Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLON IAL SOUTH '
He inveighs against "Slavery, thou worst and greatest of Evils!" and
he intersperses his prose with verse, sometimes his own, but including
several lines by Maryland poet Richard Lewis. He found the older colonial
gentlemen much more agreeable companions than the younger,
for the former appeared to share Kimber's interest in learning and education.
He concludes this section with the observation, "An universal
Mirth and Glee reigns in Maryland, amongst all Ranks of People, and
at set Times, nothing but Jollity and Feasting goes forward."
Kimber actually began the published "Itinerant Observations" with a
description of Georgia, and much of our knowledge of the appearance
of that new colony in the 1740S comes from his account. Plantations,
crops, tabby-material in building, the island and lower-Georgia settlements
are described as he proceeds in his travels. Whitefield's Orphan
House and the city of Savannah are depicted and commented upon with
shrewd discernment. After the Georgia tour he moved up the coast to
Beaufort, South Carolina. Then followed in the London Magazine the
Maryland section, his longest.
He continued into Virginia, where he found the two Eastern Shore
counties with more frequent plantations and better roads than he had
seen in Maryland, and many signs of greater wealth. He says inhabitants
of the western shore call the Eastern Shoremen Buckskins, "which is,
all over Virginia, as great a Reproach, as in England, to call a man Oaf,
or Clown, or Lubberkin." Yet Kimber found the people of the peninsula
kind and hospitable.
After an almost fatal mishap, the traveler reached the western shore
and burst into rhapsody over the richness and beauty of the country. Landing
at Yorktown, he describes that village before proceeding to Williamsburg,
which capital did not impress him. All together he gives the
Virginia Tidewater scant attention, but hurries on to a ship which is
bound for Frederica in Georgia and takes the reader back to the first
published installment noticed above, which was on the new colony.
Kimber's two journals have been worked over so that whatever dailyentry
quality they may originally have had is now a rather smooth narrative.
Apparently from his first landing in Maryland, he established empathy
with southern colonials, even enough to have known and quoted a Maryland
poet's work. He saw the Chesapeake country and Georgia as a
potential Arcadia, and he may have preferred Georgia because it had begun
with a prohibition against slavery, which he had detested from the
beginning.172
Certainly the most urbane and delightful of Maryland colonial travel
journals is the Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton discussed to some
extent under "Satire" above. This was in form an orthodox journal, with