Dear Linda, dear Jon There is a penalty for burying one’s ‘discoveries’ in a monograph about a diary that appears to busy people to be unlikely to look beyond the crazy household of the diarist. One’s ‘discovery’ is buried! There is – as there needed to be – a chapter in my “Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom” on the Stamp Act. In that chapter I ‘blew the whistle’ on the so-called “French Traveller” – see pages 169 – 173. The minute I gave serious attention to the journal, & saw that it was not in French (ever), I smelled a rat. Why would a Frenchman write to his own government in idiomatic English? There are many give-aways as to another identity. But one is very strong & clear. Jon begins his resumé of the traveler’s itinerary upon his entry to VA on April 16 – but the biggest clue comes a little before: “March 18: Had my St Patrick’s Day dinner….” So, I wrote my ‘discovery’ into “Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom.” But the story becomes more complicated. I then was working with Cary Carson & others in Linda’s CW department on what we called the “Big Book of Williamsburg” (BBoW). I wrote a draft making the pitch that at Williamsburg on May 30, 1765 the American Revolution really was launched with Patrick Henry’s call for defiance. That was a tilt at Morgan’s belittlement of Henry (he can’t resist doing that to Virginia, can he?). It also entailed further close review of the eye-witness source. I even thought CW might have to fund a trip by me to Paris – but actually the Rockefeller Library has a quite serviceable set of photographs of the French Archives original. We got intent. Jim Horn (who was on the BBoW team) had members of the library staff run traces to find our wild Irishman – to no avail, though the diary shows him in correspondence with quite a few prominent people. Then, a student at W&M with whom I was working and who is doing his dissertation on the Stamp Act, wrote to inform me that he’d made the fit – and indeed it seemed he had. Except that the traveler he’d found who’d been around & seen the people named in the diary was not Irish but Scottish and only possibly Jacobite. So far as I know Joshua Beatty has not published his ‘discovery,’ and he’s moved to Pittsburgh, where he’s doing librarian training, and he’s stopped sending me the drafts he should be sending of the dissertation. For an account of his discovery – if he wants to share it – you must write to him at: [log in to unmask] I don’t know what Jon’s current interest in this neglected VA-history enigma is, but if he is not satisfied with the Isaac published declaration in “Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom,” I will send him my unpublished essay on the whole episode written for BBoW – which has been set aside while a now-retired Cary does other things. If as a consequence Jon twists my arm to publish the thing in some visible place, that too will be good. This retired old gaffer needs his arm twisted! As you both can see, you’ve pushed one of my buttons, and look what came out! Yours -- still a devotee of Virginia history Rhys -----Original Message----- From: Rowe, Linda [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wed 10/02/2010 1:43 AM To: Rhys Isaac Subject: FW: [VA-HIST] Identify of the "French Traveler" who visited VA in 1765 fyi Hope you and yours are well. Linda Linda Rowe Department of Training and Historical Research Colonial Williamsburg Foundation -----Original Message----- From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jon Kukla Sent: Monday, February 08, 2010 7:06 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [VA-HIST] Identify of the "French Traveler" who visited VA in 1765 I'm wondering whether anyone has made progress in the past nine decades in identifying a "French Traveler" diarist who visited the Virginia and other colonies in 1765. Details below. Jon Kukla Historians have long been familiar with the "Journal of a French Traveller in the Colonies, 1765," published in the American Historical Review (26 [July 1921]: 726-747 and 27 [October 1921]: 70-89) from a manuscript in the Archives Nationales. The author was unknown - more on that below - but the diarist's notes about Patrick Henry's "Caesar-Brutus" Stamp-Act speech were brought to wider audiences by Samuel Eliot Morison and Edmund S. Morgan and have frequently been republished. The extant diary begins in Jamaica on December 4, 1764, and ends in Philadelphia on September 7, 1765. The diarist apparently left the colonies late in October 1765. The AHR Editor identifies the diarist as "a Catholic, and apparently a Frenchman, indeed apparently an agent of the French government," otherwise unidentified except that from other evidence in the French archives "he was not M. de Pontleroy, whom Choiseul sent over to inspect the colonies in 1764." From the details of the situations and people mentioned, it is pretty clear that the diarist was male (something the AHR editors also presumed) and obvious that he enjoyed entré to officialdom and well-connected introductions to gentry society in his travels. Focusing especially on the persons and places mentioned in the diary, I have looked through the extant issues of the Virginia and Maryland Gazettes (but not PA, NJ or NY papers); many contemporary Virginia and some Maryland published sources such as Jack Greene's Landon Carter's diary, Ron Hoffman et al's Charles Carroll of Carrollton papers, etc. And I've tried a slew of full-text searches in JSTOR for persons mentioned in the May-October portion of the diary (recognizing that although JSTOR now includes VMHB and PMHB articles it does not yet access Maryland or New Jersey historical journals.) In short, I've done my homework in the primary sources within my reach. So, in the hope that someone may have already identified the diarist or stumbled upon some clue to "his" identity in other letters, newspapers, diaries or whatever, I've compiled a succinct chronology/itinerary from mid April 1765 through early September 1765. This covers the diarist's travels from the North Carolina/Virginia line northward to New York and Philadelphia. I've mentioned only a few of the most prominent people mentioned in the text. The full text of the diary has many more - especially during his stays in Annapolis and Philadelphia, and is available in the June and September 1921 numbers of the AHR. CHRONOLOGICAL ITINERARY After traveling in North Carolina the diarist entered Virginia in mid April 1765: April 16: Suffolk VA April 17-19: Portsmouth VA April 20-24: Norfolk VA April 24: Hampton and York[town] VA April 25-May 14: Williamsburg VA April 28: Visits Jamestown VA May 14-15: Travels from Williamsburg to Norfolk VA May 16-29: Norfolk VA May 19: Visits Portsmouth VA May 29: Norfolk to Hampton to York[town] VA May 30-June 5: Williamsburg VA June 5: Chiswell's Ordinary and New Kent County VA June 6-27: New Castle in Hanover County VA June 7: Todd's Bridge (now Aylett) VA June 8: Port Royal VA June 9-11: Port Tobacco MD June 11: Melwood Plantation near Piscataway MD June 12: Upper Marlborough MD June 13-18: Annapolis MD June 19-20: Tulip Hill plantation (Galloway family) MD June 21: Annapolis MD June 22: White Hall plantation (Lt. Gov. Horatio Sharpe) MD June 23-25: Baltimore MD June 25: Annapolis MD June 26: Visits [Upper] Marlborough Court MD June 27-July 1: Tulip Hill MD July 1-16: Annapolis MD July 20-23: White Hall plantation (Lt. Gov. Horatio Sharpe) MD July 23-26: Annapolis MD July 26: Church Hill MD July 27: Frederick[town] and Georgetown MD July 28: New Castle MD July 29: Chester MD and Philadelphia PA July 29-August 20: Philadelphia PA August 5: Visits Germantown PA August 7: Visits falls of the Schuylkill August 10: Dines with Lt. Gov. John Penn August 12: Visits Rev. Robert Harding SJ at Catholic Mission August 20: Departs Philadelphia for New York August 21: [Perth] Amboy NJ August 22-26: Staten Island and New York NY August 26: Long Island NY August 27-Sept 3: Returns to New York NY August 27: Dines with Gen. Thomas Gage and Mrs. Gage September 3: Sleeps at Woodbridge NJ en route to Philadelphia September 4: Brunswick, Princeton, and Trenton NJ September 5-October: Back in Philadelphia PA September 6: Dines with Lt. Gov. John Penn September 7: Final dated entry. September 7: Dines with PA Attorney General Andrew Allen Late October 1765: Diarist returns to Europe. -- -- Jon Kukla www.JonKukla.com Online interview : http://www.virginiavoice.org/celebrity.html ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html