Observations of the Indians from Jasper Danckaerts's Journal, 1679-1680

Abstract

JASPER Danckaerts's Journal of a Voyage to New York and a Tour in Several of the American Colonies in 1679-80, byJaspar Dankers and Peter Sluyter is an indispensable source for the history of the Middle Atlantic colonies. The writer was a Labadist agent who came to America with Peter Sluyter to find land for a colony for their oppressed religious order. The two men traveled extensively through New York, NewJersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Massachusetts. A meticulous diarist, Danckaerts recorded detailed accounts of the social, political, economic, geographic, and environmental conditions he encountered during the journey. He was fascinated by Indians, and his journal contains numerous descriptions of native life, including a previously untranslated set of general observations that appears here for the first time. The journal has an interesting history. Its eighteenth-century handwriting style, lack of editorial emendation, and conversational narrative form indicate that Danckaerts dictated much of it to an unidentified scribe late in life. The manuscript remained unknown until i 864, when Henry Cruse Murphy, a prominent Brooklyn politician who was then the American minister to the Netherlands, obtained it from an Amsterdam bookseller. After translating and editing it, Murphy arranged for publication by the Brooklyn Historical Society (then the Long Island Historical Society) in i867.1 Several printings of this edition, as well as a minor editorial revision completed in I9I 3, have since been published.2 Acquired by the