Title: Shipwreck and Survival in Seventeenth-Century Florida: Rediscovering Jonathan Dickinson's Journal and God's Protecting Providence
Join us for a lecture with Dr. Jason Daniels (Assistant Professor of History at California State University, East Bay) as he explores his new book, Jonathan Dickinson's Journal or God's Protecting Providence: An Early American Castaway Narrative. God’s Protecting Providence, better known as “Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal,” is a firsthand account of the 1696 wreck of the ship Reformation near Jupiter Inlet, Florida. The Indigenous peoples through whose territories the captive castaways passed protected them from famine and flood, and the peoples of Spanish Florida helped them on their journey up the east coast to St. Augustine and Charles Town. First published in 1699, the narrative has become a valuable resource for historians, archaeologists, and ethnographers. Looking through the Loudoun Mansion (Germantown) Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Daniels came upon a 111-page manuscript in a copyist’s hand, dated 1696 and titled “Journal of the Travels of several persons their sufferings―being cast away in the gulph among Cannabals of Florida.” This earlier version, stopping when the party was debriefed in St. Augustine and differing markedly from the first printed edition of God’s Protecting Providence, leaves no doubt that Dickinson’s original account was drastically cut, rearranged, and rewritten before it was approved for Quaker consumption. Join us as Daniels discusses this fascinating narrative and nature of early-American censorship and publishing.