[January 30th marks the 150th anniversary of the English-language publication of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that book and other travel stories!]
On what a
unique American travel narrative helps us understand about the early 18th
century.
If you
haven’t taken an Early American Literature class or otherwise looked through an
American Lit anthology, I’m not sure how likely you are to have heard of Sarah
Kemble Knight and her five-month journey from Boston to New York in 1704-1705.
Because there are so few extant literary works (in any genre) from that
particular colonial period, Knight’s diary (or journal; it was private and
unpublished in her lifetime but rediscovered by New England luminary Theodore
Dwight and released in 1825 as The Journal of Mme Knight) of her journey
is frequently anthologized and taught (either in excerpts or in full), but I
don’t know how well-known it is beyond such textbooks and classrooms. Which is
a shame—partly because Knight, a
widow who had begun running a Boston boarding house after her
husband’s death in 1703, was clearly a unique and interesting woman, with a
sharp and funny voice and perspective that translate well to the pages of her
journal; but also because this unusual piece of early American travel writing
reveals a good deal about life in New England and America in the first decade
of the 18th century.
Some of
those revelations are seemingly straightforward but difficult to wrap our 21st
century heads around without the aid of texts like Knight’s. That’s especially
true of the single most striking detail about Knight’s journey: that it took
her and her guide five months to travel the 220 miles from Boston to New York. They
weren’t riding as if the devil were at their heels or anything, but that
stunningly extended length of time does reflect a number of significant
realities of early 18th century travel and America. There’s the poor
condition of even those few roads (like the Boston Post Road that was Knight’s
first thoroughfare) that did exist in the era; as Knight writes of one such
experience, “the Roads all along this way are very bad, Encumbered with Rocks
and mountainous passages, which were very disagreeable to my tired carcass.” Or
the very real dangers of crossing rivers during the period, whether on a ferry
as she does the Thames River (“the Boat tossed exceedingly, and our horses
capered at a very surprising Rate, and set us all in a fright”) or over a
bridge as she does in Dedham (“But in going over the Causeway at Dedham the
Bridge being overflowed by the high waters coming down I very narrowly escaped
falling over into the river Horse and all which ‘twas almost a miracle I did
not”). The incredible challenges of Knight’s trek make rush hour traffic on the
Merritt Parkway seem like nothing at all, no?
Knight’s
journal also reveals a good bit about the society and communities through which
that five-month journey takes her. On a number of occasions Knight is met with
incredulity that she is a single woman taking such a journey alone, as when she
writes, “I was Interrogated by a young Lady I understood afterwards was the
Eldest daughter of the family [with whom she is staying], with these, or words to
this purpose: what in the world brings You here at this time a night?—I never
see a woman on the Road so Dreadful late, in all the days of my versall [?]
life. Who are You? Where are You going?” Knight also offers her own
observations on the social worlds around her, and that progressive gender
identity does not free her from such stereotyping descriptions as this of
Native Americans she encounters: “There are every where in the Towns as I
passed, a Number of Indians the Natives of the Country, and are the most savage
of all the savages of that kind that I had ever Seen.” She does add, however,
that there has been “little or no care taken (as I heard upon enquiry) to make
them otherwise,” making clear that these American identities are a product of
collective bigotry at least as much as they are a reflection of Knight’s own
prejudices. Just a couple of the early 18th century realities and
histories that we can glimpse in this unique piece of colonial travel writing.
Next
travel story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Travel stories or writing you’d highlight?
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