Journal of Jasper Danckaerts

June 1679. Two Labadist brothers leave a village in Friesland on a mission kept secret: to find, on the far side of the ocean, a land where their community can live out its faith. One of them, Jasper Danckaerts, keeps his journal day after day.

What he records there is priceless. Here is the New York of 1679, only just turned English, still thoroughly Dutch: its fort, its orchards, its muddy streets, its taverns full of sailors. Here are the farms of Long Island, the Lenapes of Najack sharing their cornmeal cake, the tobacco planters of Maryland, the Passaic Falls locked in ice. Here is the Hudson followed upstream to Albany, the fur trade, the mixed-blood interpreter Illetie, and the stories of a converted Mohawk. Here is Puritan Boston, and the long voyage home across the North Atlantic.

Danckaerts almost never judges. He watches. And his sober, attentive gaze crosses the centuries intact: this is colonial America captured at the moment when its world still stood, seen by a witness from elsewhere who did not know he was writing History.

Danckaerts and Sluyter travel under false names, as ordinary men. That may be what gives their account its rare quality: doors open, tongues loosen. Over sixteen months on the road, they cross Manhattan, New Jersey, Delaware, the tobacco plantations of Maryland, follow the Hudson up to Albany and Schenectady, reach Boston and its fledgling colleges, then sail home to Holland by way of the North Atlantic and the Orkneys. Danckaerts describes an America soon to vanish beneath the English tide: he observes the Lenapes while they are still on their own land, listens to a converted Mohawk recount his visions, and crosses paths with Illetie, the mixed-blood woman who interprets at the fur trading post. This notebook lay dormant for nearly two centuries before it was found by chance in an Amsterdam bookshop. It had never before been made accessible to the English-speaking reader.

This is the first complete modern rewriting for today's reader, one that makes this testimony accessible without betraying anything of the original. Nineteen original illustrations and eight maps of the journey bring the route to life, while a full critical apparatus (timeline, index, afterword, selected passages from the original text, editor's note, further reading) illuminates the reading.