Bartram's Travels

[2] In 1772, Dr. John Fothergill of London commissioned William Bartram to explore the Florida territories, collecting seeds, making drawings, and taking specimens of unfamiliar plants.

Returning to Charleston, Bartram set out for the southern Appalachians and the Cherokee country in April 1775, unaware that war had broken out in New England.

Sailing again to Mobile, he traveled inland late in the year to the Creek Indian settlements on the Tallapoosa River.

[citation needed] The reviewer in the Massachusetts Magazine found Bartram's literary style "rather too luxuriant and florid",[6] but overall the book was praised highly in the United States and Europe.

He is considered the scientific discoverer of several plant species, including the Franklin tree (Franklinia alatamaha), which was rare when Bartram described it and later became extinct in the wild.

Because of the sixteen-year delay between the completion of his travels and the publication of his book, Bartram missed the opportunity to be recognized as the first describer of several more species.

In addition to the Travels Bartram wrote other documents concerning his impressions of the southern Indians and the necessity of a humane public policy toward them.

By his own account, Coleridge had Bartram's Travels in mind when he devised the exotic imagery in his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.

Also in 1793, the Travels appeared in German as William Bartram's Reisen, translated by Eberhard August Wilhelm von Zimmermann.

A French translation by Pierre Vincent Benoist, Voyage dans le parties sud de l'Amérique septentrionale, appeared in 1799 in Paris, followed by a second edition in 1801.