed and paddled much of the St.
Johns in and took William there in . William was smitten (not un-
like Marjorie Rawlings) and decided to remain in Florida as a planter of
rice and indigo. John’s half-brother, also named William, a planter near
Wilmington, North Carolina, was probably model and inspiration. John,
ever the indulgent father, bought slaves in Charleston and sent them down
to young William early the next year, but William promptly failed. He was
no good at business and returned to Philadelphia as a farm laborer, for
a while. Finally, capitalizing on his father’s contacts with English collec-
tors, William gained commissions to draw pictures and gather specimens
of North American fauna and flora and ship them to London. Botanical
and other natural life collections had been a passion of Europeans and
European settlers in the Americas since . Possession of natural ex-
otica enhanced collectors’ social status and entertained collectors’ fasci-
nated friends, but collecting was also about the business of commodifying
nature. Europeans sought plant medicines and perfumes. Europe was be-
coming deforested, and kings sought replacements and/or new sources of
wood for ships, especially. William himself had sought to extract wealth
from Florida in . Like other fortune seekers, he would tear out natural
vegetation, drain and dike extensive rich lands, and introduce semitropi-
cal cultivars from Asia and West Africa. Now he would collect and draw
sea, river, and land shells, then mollusks and turtles, for Londoners’ study