author
Jasper Danckaerts
b. 1639
A Dutch traveler and Labadist missionary, he left behind one of the clearest firsthand accounts of colonial New York and the mid-Atlantic in the late 1600s. His journal turns a scouting mission for a religious settlement into a vivid record of landscapes, towns, and everyday life in early America.
1 Audiobook
Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680
by Jasper Danckaerts
About the author
Born on May 7, 1639, in Vlissingen in the Dutch Republic, Jasper Danckaerts was a member of the Labadists, a Protestant religious community that sought a stricter and more communal Christian life. He later became closely associated with the group’s efforts to establish a colony in North America, especially along the Bohemia River in what is now Maryland.
Danckaerts is best known for the journal he kept during a journey to North America in 1679–1680. Traveling with Peter Sluyter, he explored former Dutch and English colonial settlements while looking for a suitable place for a Labadist community. The journal is valued today for its detailed observations of New Netherland, New York, the Chesapeake region, and the people he encountered there.
He appears to have died in Middelburg sometime between 1702 and 1704. Although little is known about his life compared with the survival of his writings, his travel journal remains an important source for readers interested in colonial America, religious migration, and seventeenth-century Dutch perspectives on the New World.