Jasper Danckaerts Might Have Preferred a Horse

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A Labadist minister, Jasper Danckaerts, traveled from New Amsterdam to northern Maryland in December 1679 to assess the possibility of establishing a Labadist settlement in northeastern Maryland. Danckaerts and his companion traveled mainly on foot, but were very grateful for the few occasions when they had the opportunity to ride a horse, even if meant sharing one horse among three men.

In the journal that Danckaerts kept of his travels, he described the difficulties of crossing the region’s many creeks and rivers. On Monday the 4th of December, the group crossed the “creek, or Bohemia River, in a canoe.” [116] The following day, they were more fortunate, arriving at the court house on the Sassafras River, where a ferry carried them to the other side for a charge of one English shilling per man. Following the course of the river, they came to a small creek, “which runs very shallow over the strand into the river. Here we had to take off our shoes and stockings in order to cross over although it was piercing cold. We continued some distance further . . . to the Great Bay (the Chesapeake) when we came to another creek and called out to be taken across, which was done.” [116]

“The next morning we crossed a creek, and were shown the way to another plantation, where would be set over still another [creek]. . . . The people excused themselves from taking us over, saying that their canoe was not at home, and sent us to another plantation on the right. We crossed there [and went] a long distance along the road until we reached a plantation . . . where no one was at home except a woman, who nevertheless lent us a canoe with which we might not only cross over, but go a considerable distance down the creek, trusting her canoe to us.” [117]
At a later crossing, Danckaerts and his party reached the bank of the creek as another traveler was already crossing in a canoe. Fortunately for Danckaerts there was a second canoe, in which he and his companion crossed, giving the canoe to a woman waiting on the other shore who paddled it back across the creek.

On Danckaerts’s return trip, the ferry at the Sassafras courthouse proved not be as accommodating as he’d found it on his first encounter. “We wished to be put across the Sassafras River here, but could not accomplish it, although we were upon the bank of the river. We were directed to the ferry at the court house, . . . where we arrived about two o’clock and called over to them to come and take us over. Although the weather was perfectly still and they could easily hear us, we were not taken over, though we continued calling out to them until sundown.” [124]

One of Danckaert’s final crossings involved enlisting the help of an enterprising indentured servant. “We therefore promised this servant if he would put us across we would give him the money, which we would otherwise have had to pay at the ferry. The master made some objections on account of the servant’s work and the distance from the river, and also because they had no canoe.” One would think any of these objections would be a serious obstacle to the plan, but apparently not. “The servant satisfied him on these points, and he [the master] consented. We breakfasted on what we could get, not knowing how or where we would obtain anything again. We three, accordingly, went about two miles to the strand, where we found a canoe, but it was almost entirely full of water, and what was the worst of it, we had nothing with which to bale it out. However, by one means and another we emptied it and launched the canoe. We stepped in and paddled over the river to a plantation of a Mr. Frisby.” [126]

What can we learn from Danckaerts’s account of his journey that sheds light on the use of horses for personal travel in seventeenth-century Maryland? Had the party been traveling on horseback, it would not have been able to use the many crossings where canoes carried the men from one side of the creek to another. But these journeys by canoe, as the above excerpts show, were not without their own complications: no canoe at a convenient crossing point could mean a long detour in search of another; a crossing too shallow for a canoe meant wading across frigid winter streams; canoes could leak or be so weighted down by their passengers as to have little margin of safety. On horseback, the party could have made faster use of the ferries available (assuming the ferry hands wished to heed their summons, but that was a hazard whether on foot or horseback) and could traverse creeks at natural fords or shallow headwaters, options that required no more of a detour than did the hunt for a canoe and would take far less time using horsepower than to find the canoe on foot.

The journal of Jasper Danckaerts is available online at http://books.google.com/books?id=_cgBAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=journal+of+jasper&hl=en&ei=VwT1TOG5FsL78Abw5dXTBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
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