Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680

Two members of the Labadist sect, travelling under false names, left Amsterdam on 8 June 1679 aboard the small flute-ship Charles, sent to find land in America where their Protestant community could settle. Jasper Danckaerts kept the diary, and Peter Sluyter went with him. It records the boredom and fright of the crossing, then New York five years back under English rule, the Dutch farms and villages of Long Island, and hard overland weeks through New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. In Boston the following summer they called on the missionary John Eliot and came away distinctly unimpressed by Harvard College. The manuscript vanished for almost two centuries, until Henry C. Murphy came across it in an Amsterdam bookshop in 1864. Little else from the middle colonies is this plain-spoken about daily life.