‘A Strict Journal of All the Passages’: John Lawson’s "New Voyage to Carolina" and the Importance of Mobility

Abstract

In colonial British America ‘travel writing’ found its way into many different literary genres: religious tracts, scientific accounts, and political or promotional writings, often written to make settlement attractive. Travel writing was also often devoted to mapping and describing landscapes for future travellers or settlers. Whatever its genre, however, early American travel writing is unquestionably a form that makes manifest by implication the actual mobility of the travellers themselves and the need for continued and future mobility. This paper will examine this issue in A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), by British travel writer John Lawson (1674–1711) as little attention has so far been paid to the rhetoric of his implicit assumptions about mobility and the importance of emigration. In this post-colonial context, then, this paper argues that A New Voyage stands as a substantial piece of colonial travel writing, one of whose basic, underlying themes is the importance of freedom of movement, both individual and collective. Lawson’s own experience bears this out insofar as, in addition to his travels, he was himself instrumental in the founding of two early eighteenth-century towns in North Carolina, Bath and New Bern, the latter a community of about 300 Palatine and Swiss emigrants.