I just started reading Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America. In 1747, Kalm was sent by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to find and bring back plants from the new world which could be cultivated in the cold Swedish climate. He took advantage of his opportunity to observe and document almost every aspect of his travels throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Canada. As a result, his book reads a lot like an 18th century blog with a wonderful hodge podge of descriptions and facts about colonial America. Since there’s no central narrative Kalm is free to talk about Indian burial rites in one passage and then switch to the price of firewood in Philadelphia and the reader, if they so choose, may open the book and read at random.
Perhaps because he wasn’t on a specific government mission like Lewis and Clark (and wasn’t crazy as a bedbug like Lewis) I am finding Kalm’s work more interesting. He seemed to approach his travels as an opportunity to describe America to a readership back in Europe that still knew virtually nothing about the land or the people (including, perhaps, many former countrymen) and so needed descriptions about virtually everything.
It also provides a glimpse about European (or at least Scandinavian) perceptions about life in the mid-18th century. For example:
[Americans] do not attain to such an age as the Europeans, and it is an almost unheard of thing that a person born in this country lives to be eighty or ninety years of age.
How long were Europeans living in 1750s? I was always under the impression that life expectancy was rather short. Apparently all those old geezers were getting busy as well…
[American] women cease bearing children sooner than in Europe. They seldom or never have children after they are forty or forty-five years old and some leave off in their thirties.
Wow…apparently the biological clock was ticking much slower back then.
