Jasper Danckaerts
Jasper Danckaerts (7 May 1639, in Vlissingen – 1702/04, in Middelburg) was the founder of a colony of Labadists along the Bohemia River in what is now the US state of Maryland. He is known for his journal, kept while traveling through the territory which had previously been part of the New Netherland.[1] Documenting his journey in 1679–1680, it offers a description of the landscape and the lifestyle of inhabitants of the region in the late 17th century.
The diary journals the travels of Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter (1645 in
The original Dutch manuscript was acquired in 1864 by Henry C. Murphy, then corresponding secretary of the Long Island Historical Society, in an old book-store in Amsterdam. Murphy published an English translation in 1867. A revised edition appeared as Original Narratives of Early American History, edited by J. B. Bartlett of the Maryland Historical Society and J. F. Jameson, director of the Department of Historical Research in the Carnegie Institutions of Washington in 1913.[3]
Danckaert and Sluyter returned to Europe on July 23, 1680, and came back the same year with the people who would form the colony. Danckaert then went to the settlement of La Providence in
References
- ^ a b Danckaerts, Jasper (1679–1680), Journal of Jasper Danckaerts
- ^
Nead (1980). The Pennsylvania-German in the Settlement of Maryland. Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc. ISBN 978-0-8063-0678-0.
- ^ Project Gutenberg etext of the 1913 edition