An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, Made During the Years 1638, 1663 — Edition Insights

A Voice Between Logbook and Natural History

Josselyn's prose shifts abruptly between technical detail and anecdote. In the voyage narratives, he notes the ship's trim—"the Ships trine a foot by the stern"—and the dates of landfall with a mariner's precision. But when describing New England's flora and fauna, his sentences lengthen, accumulating observations like specimens: the moose that "breaks it quite asunder with one stroak" of its hoof. The editor's bracketed queries—"trim?" and "leagues?"—hint at places where Josselyn's vocabulary or handwriting puzzled even his nineteenth-century revisers. These small uncertainties underscore the text's status as a living document, not a polished literary artifact.

The Ethnographer's Uneven Gaze

Josselyn's account of Native Americans mixes genuine curiosity with the assumptions of his era. He records that the Indians "will Prognosticate shrewdly what weather will fall out" and describes their hunting methods in vivid, almost epic prose: the moose "sinks and falls down like a ruined building, making the Earth to quake." Yet he also dismisses their astronomical knowledge and notes their adoption of English fiddles with a tone of mild surprise. The passage on Indian poetry—"the last word of a line riming with the last word of the following line"—shows him applying classical metrics (Constare ex pedibus) to oral tradition. These moments reveal a writer struggling to fit unfamiliar practices into European frames, a tension that gives the ethnography its particular texture.

Pace and the Texture of Time

The two voyages, separated by twenty-five years, create a natural diptych. The 1638 journey finds Boston "rather a village than a town, there being not above twenty or thirty houses"; by 1663 it is a "flourishing seaport." Josselyn does not explicitly comment on this transformation, but the juxtaposition is telling. His narrative pace mirrors the change: the earlier voyage lingers on first impressions, while the later one moves more briskly, as if the author now knows what to look for. The editor's decision to embed the original page numbers allows readers to sense where Josselyn himself paused—where a new page begins mid-sentence, mid-thought. These typographical ghosts of the 1674 edition become a kind of rhythmic notation.

Readers approaching this edition should attend to what is not said as much as to what is. Josselyn's silences—about his own motives, about the English settlers' impact on the land—are as telling as his catalogues. The 1865 reprint, with its careful preservation of seventeenth-century typography, offers a rare chance to watch a colonial observer at work, his prose as uneven and revealing as the coastline he described.

Reading John Josselyn's sailorly voice, preserved with its odd old spellings, I felt a strange kinship with another traveler's journal. His careful notes on unfamiliar plants and peoples echo in the matter-of-fact observations of a later expedition, which I found waiting for me in James's Account of S. H. Long's Expedition, 1819-1820, part 3 — Reading Companion. Two centuries apart, yet the same patient wonder at a new land.