Nothing Material

Recently I wrote an entry about Patrick M’Robert’s tour of the northern British colonies in North America in 1774-75. I omitted how his account actually starts:

We met with nothing material on our passage; only a little girl of about nine years of age fell over board and was lost.

A Tour Through Part of the North Provinces

This morning I’m sharing a bit of travel literature: Patrick M’Robert’s A Tour Through Part of the North Provinces of America: Being, a Series of Letters Wrote on the Spot, in the Years 1774, & 1775, published in Edinburgh in 1776.

M’Robert planned to write a book on Britain’s North American colonies for prospective emigrants, but had the bad timing to arrive just before the Revolutionary War broke out. He had hoped to visit Boston in mid-1774, but with the port closed he went to Halifax instead. By the time M’Robert wrote his last letter, he had to acknowledge the war:

You may also be surprised that I say nothing of the unhappy contest now subsisting between this and the mother country: This I leave to politicians; but am afraid both parties will repent when too late their having launched so inconsiderately into it. When it will end, God only knows, I fear the ruin of one, if not of both countries.

Still, M’Robert does offer some useful advice for travelers, such as how to get service at a New England tavern:

They have been great adventurers in trade, and generally successful; they are very inquisitive, want to know every circumstance relating to any stranger that comes amongst them, so that a traveller lately in that country had been so pestered with their idle queries, that, as soon as he entered a tavern, he used to begin and tell them, he was such a one, telling his name, travelling to Boston, born in North Britain, aged about thirty, unmarried, prayed them not to trouble him with more questions but to get him something to eat: this generally had the desired effect.

And at the back of the book is this mileage chart for traveling by land to Boston from the city of New York, showing the distance between each town or stop and the next:

King’s-bridge — 15 miles
East Chester — 6
N. Rochell — 4
Rye — 5
Horse-neck — 6
Standford — 7
Norwalk — 10
Fairfield — 12
Stratford — 8
Milford — 4
New Haven — 10
Wallingford — 13
Durham — 7
M. [Middle]Town — 6
Weathers-field — 11
Hartford — 3
Windsor — 8
Enfield — 8
Springfield — 10
Kingston — 15
Western — 9
Brookfield — 6
Spencer — 8
Leicester — 6
Worcester — 6
Shrewsbury — 5
Marlborough — 10
Sudbury — 11
Water-town — 10
Boston — 10

Today I drive the reverse route, and beyond, so new postings might be spotty for the next week or so.