active 1630-1675 John Josselyn

Little is known for certain about his life, but John Josselyn was an English visitor to New England in the seventeenth century, with documented activity from the 1630s to the 1670s. He traveled to the region more than once, including visits connected to his brother Henry Josselyn in what is now Maine, and later wrote about the landscape, wildlife, plants, and daily colonial life he encountered.

He is best remembered for New-England's Rarities Discovered and An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, works that helped preserve some of the earliest extended English descriptions of the region's natural world. His writing is often lively and detailed, though it also repeats hearsay and marvelous stories that modern readers should treat with caution.

That mix of observation and credulity is part of what makes him interesting today. For readers of travel writing, early American history, and the history of science, his books offer a vivid window into how seventeenth-century English visitors tried to understand a place that still felt strange and new to them.