their age was so abundant that the taking of one or two or half a dozen for
study would matter not to anyone, save perhaps God. Bartram addressed
this subject himself after his St. Johns River journey, as he accompanied
white traders in Alachua Indian country, west of St. Augustine. The hunters
had killed and cooked for William an enormous soft-shelled turtle. William
thought it delicious but could eat hardly half the meat and regretted waste.
His ‘‘companions,’’ he wrote, ‘‘seemed regardless, being in the midst of
plenty and variety, at any time within our reach, and to be obtained with
little or no trouble or fatigue on our part; when herds of deer were feed-
ing in the green meadows before us; flocks of turkeys walking in the groves
around us, and myriads of fish, of the greatest variety and delicacy, sport-
ing in the crystalline floods before our eyes.’’ Besides, ‘‘vultures and ravens,
crouched on the crooked limbs of the lofty pines, at a little distance from
us, sharpening their beaks, in low debate, waiting to regale themselves on
the offals, after our departure from camp.’’ Still, there is much more on the
killing of wild nature.
Once Bartram had landed by the St. Johns and procured from a planter
a little sailboat, then set out southward, on his own, one of his first ob-
servations was of ‘‘parroquets...hovering and fluttering’’ about treetops.
He meant Carolina Parakeets, foot-long multicolored birds that became
extinct about . Their range extended northward past Virginia and
westward past the Appalachian Mountains. During the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Europeans and Africans exclaimed that parakeet mi-
grations blackened the skies—like those of passenger pigeons—the birds
being so numerous. Already, though, by William Bartram’s time, these col-
orful creatures had become brethren to Ole Slewfoot, and settlers were
laboring toward the parakeet’s extinction with gun, net trap, and poison.
What parakeets threatened was apples. Europeans brought apple seed
and tree seedlings to America, the last great migratory destination of the
Asian species. Mature trees bloom magnificently and grace any homestead.
The fruit may be beautiful, too, and delicious. Apples dried and stored
might also supplement winter’s diminishing food stores, for people and
hogs. But apples had more important economic utility: They became
brandy, for home and local consumption, to be sure, but especially as a
form of cash money. Apples reduced in bulk to demijohns and casks might
be transported relatively easily from backwater farms to trading points
great and small. The overwhelming majority of Euro-Americans, from Flor-
ida through Virginia and Maryland, were not great riverside planters with
large labor forces and enormous commodity production for ready trade