Quaker Bibliographical Notes

QUAKER BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES83 QUAKER BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES By Henry J. Cadbury 1. Willem Sewel In a popular review (Friends' Intelligencer) of William I. Hull's Willem Sewel of Amsterdam I failed to mention two features of special delight to the bibliographically minded, the accurate index and the "Chronological List of Willem Sewel's Published Writings and Translations." The latter is not only much more complete than Joseph Smith's list, but even than the excellent and recent (1933) bibliography by R. Zuidema in the Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, Vol. IX, 1933. It is appropriate now to call attention to this feature of Dr. Hull's work and to add an item of no small interest which he overlooked. Though Willem Sewel evidently had less sympathy and interest in Dutch Quaker migration to America than many, one exciting narrative of adventure by some English Quaker emigrants can claim him as translator. This is Jonathan Dickenson 's God's Protecting Providence, a story not particularly Quakerish or edifying, but a remarkable and gruesome tale of shipwreck on the Florida coast and of painful travel through unfriendly Indian villages to St. Augustine. The title of Sewel's translation is: Ongelukkige|Schipbreuk|en Yslyke|Reystogt,|van etlyke Engelschen , in den Jaare 1696 van|Jamaika|in West Indien, na| Pensylvania|t'scheep gegaan, en in de Golf van Florida de-| strand, alwaar zy onder de menschenëeters|vervielen, en byna ongelooflyke weder-|waerdigheden uytstonden.| In't Engelsch beschreeven door|Jonathan Dickenson,| eenen van de reyzigers. En daaruyt vertaald door|W. Sewel.| . . . |Te Leyden,|By Pieter van der Aa . . .| The translation by Sewel has many features not in the original . For some of these the energetic publisher van der Aa may be responsible, such as an elaborate map of the Atlantic seaboard and the West Indies and three folding plates showing in Quaker, Spanish, and Indian garb some of the more critical events in the story. This is also the only edition of the work which I have seen that has an index. But Sewel himself con- 84 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION tributes by way of prolog a sixty-line poem calling the reader's attention to the pathos of the story. His versifying inclination of course is known to us from other sources. This, the first Dutch edition, is without date. I would suppose it was soon after the book's appearance in English, at any rate before 1706, for the work was included in that great collection of voyages of the same van der Aa entitled Naaukeurige Versameling. In this form new editions followed—listed in P. A. Tide's Nederlandsche bibliographie van land- en volkenkunde (Amsterdam, 1884), pp. 2-6. Copies of Sewel's work in various editions will be found in the following American libraries : New York Public Library, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library of Congress , John Carter Brown Library (Providence), De Renne Georgia Library (Savannah), Newberry Library (Chicago), Howard University Library. The map was published in folio by van der Aa with a French notation. Two different editions of it are known to me, but whether it ever accompanied a French translation of the book I do not know. I think probably it belongs to his collection of maps only. For a German translation see below. 2. Jonathan Dickenson (or Dickinson) Jonathan Dickenson's book, God's Protecting Providence, itself has had an interesting history in English. First published in Philadelphia in 1699, it is one of the earliest if not the earliest of the many accounts of captivity among the American Indians. A list of books on this subject in the Newberry Library in Chicago published in 1912 with a supplement in 1928 runs to nearly 500 titles or editions. Dickenson's work may never have had as much influence on English literature as the Quaker description of Florida by William Bartram, published nearly a century later. It catered to the taste for adventure and suffering rather than that for sensuous description of nature and the idealization of primitvism in the American Indian. But it had a much wider reading than Bartram, if we may judge by its numerous editions. As neither Smith's Catalogue nor any other list that...