Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature,
Principally Belletristic .
southern daily life and thinking, and some possess intrinsic literary merit.
As early as 1705-1706 an unknown traveler from Plymouth in Eng­
land to Maryland kept a record of his voyage and of the Maryland scene.
In the colony he describes governor and Council, Indians, and fauna and
flora. He boasts, "I have killed a turkie my selfe that has wheyed 43
Pounds out of the ffeathers and his Gutts out," and he caught partridges
simply by shutting the tobacco-barn door. He recounts tales of bear killing
and of snakes and one of the effects (on an Eastern Shore innkeeper ) of
eating a rattlesnake. This is in journal form and apparently was not
published until 1907 .17 0
The popular Life and Adventures of Bampfylde Moore-Care'llJ, Commonly
Called the King of the Beggars is much concerned with Maryland,
where he was an indentured servant in Talbot County. This is travel account
and promotion pamphlet and journal all in one, as are several
others, though the promotion quality seems minimal here. Factual and
anecdotal, the vagrant's account includes long descriptions of individuals,
of the Indians, of agriculture including corn and tobacco culture, and of
the natural produce of the country. He even goes into the Pocahontas­
Rolfe story and tells of Whitefield in Philadelphia. The style is mock­
heroic, and the book actually belongs with the rogue literature so frequent
in the earlier eighteenth century.l71
Edward Kimber (17 19-1769 ), who traveled and wrote in and about
the southern colonies in novels, poems, and journals, is best remembered
for the last, for in them he gave valuable detailed accounts of various
provinces from Maryland to Georgia. Edward was the son of the Reverend
Isaac Kimber, editor of the London Magazine from 1732 to 1755.
Of Edward's two journals, A Relation or Journal of a Late Expedition
to the Gates of St. Augustine in Florida (London, 1744 ) is an account
of Oglethorpe's unsuccessful expedition, and "Itinerant Observations in
America," originally published serially in the London Magazine in 1 7 45-
1746, concerns the several colonies he "visited."
Although his style is flamboyant and journalistic, Kimber had a sense
of the dramatic aspects of life in the colonies and managed to capture
them frequently in these journals. The Maryland portion of the second,
beginning with a voyage from New York to Sinepuxent, reminds one
both of Colonel Norwood's seventeenth-century narrative of his voyage
to the Chesapeake and of the manner and content of Poe's Narrative of
A. Gordon Pym. Shipwreck, storm, inadequate food, a cargo of Negroes,
all conclude in a safe landing, though several of the narrator's cabin
mates had died during the hardships of the voyage. Everywhere as he
journeys on land Kimber makes pungent observations on wretched slaves
and the slave trade, the opulent planters, and the beautiful countryside.
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