SOURCE: Seelye, John. “Beauty Bare: William Bartram and His Triangulated Wilderness.” Prospects: The Annual of American Cultural Studies 6 (1981): 37-54.

In the following essay, Seelye claims that Travels was originally intended as a record of scientific observations, but a closer look reveals a humanistic tone that is based on the divine providence of nature.

In September 1753 the American botanist John Bartram set out with his young son Billy from their farm on the banks of the Schuylkill for the Catskill Mountains for the purpose of gathering seeds and plant samples. The journey ended at the Hudson Valley home of Cadwallader Colden, surveyor-general of New York and himself a botanist of note, where the Bartrams made the acquaintance of yet another botanist, Alexander Garden of Charleston, South Carolina. The elder Bartram encouraged Garden to open correspondence with Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist to whom Bartram had been writing for years, correspondence...