While the American Revolution was beginning and his countrymen were arguing and arming themselves, William Bartram was making his solitary way across the marshlands and forests of Florida, Georgia, and Alabama collecting botanical specimens. When a group of delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 spent a Sunday off from their deliberations touring the gardens established near Philadelphia by his father, John Bartram, they found William Bartram pottering about the plants in his bare feet. A wonderful anomaly in his place and time, he produced in his long life only one book, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida. It remains one of the most impressive and influential works by any early American writer.

Bartram's Travels, as its title suggests, does not purport to be an imaginative work. It records the terrain features, flora, and fauna Bartram encountered in three years of wanderings in the...