and amusement. This was an agreeable profession for William. It would be
conducted alone, without supervision, and it permitted William to wander,
especially in wild places, by foot, horse, and boat. In he won a com-
mission from a wealthy London physician to gather Floridian plants for
the doctor’s elaborate city garden. So William was happily off to the South
Atlantic coast again.
In April —just a year before the Revolution began—he approached
the mouth of St. Johns River again (as he recorded in hisTravels) aboard ‘‘a
handsome pleasure-boat, manned with four stout negro slaves, to row in
case of necessity.’’^6 There was no need for rowing as the party sailed past
Amelia Narrows, then bore shoreward through Fort George Sound into the
river’s broad mouth. William and a companion, a Mr. Egan, took pleasure
in watching diving pelicans—brown pelicans, presumably, since the larger
white variety are not divers. Egan promptly ‘‘shot one of them, and brought
it into the boat,’’ delighting Bartram, who described the dead bird at length:
‘‘The pouch or sack, which hangs under the bill: it is capable of being ex-
panded to a prodigious size. One of the people on board, said, that he had
seen more than half a bushel of bran crammed into one of their pouches.
The body is larger than that of a tame goose, the legs extremely short, the
feet webbed.’’ This was observation both scientific and artistic, for that day
and many years to come, before photography presented a less sanguinary
means to study birds closely.
William Bartram was hardly a slouch, but bird study is better associated
with his younger contemporary, John James Audubon (–). The most
vivacious painter of North American birds, immortal in his books and the
bird-protection society founded in his name during the s, Audubon
‘‘captured’’ his subjects first with his gun before posing their carcasses
with the aid of sticks and wires. Audubon also wrote unselfconsciously of
his participation in slaughters of birds for mere sport on the east coast of
Florida early in the nineteenth century. As his vessel cleared a coral reef and
made safe harbor, Audubon’s ‘‘heart swelled with uncontrollable delight,’’
he wrote, for ‘‘the birds which we saw were almost all new to us; their lovely
forms appeared to be arrayed in more brilliant apparel than I had ever be-
fore seen.’’ Nonetheless the men fired ‘‘shot after shot...anddowncame
whirling through the air the objects of our desire.’’ Still unsatisfied, a com-
panion invited Audubon onward, to another site: ‘‘ ‘Come along, I’ll shew
you something better worth your while,’ ’’ ‘‘ ‘rare sport.’ ’’ This was soon re-
vealed in a mangrove swamp: ‘‘a multitude of pelicans. A discharge of artil-
lery seldom produced more effect;—the dead, the dying, and the wounded,