May 1, 1700

Not much is known about John Lawson's dates, but he may have worked as an apothecary in England, and his life span is estimated at 1650 to 1711. We do know that he left for America on May, 1, 1700, according to an article on this figure who worked as a naturalist in what is now called South Carolina. Our source is an article is from The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, at this link (to an pdf file.)

The information we quote is an example of the interest of this Society in Early European Naturalists in Eastern North America:

In December the Lord Proprietors of Carolina appointed ...[Lawson] to make a survey of the colony’s interior, which he did, accompanied by five [other] Englishmen and four Indians. It lasted from 28 December 1700 to 23 February 1701, and ... covered... 550 miles..... This exploration provided information for his map of North and South Carolina, which he published in A New Voyage to Carolina, Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of that Country (1709). ....

[In] his book’s extensive discussion of plants and animals ... Lawson devoted almost 25 pages to the trees, shrubs, and vines of Carolina. He was unconcerned about whether they were native or introduced, although most were native. He emphasized their uses but did not limit himself to utilitarian comments. For example, he identified three kinds of honeysuckle— which grew respectively in moist ground, clear and dry land, and in swampy woods—their only use being to beautify nature. His long discussion of the kinds and uses of oak trees included “Turkey-Oak,” whose only known use was to provide food for turkeys. Aside from his map, his only illustrations were of seven mammals, three snakes, and a turtle shell. The bear is catching a fish, the raccoon is using its tail as bait to catch a crab, and a coiled snake is charming a squirrel out of a tree. He did not explicitly relate his illustrations to his text, which created some ambiguity, since the illustrations are not very precise. What kind of snake is charming which kind of squirrel? And in his illustration...[below], what kind of cat is attacking what kind of deer?

He discussed four kinds of cat—panther, catamount, wild cat, tiger—which presumably are species now called cougar, lynx, bobcat, and jaguar, and he discussed three kinds of deer—elk, stag, and fallow deer—which presumably are only elk and white-tailed deer. 

The cat [below] most resembles a bobcat, and the antlers resemble those of elk more than white-tailed deer. Bobcats are known to kill fawns, and also adult white-tailed deer in winter; whether they kill adult elk is less certain.

Lawson discussed 27 kinds of “beasts” (mammals), though his list mentions two sorts of unspecified rats and two sorts of unspecified mice, 129 kinds of birds, 42 kinds of saltwater fish (including whales, porpoises, and dolphins), 20 kinds of freshwater fish, 20 kinds of shellfish, and 22 kinds of “insects,” which were reptiles, with additionally unspecified frogs and worms listed as “insects”; there were no actual insects listed under that heading.

[John Lawson planned to go back to England .... and then return to America to pursue his  research] but those plans failed because he was killed by Tuscarora Indians in 1711. However, what he had already accomplished was considerable for the time: “the first major attempt at a natural history of the New World...”

This is the  drawing  mentioned above: