and customs duties, an organizer of the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company, when his worldly career was diverted by a chance meeting with Cromwell. The Lord Protector recognized a man after his own model, and sent him in quick succession against the Dutch on the Hudson River, the French at Acadia, and the Spanish of the Island Colonies. In one of his reports from his last expedition to Jamaica he begs the Protector to pardon his

prolix and rude expressions. I am apt sometimes to think I shall write no more. I am sometimes sick, and think I may fall among the rest of my countrymen; and durst do no other than plainly to let your highness know our state and condition.

Plainly and simply, and most convincingly, he set forth the deplorable situation of Jamaica and of the English soldiers who were dying there.

On the North American mainland, settlement followed exploration and colonization. For half a century there was little record of travelling beyond the limits of the outlying pasture lands and adjoining home sites. Occasionally someone bolder than his neighbours pushed a canoe up-stream to the head of navigation, or wandered into the valleys beyond the surrounding ridges, but very rarely were observations or physical experiences committed to paper. The impulse to print the reports of travellers did not come until there was land to be sold. The seventeenth-century promoters of speculation carried on the practice of distributing tracts telling about the property they wished others to buy. The little pamphlets issued by the Virginia Company, by the Massachusetts Agents, by William Penn in German, Dutch, and French as well as in English, by the Scots Proprietors of the Jerseys, and by the Lords of Carolina, are today worth more money than many of the acres that they describe. Most of these early tracts were written by men who had travelled through the regions of which they wrote. Rarely is there any substantial reason for doubting the honesty of what was reported as the result of actual observation. "What I write, is what I have proved," remarks one of the frankest of these promoters of a New World settlement in which he hoped to make his fortune, Edward Bland, Merchant. On 27 August,

1650, Bland set forth from the head of "Appamattuck River" in Virginia in search of the Falls of Blandina. His journey took him across broad stretches of "very rich Champian Land,” "a pleasant Country, of temperate Ayre, and fertile Soyle." The beauty of the country, the heaps of bones which led the native guides to relate tales of valorous deeds, and the preservation of the party through "information our Guide told us he had from a woman that was his Sweet-heart," offered opportunities that a later-day reader wishes might have been improved with some of the appreciation of literary possibilities which a Frenchman could hardly have neglected. Bland's narrative goes steadily forward toward the goal and home again, without digression for any merely entertaining purpose from each day's march and the nightly watch against surprise.

The natives supplied the picturesque element for most of the writing of colonial times. To them also were due a number of involuntary journeyings, the accounts of which make an important part of American literature. There is nothing in English, or in any other language, that surpasses these narratives of Indian captivities in vividness or in the bare statement of physical suffering and of mental torment. They held the attention of readers who knew the writers, and the stream of successive reprintings is still going on, to supply an unabated demand.

The first and the best known of these narratives is that of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. She was the wife of the minister at Lancaster, Massachusetts, where the natives seized her when they burned the town during King Philip's War. The record of her subsequent "Removes" has seldom been equalled as a direct appeal for human sympathy. The hours following her capture may well have been

the dolefullest night that ever my eyes saw. Oh the roaring, and singing, and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell. . . There remained nothing to me but one poor wounded Babe, and it seemed at present worse than death, that it was in such a pitiful condition, bespeaking Compassion, and I had no refreshing for it, nor suitable things to revive it.

I 2d ed. 1682. The date of the first edition is unknown.

Mrs. Rowlandson's narrative is matched by that of John Gyles of Pemaquid (1736), who collected from his minutes

these private Memoirs, at the earnest Request of my Second Consort; that we might have a Memento ever ready at Hand to excite, in our selves Gratitude & Thankfulness to GOD; and in our Offspring a due Sense of their Dependance on the SOVEREIGN of the Universe.

Gyles was captured in 1689, and spent the ensuing nine years with the Indians along the Penobscot River and with the French in Canada. The natives soon tired of the too easy amusement of seeing him suffer, and as he managed to avoid death by drowning and frost-bite, he gradually made a place for himself by the humblest usefulness.

The natives of the woods of Maine and those of the everglades of Florida were equally skilful in devising methods of terrifying strangers who were thrown by chance or indiscretion amongst them. The account of God's Protecting Providence In the Remarkable Deliverance of Robert Barrow, Faithfully Related by Jonathan Dickenson (1699), is in many respects the best of all the captivity tracts. Driven ashore by a storm on the Gulf coast of Florida, late in September, 1696, the survivors, among them Dickenson's wife with their baby at her breast, six weeks later reached St. Augustine. For most of this interval, the wanderers were in hourly expectation of death. As is frequently the case, the record of these experiences is so undemonstrative that it is unconvincing, until the whole story is reread from the beginning. It was only after the more desperate dangers were over, and the prospect began to favour their escape, that Dickenson's narrative became pathetic. When the Spanish outposts were reported to be only two marches away, the fugitives

had a great Loss; having a Quart of Berries whole, and as much pounded to mix with Water, to feed our Child with; the Fire being disturbed, the Cloth which we had our Food in was burn'd.

This was a loss which might easily have proved, to persons emaciated and weakened by suffering, the fatal last straw; but in spite of a driving storm and freezing weather, all but

two of the party managed to drag their blood-caked bodies through the sand to the Spanish garrison. At St. Augustine the Commandant and the other residents divided their scanty supplies with the fugitives, and nursed them until they were fit to be sent on their way to the Carolinas. The aged Quaker, Robert Barrow, survived all these experiences just long enough to greet the Friends who were awaiting him at Philadelphia. There he died three days later, on 4 April, 1697,

having passed through great Exercises, in much Patience; and in all the times of our greatest Troubles, was ready to Counsel us to Patience, and to wait what the Lord our God would bring to pass: And he would often express, That it was his Belief, that our Lives should be spared, and not be lost in that Wilderness, and amongst those People, who would have made a Prey of us.

The same fundamental religious impulse which sustained Robert Barrow on the storm-swept Florida beaches had settled the New England Puritan colonies. This same overwhelming impulse drove into these colonies, half a century after their permanent establishment, a succession of groups of wanderers whose peregrinations left a broad and often bloodstained trail the length of the continent and seaward to the islands. The men and women who made up these groups, called in derision Quakers, wrote as freely as they discoursed, and the spirit that animated them brooked no interference with either speech or progress. The names of several, Mary Dyer, Marmaduke Stevenson, and George Fox, whom Roger Williams "digg'd out of his Burrowes," to wit Edward Burroughs, are better known, but none of them wrote more forcefully than Alice Curwen. In the year 1660, "hearing of the great Tribulation that the Servants of the Lord did suffer in Boston, of cruel Whippings, of Bonds and Imprisonments, yea, to the laying down of their natural Lives," Mistress Curwen felt the call to go and profess in that bloody town. "Having this Testimony sealed in my Heart," she writes, "I laboured with my Husband day and night to know his Mind, but he did not yet see it to be required of him," he having but just returned from the Lancashire gaol in which he had been confined for refusing to pay the tythe. The call reached him in season to enable him to embark on the vessel on which his wife had taken

passage for America. Journeying to Boston, they missed imprisonment through a legal technicality, and went on their way to the eastward. They were more fortunate on their return, for the constables drove them "all along the Street, until they came to the Prison, whereinto they thrust us; but the Lord was with us, and our Service there was great; for many people, both rich and poor, came to look upon us.”

Another traveller who did his best to scour the colonists of heretical opinions, his own opinions being as pronounced when he was directed by the Quaker spirit as when he followed the Anglican order, was George Keith. He knew the controversially-minded Americans better than anyone else at the end of the seventeenth century. The descriptions of his opponents which are scattered through his hundred-odd publications are an invaluable elucidation of the state of mind which fructified in the revivals of forty years later, when George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards came to make plain the way to salvation. Whitefield' kept a diary during his constant journeyings between England and America and through the mainland colonies. These personal records were published at the close of each important stage of his wanderings, and the seven pamphlets in which they appeared were reprinted in numerous editions. They contributed largely to the success of the great revivalist's ministry. Upon the reader of two hundred years later they still leave the impression of a dominating spirit, and of a sweet nature unconscious of its power. Worn out by wordy wrestlings with a recalcitrant sinner, Whitefield would cheerfully get out of a sick bed to preach to the Free Masons, "with whom I afterwards dined, and was used with the utmost civility."

An elemental fondness for rhyme and rhythm was responsible for the preservation of a few records of travellings not in themselves as remarkable as the effusions for which they gave the occasion. Two of these were A Monumental Memorial of A Late Voyage from Boston in New-England To London, Anno 1683. In a Poem. By Richard Steere, and a broadside, A Journal of the Taking of Cape-Breton, Put into Metre By L. G., One of the Soldiers of the Expedition, in 1745.

The eighteenth century brought economic independence * See also Book I, Chap. v.