Jeffrey Wade's Reviews > The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist Edition

This is a gorgeous book, written in a vastly different time. Bartram's prose is often quite flowery and he dwells long on lists of species he runs across (which might bore the casual reader) but he offers a portrait of a Southeast that has utterly vanished from the face of the earth -- multicultural, unspoiled, and mysterious. It's a world where Spanish, Muskogee, Hitchiti, English, French, the trade language Mobilian and various African language are spoken and cultures collide in a Georgia and Florida wilderness containing cougars, wolves, and many other animals that have vanished from the region.

He describes his encounters with the Creeks, Seminoles and other Native peoples in great detail and from his descriptions of the landscapes he encounters--full of abandoned mounds and groves--it is quite evident there was once quite a bit more. He also dwells most lovingly on the flora and fauna. His account of a ride up the St. John's River in Florida is harrowing, with one account of a group of alligators approaching his primitive little camp on an island in the swamp as he tried to sleep with a deluge of rain pouring from the sky.