SOURCE: Adams, Charles H. “Reading Ecologically: Language and Play in Bartram's Travels.” The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 32, no. 4 (summer 1994): 65-74.

In the following essay, Adams argues that previous characterizations of Bartram have been too narrow, and that in Travels the author creates a world that mirrors the natural one.

In Part III of his Travels (1791), William Bartram describes a spot on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River near Augusta called Silver Bluff, the property of a trader named George Golphin. “Silver-Bluff is,” he says, “a very celebrated place,” mainly because of the “various strata of earth” displayed in this “steep bank” that “rises perpendicular out of the river” more than thirty feet. Loam, clay, sand, marl, more clay and finally “a deep stratum of blackish … saline and sulphurous earth” mark the geologic history of the bluff. Within the oldest stratum...