Sarah Kemble Knight, 1666-1727.

Among the most interesting personal narratives of this period is the Journal of Sarah K. Knight, which contains a lively account of a journey from Boston to New York made by this adventurous lady in 1704. Madam Knight was thirty-eight years of age -- a native of Boston. She made the trip on horseback and was five days on the way between Boston and New Haven; the distance between New Haven and New York occupied two days. The story is eloquent of the inconvenience and peril to which colonial travelers were subject, but the charm of the narrative is due to the vivacious personality of its author, and to her abounding sense of humor which broadly illuminates the oddities of human nature encountered in the wilderness.

William Byrd, 1674-1744.

William Byrd became one of the most prominent and useful of those who served that colony at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was also its wittiest writer if not its most accomplished scholar. In 1729, his duties assigned him to an expedition which fixed the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina; and a narrative of this expedition Byrd wrote in the form of a journal. It was not until 1841, however, that the Westover manuscripts were published. “The History of the Dividing Line”, as its author called it, is a picturesque and racy account of an interesting experience. It was a laborious task -- this of running the line of division from a point on the coast six hundred miles westward through a country wild and almost unknown, and which traversed the Great Dismal Swamp. In the gayest of spirits, the journal records the daily experiences of the expedition, vivaciously describing the locality, with its denizens both wild and tame. An historical sketch of Virginia is included in the narrative wherein Byrd humorously sets off the shortcomings of the first colonists. Another journal entitled “A Progress to the Mines” contains the account of a trip taken in 1733.

Other historical books.

There was no lack of historical writings in the colonies during this period of their growth. A young Virginian, Robert Beverley, studying in London, was shown the text of a work upon the British Empire in America; and was so disturbed by its inaccuracies that he himself prepared a “History of Virginia” which was honest and readable. Beverley's history was published in London in 1705, and again, enlarged and revised, in 1722. Rev. William Stith (1689-1755) published in 1747 his first part of “The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia”, bringing his narrative down only to 1624. He never carried the work further. It is based directly upon "the excellent but confused materials" of Captain John Smith.

One other book dealing with a picturesque aspect of southern life at this time is worthy of notice; it was one entitled “The Sot Weed Factor”; or, a “Voyage to Maryland”, published at London in 1708. The name of its author, Ebenezer Cook, appears on the title-page, but of him we know nothing; he may have been an American, he may have been merely an English visitor to our shores; however, his work is a lively contribution to the literature of the period and presents in rough and ready rhyme a coarse but realistic satire of the writer's adventures among the tobacco agents -- the "sot-weed factors" of Maryland. He asserts his purpose to describe "the laws, governments, courts, and constitutions of the country, and also the buildings, feasts, frolics, entertainments, and drunken humors of the inhabitants."