Revolution in the Streets, Revelations in the Swamps
As musket fire echoed in the colonies, two observers in the Floridas turned their attention to plants, people, and place.
By James Cusick
Bernard Romans, surveyor, cartographer, and writer, traveled extensively in British East and West Florida in the 1760s, producing many of the maps of those colonies. Drawing from his observations about colonial products and daily life among the Chickasaw, Creek, and Choctaw, he compiled his Concise History of East and West Florida—part promotional piece to encourage emigration, part treatise on flora, fauna, and society.
In search of funds to get his work published, Romans moved to Philadelphia, where he joined the American Philosophical Society and solicited subscribers for the first edition. It came off the press in 1775, the same year British redcoats clashed with American minutemen at Lexington and Concord. A second edition appeared in 1776, the year the 13 colonies north of the Floridas declared independence. Applying his expert knowledge of coastal areas and bays, Romans went on to produce a detailed map of the Floridas accompanied by a pilot’s guide for navigating into harbors. His works remain a valuable documentation of the Floridas during two decades under British rule.
William Bartram also spent part of the 1760s traveling in Florida. He accompanied his father John on a botanical expedition in 1765, and in 1774 he returned in his own right, sponsored by Dr. John Fothergill, a noted London plant collector and fellow of the Royal Society. Bartram’s keen interest in the natural world and native society inspired his series of works about the Creek and Seminole Indians. He also authored the most highly regarded text on natural history produced in North America, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country.
Self-trained as an artist, by the time he was a teenager Bartram was contributing sketches of plants and animals to naturalists in Europe. From his sojourn in Florida he made the first two sketches of what is now known as Payne’s Prairie, south of Gainesville. He wrote detailed descriptions of Seminole towns headed by the miccos (chiefs) Cowkeeper and Long Warrior, and painted a portrait of the latter for Travels.
Bartram published not as a British subject, but as an American: the first edition of Travels appeared in Philadelphia in 1791, followed by two London editions, a Dublin imprint, and versions in French and German. The book was an early best-seller—not merely born in the Revolution, but revolutionary in its rich prose and captivating descriptions of the natural world. It became an inspiration to other naturalists including Alexander Wilson, father of American ornithology, and the French botanist Andre Michaux. Both spent considerable time consulting with Bartram at his Pennsylvania home. The spirituality of Bartram’s writings also captured the imagination of poets such William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, making Travels a scientific and literary sensation.
James Cusick is the curator of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of Florida’s George A. Smathers Library. He holds degrees in journalism and anthropology. He is the author of The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida and is currently working on a second book, Colonial Crime: Cases from the Records of Spanish East Florida. Dr. Cusick serves as a board member of UF’s Historic St. Augustine, Inc., and has served as president of the Florida Historical Society and as a judge for the State of Florida’s annual book awards.