of the country’s natural history. Bartram drew sketches of and described snakes, frogs, turtles, and many sorts of mammals, bringing them to life with sometimes startling immediacy. He reported that Florida swamps in the springtime reverberated with the bellows of male alligators, and that when these reptiles issue their calls, “vapor rises from their nostrils like smoke.” Bartram discovered a great many species not previously known to science, from the gopher turtle to the Florida panther. Among his most significant contributions were observations on bird migration. Bartram noted the transitory appearance in Florida each fall and spring of the many birds that bred in the North and overwintered in the South. And he assembled a new list of American birds—215 in all—that nearly doubled Jefferson’s compilation. Bartram probably had even more bird data than he included in Travels, and his use of unconventional naming schemes in place of Linnaean binomials denied him full credit for many species he was certainly the first to formally describe. But later naturalists came to regard Bartram’s Travels as the true starting point of American ornithological study. Three years after the book first appeared, Bartram was the only American named to an international list of “all living zoologists.”
Bartram was sixty-three when Alexander Wilson came to Gray’s Ferry, and was busy drafting illustrations for Elements of Botany, the first botany textbook published in America. Wilson’s schoolhouse was less than a mile from Bartram’s Garden, which he soon discovered. Long devoted to rambling before and after his teaching day, Wilson loved hiking among the unusual and stately trees and shrubs that abounded in the garden. He was more quickly acquainted with Bartram’s cypresses and azaleas than he was with Bartram himself, as it apparently took the shy schoolteacher the better part of a year to become a regular visitor at the old stone house built by Bartram’s father three-quarters of a century earlier.
But by the spring of 1803, Wilson was corresponding with Bartram and was spending time in the famous naturalist’s library, where he was learning plant and animal classification. He had also begun taking drawing instruction from Bartram’s niece. Wilson regretted not having more free time to pursue these new interests, and remarked how difficult it was to draft proper images when he was forced to work by candlelight. In March, he sent a note to Bartram thanking him for his letters of encouragement, which he said were like “Bank Notes to a Miser.” Wilson worked on images of birds and flowers, and drew an interesting shrub Bartram had pointed out to him, sending the picture—which he deemed a “feeble imitation”—to Bartram with a request that he supply its Linnaean and common names.
One of the works Wilson studied in Bartram’s library was an age-mellowed copy of The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands that the book’s author, the English naturalist Mark Catesby, had presented to Bartram’s father. It was, before Bartram’s Travels, the most complete and the most beautiful zoology of North America. The two-volume book consists almost entirely of 220 etchings of plants and animals that Catesby had observed and drawn during two lengthy expeditions to the New World between 1712 and 1726. The pictures depict animals familiar now in North America, but also some that were completely unknown to Wilson. The schoolteacher’s head, for years preoccupied with grammar lessons and the figures of the calculus, now filled with colorful images of fishes and reptiles and mammals and, especially, birds. The first volume was devoted to birds. Wilson saw birds that he knew and some that he didn’t, many depicted in ways suggesting their personalities. In Catesby’s most ambitious drawing, a bald eagle with wings outstretched and talons flaring dives high above a river to capture a fish that has just fallen from the grasp of an osprey seen hovering helplessly in the background. The complexity of this drawing—it is one of only two in which Catesby drew a landscape as a backdrop—is remarkable, and the fact that most of the rest are much simpler indicates how expensive and time-consuming engraving and coloring prints could be. Some of Catesby’s animals are posed against neutral backgrounds; most are either perched on or standing by trees or shrubs that are carefully classed and named.
Catesby had a soft style—the original drawings were made in water-color—but he used bold, saturating colors. There is an arresting degree of detail in the engravings, with the lines of even the softest feathers clearly delineated. His blue jay is typical. The bird stands on the limb of a smilax bush in a scolding posture, its tail cocked high and its head canted upward with its beak open to reveal a wagging tongue. The bird’s signature crest is erect, and the fine feathers along its belly stand out excitedly.
Wilson found Catesby’s book irresistible, and he seemed to begin thinking almost immediately about undertaking a project to expand on it. With only a hundred species of birds represented, the Natural History wasn’t even close to a comprehensive catalogue of North American species. But Catesby had found the right approach in using the available printing techniques and figuring out how to market such a book.
There were several ways of reproducing drawings or paintings. All were labor-intensive and expensive. Images were typically traced and then cut into wood or engraved on stone or metal, usually copper. When these templates were inked and pressed onto paper, a black-and-white copy of the original image resulted. Depending on how rapidly the wood-cut or engraving wore down, it could be reused many times to mass-produce copies.
If the finished image was to be in color, however, this added another demanding step—hand painting. Using the original as a guide, a colorist—or sometimes a team of colorists—painted over the black-and-white print, filling it in one color at a time, like a paint-by-numbers. When well executed, a hand-colored print was almost indistinguishable from the original and from its sibling prints—even though each reproduction was, in truth, a unique work of art.
Printmaking thus involved several skilled disciplines, with the engraving in particular requiring talent often equal to that of the original artist. This meant that the biggest obstacle facing any illustrated book was the cost of making it. Catesby did his own engraving, partly so he could control the quality of the prints but mainly because he couldn’t afford to hire an engraver. Even then, the finished book figured to be so expensive—not to mention the normal risk of less-than-hoped-for sales—that Catesby had had to ensure in advance that the project would pay for itself. He did this by producing the Natural History in installments and selling subscriptions to buyers who agreed to pay for each batch of “birds, beasts, fish, serpents, insects, and plants” as it was received. He also decided to make the book available in black and white. One uncolored installment, or “Number” as it was called, cost one guinea—a pound and a shilling (about $4.80). Catesby then advertised a luxury version. “For the Satisfaction of the CURIOUS,” he stated in a prospectus, “some Copies will be printed on the finest Imperial Paper, and the Figures put in their Natural Colours from the ORIGINAL PAINTINGS, at the Price of Two Guineas.”
Catesby’s Natural History made a terrific impact. It was widely reprinted and translated for many years, and found its way onto the shelves of several royal families. Virtually all of Europe’s most influential naturalists regarded it as the definitive work on North American wildlife. Linnaeus himself based many of his taxonomic listings of New World plants and animals on Catesby’s observations. Like William Bartram decades later, Catesby was struck by the coming and going of the birds through the South each fall and spring. At the time, there was still much uncertainty about migration, and many myths about where birds went in the winter persisted. It was thought that some spent the winter in the deep recesses of caves. Another surprisingly durable theory was that some species, such as swallows, dived to the bottoms of lakes and remained there until the return of warm weather.
Catesby was humbled by his success, and was at pains to apologize—quite unnecessarily—for his primitive style. He took more pride, it seemed, in having endured the rigors of his expeditions, which were considerable. Catesby made all of his drawings in the field, working whenever possible from live-caught specimens. He traveled in unsettled areas, hauling his kits of paints and papers and dissecting instruments, and often lived in the open. He was impressed by the many species he encountered—and by the violence they perpetrated on one another—as he advanced deeper into the tropics. In South Carolina, he lived through a powerful
