Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLON IAL SOUTH '
back to the Eastern Shore, and again to the Potomac in most successful
beaver trade with the Indians. Interpreters, Captain John Utie, the young
musician of the preceding chapter, and the writer's captivity among the
Indians all have some part in his fairly objective journal. There may have
been a degree of promotional design in its composition, but as it was not
published until the nineteenth century this seems doubtful. It is the narra­
tive of a reasonably well-educated man, allegedly a cousin of Sir Francis
Wyatt. It may be the rewriting for the general reader of a ship's log.21 In a
somewhat parallel journal Richard Burgess, master of the Maryland Merchant,
described in the year 1699 the renowned pirate, Captain Kidd.22
Then there are scattered entries from the journal of Abigail Langley
of Nansemond County, Virginia, in a Tennessee-owned (in 1946) manu­
script.23 And not quite a penitential autobiography is the 1680 Londonprinted
The Vain Prodigal Life and Tragical Penitent Death of Thomas
Hellier Born at Whitechurch near Lyme in Dorset-Shire; Who for Murdering
his Master, Mistress, and a Maid was Executed according to Law at
Westover in Charles City in the Country of Virginia, near the Plantation
called Hard Labour, where he perpetrated the said Murders. He Su/Jer'd on
Monday the 5th of August, 1678 . . . . Perhaps written by a local clergyman
from the murderer's account, this is a first-person confession, a sort of auto­
biography followed by a sermonlike application, "For, each Example is a
Looking-glass, / In which we may behold (each man his face)." The
address "to the Reader" is in couplets pointing out the obvious moral be­
hind such a relation, or confession.
In the seventeenth century the remaining journals written in the South
were by religious sectarians reflecting something of the experiences and
spiritual quests and questionings of several Quakers and a Puritan, with
one 1704 autobiographical narrative by the Reverend John Blair, Anglican
missionary to North Carolina, and of his religious labor in that colony. John
Burnyeat, George Fox, William Edmundson, and Thomas Story were all
dedicated missionaries of the Society of Friends who published the ac­
counts of their trials, travels, and tribulations in the American colonies.
Though most of these men were legally based in the Quaker colony of
Pennsylvania, it is the story of their adventures in bringing light to the
Gentiles of the Chesapeake and Carolina (and New England) colonies
which remains good reading. Each has left a highly interesting account of
his instruction and conversion of the unchurched or of the Puritan or
Anglican. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, left his greatest impact
in the southern provinces as elsewhere, though his] ournal (London, 1694)
is no more entertaining than Burnyeat's The Truth Exalted (London,
1691) or the later-published accounts of Edmundson and Story.24 Fred­
erick B. Tolles, distinguished Quaker historian, could be summarizing the
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