Travellers and the Colonial Scene

Between 1700 and the outbreak of the Revolution over 800 travellers left accounts of their American experiences. After 1750 the value and variety of their information increases considerably as colonial society develops and matures, while opportunity and interest grows in the observation of a scene marked by its diversity and rapidity of change. Travel had become easier and journeys more ambitious. When in 1708, Dame Knight ventured overland from Boston to New York her trip proved difficult and unusual, and her comments on the standards of hospitality she encountered were blistering. By the 1760s travellers found that the journey from Virginia to Maine presented no enormous problems. Taverns might be dirty and inadequate, ferries could prove expensive and temperamental, but the discomforts to be endured were limited to occasional misfortunes of this kind. Further south, it was true, the roads deteriorated sharply, particularly along the less used route between North and South Carolina. Here horses were difficult to obtain, and a guide was advisable, or at least a compass. Inland in New England the road between Boston and Albany was new and presented some difficulties, but despite this a commissioner of customs and his wife were able, in 1772, to travel by coach from Boston to Canada and back. As travel became less of an adventure, diaries and letters dwell increasingly on picturesque detail rather than practical hazards; there was security and leisure to admire scenery, for which the highest term of praise was ‘romantic’, and to linger in cities whose buildings and social life could be considered truly ‘elegant’.