Hamilton's Itinerarium : being a narrative of a journey from Annapolis, Maryland, through Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, from May to September, 1744 / by Doctor Alexander Hamilton; edited by Albert Bushnell Hart.

  • Hamilton, Alexander, 1712-1756.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Hamilton's Itinerarium : being a narrative of a journey from Annapolis, Maryland, through Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, from May to September, 1744 / by Doctor Alexander Hamilton; edited by Albert Bushnell Hart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    him where he came from, he replies that he is from “Calliphurnia,” presumably a reference to the old romance from which the name California was taken. He was one of the first to notice that the low tide in Boston Harbor “left a very stinking puddle.” He notes the use of the word “guns,” meaning pis- tols, a phrase supposed to be of much later frontier origin. He makes note of the existence of a “state room” in the Castle in Boston Harbor. At New- port he goes “to a windmill near the town to look out for vessels,” perhaps the so-called Norse Tower. Contrary to the accepted science of his time, he has glimpses of the Darwinian theory of development: “The progress of Nature is surprising in many such instances. She seems by one connected gradation to pass from one species of creatures to another, without any visible gap, interval, or discontinuum in her works.” He falls in with a “comical, old, whim- sical fellow,” who “talks much of cutting the Amer- ican isthmus in two, so to make a short passage to the south seas; and if the powers of Europe cannot agree about it, he says he knows how to make a machine with little expense, by the help of which ships may be dragged over that narrow neck of land with all the ease imaginable, it being but a trifle above ioo miles.” He notices the New England twang of a horse jockey, who would not sell “the jade for ioo peaunds.” He predicts for Philadel- phia “that in a few years hence, it will be a great and flourishing place, and the chief city in North America,” a prediction which half a century later came true. After all, these are the accidental parts of Ham- ilton’s Itinerarium. His accounts of the incidents XXlll