NARRATIVE OF JOHN F. D. SMYTH.

1769-1775.

JOHN FERDINAND DALZIEL SMYTH, it appears, changed his name in 1793 to Stuart. Smyth’s last published work was a poem in folio called “Destiny and Fortitude: An Heroic Poem on the Misfortunes of the House of Stuart.” His father, Wentworth Smyth, was killed in the Highlands of Scotland after being concerned in the attempt to bring in the Stuarts in 1745. J. F. D. Smyth studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He came to America possibly about 1769, and settled at first near Williamsburg as a physician. He was active in the Revolution, and for a time drew a pension of £300 a year for his losses sustained in America. He was killed accidentally in London in 1814. In this case there is nothing in a name, because in tracing Smyth from the title page of his best known work, his “Tour in the United States,” nothing can be discovered about him. It is only by chance that in looking up Smyth the eye falls upon Stuart. Although he was in most of the English colonies, and saw the greater part of the Spanish possessions in Louisiana and Florida, Captain Smyth preferred the Potomac region, and lived there, both peacefully and adventurously, until finally disturbed by the war. He was not a Tory, because he was not strictly an American. In 1778, his correspondence proves, he was a captain in the Queen’s Rifles. Two years before he had been ingeniously farming some six hundred acres of good land on the Maryland side of the Potomac. Captain John Ferdinand Dalziel Smyth, explorer, planter, fighter and author, was (from his own account) not unlike the more famous Smith, who, if he had chosen, could have spelled the name with a y as well.

John F. D. Smyth came in sight of land on the 4th day of August (he neglects to give the year), “in the forenoon, in a fine day, with a clear, serene sky. We soon sailed within the capes of Virginia, Cape Henry and Cape Charles, which last is an island named Smith’s. We past Lynhaven Bay on our left, and the opening of the Chesapeak on the right, and in the evening anchored in Hampton Road, which appears to be very safe. The night being calm, we were assaulted by great numbers of musketoes, a very noxious fly.” After a day the ship proceeded to Jamestown, “passing a great number of most charming situations on each side of this beautiful river.” Jamestown still sent a member to the House of Burgesses, but there was only one voter, who was the proprietor of the borough and also the Burgess, Champion Travers, Esq. Making an excursion with a companion to Williamsburg, with which town Captain Smyth was well pleased, they “dined very agreeably at the Raleigh Tavern, where we had exceeding good Maderia.” What with pocket boroughs and good Maderia, the traveler must have felt as if he had scarcely left home.

The author describes Williamsburg, that capital city, but being fond of sports, he gives most space to the races: “Very capital horses are started here, such as would make no despicable figure at Newmarket; nor is their speed, bottom or blood inferior to their appearance. Their stock is from old Cade, old Crab, old Partner, Regulus, Babraham, Bosphorus, Devonshire Childers, the Cullen Arabian, the Cumberland Arabian, &c., in England; and a horse from Arabia named the Bellsize, which was imported into America and is now in existence.” The quarter-racing of Southern Virginia and North Carolina struck Smyth as being a strange institution. Many early travelers devote a page or two to the quarter-race, a match between two horses to run one-quarter of a mile straight out. Smyth observes: “They have a breed in Virginia that performs it with astonishing velocity, beating every other for that distance with great ease; but they have no bottom. However, I am confident that there is not a horse in England, nor perhaps the whole world, that can excel them in rapid speed; and these likewise make excellent saddle horses for the road. The Virginians, of all ranks and denominations, are excessively fond of horses, and especially those of the race breed. Nobody walks on foot the smallest distance, except when hunting; indeed, a man will frequently go five miles to catch a horse, to ride only one mile afterwards.”

Returning from Williamsburg to Jamestown, Smyth joined the ship again, which, on the 9th of August, got “under weigh” for City Point. They passed many delightful situations and charming seats, the names of which are still well known either actually or historically. At City Point the genial author hired a boat and four negroes for a dollar and a half per day to continue up the river to Richmond. “I slept on board the boat, and on the 11th, in the forenoon, landed at the town of Shokoes, at the falls of James River. There are three towns at this place. Richmond, the largest, is below the falls, and is separated only by a creek, named Shokoes, from the town of Shokoes. On the south side of the river stands the town of Chesterfield, best known by the name of Rocky Ridge.” In those days the river was the road to town. Tobacco was boated down to Westham, seven miles above the falls, and thence brought by land carriage to Shokoes, or Richmond. Smyth speaks of a man who, bringing a double load down to Westham, unconsciously kept on, passed all the falls, and arrived not quite sobered at Shokoes. “This is one of the most extraordinary accidents that has occurred, or perhaps was ever heard of.”

The great rivers of America, the great forests, the fierce electrical storms, the strange methods of agriculture, the lightning bugs, the mosquitoes and the bullfrogs astonished the European. Of the bullfrog, Smyth remarks: “Their note is harsh, sonorous and abrupt, frequently appearing to pronounce articulate sounds, in striking resemblance to the following words: Hogshead tobacco, knee deep, ancle deep, deeper and deeper, Piankitank, and many others, but all equally grating and dissonant. They surprise a man exceedingly, as he will hear their hoarse, loud bellowing clamor just by him, and sometimes all around him, yet he cannot discover from whence it proceeds. They are of the size of a man’s foot.” Bullfrogs by day and the falls by night: “When a person arrives at Richmond his ears are continually assailed with the prodigious noise and roaring of the falls, which almost stuns him and prevents him from sleeping for several nights.”

Richmond was close to nature in those days. Captain Smyth used to take walks among the rocks and solitary romantic situations around the falls. His custom was to carry a book in his pocket, and read in the shade until he “insensibly dropt asleep. This was my daily recreation, which I never neglected. But I was once extremely surprised at beholding, as soon as I opened my eyes, a prodigious large snake, within a few feet of me, basking himself in the sun. He was jet black, with a copper-coloured belly, very fine, sparkling eyes, and at least seven feet long.”

August 28th Smyth set out for the South. Crossing the James in a ferry-boat early in the morning, he rode through the towns of Rocky Ridge and Warwick (about five miles beyond), stopped at Osborne’s, eight miles from Warwick, and reached Blandford in the afternoon, having crossed the Appomattox by a lofty wooden bridge at the town of Pocahontas, one of the three towns at the falls of the Appomattox—Petersburg, Blandford, Pocahontas. “In Blandford, the charming, pretty town of Blandford, in a beautiful plain on the river brink, on a very pleasant and delightful spot, I found an excellent ordinary at Boyd’s.”

Smyth purchased two horses at Petersburg. For the best he gave £15 and the worst cost him £25. On the 4th of September he left Blandford and rode fifteen miles to Hatton’s Ordinary, and thence to the Nottoway River, at Swede’s Bridge. “I arrived at Stewart’s Ordinary to breakfast, which was toasted Indian hoecake and very excellent cyder. Being always particularly careful of my horses, and they having fared very indifferently the night before, I ordered the hostler to give them plenty of meat.” The hostler understanding meat to mean meat, put bacon before these Petersburg horses. A crowd assembled, and this new balanced ration became a great joke. The horses having been fed corn, which, after all, is a form of bacon, the party proceeded to Three Creeks, crossed them on three wooden bridges, and then crossed the Meherrin at Hicks’s Bridge, “remarkably lofty and built of timber, as all in the southern part of America appear to be.” Near Hicks’s Bridge[A] (and ford) lived Mr. Willis, breeder of the original stock of triumphant quarter racers. “We took some refreshment at Edwards’s Ordinary, an exceedingly good building, with excellent accommodations, lately erected at this place. At the distance of ten miles we entered the province of North Carolina.”Smyth mentions that the James River lowgrounds produced twenty-five, thirty, and sometimes thirty-five bushels of wheat from one of seed; the high land from eight to fifteen for one. “Much about the same quantity of Indian corn is produced from an acre, according to the quality and excellence of the soil, though it does not require more than a peck of seed to plant it. The produce of an acre in the culture of tobacco, in the best land, is about 1,660 pounds weight; on the worst about 500 pounds weight. An acre always contains nearly 1,250 hills of Indian corn, with two, three, and sometimes in strong land, four stalks in each hill, or about 5,000 plants of tobacco.”

In the summer-time, says Captain Smyth, the average planter “rises in the morning about 6 o’clock [the very rich men, he says, rose at 9]; he then drinks a julep, made of rum, water and sugar, but very strong; then he walks, or more generally rides, round his plantation, views all his stock and all his crop, breakfasts about 10 o’clock on cold turkey, cold meat, fried hominy, toast and cyder, ham, bread and butter, tea, coffee or chocolate, which last, however, is seldom tasted but by the women; the rest of the day he spends in much the same manner before described [i. e., in trying to keep cool]; he eats no supper; they never even think of it. The women very seldom drink tea in the afternoon, the men never.”

Captain Smyth, as already described (following his tour as he gives it), landed at Norfolk, saw Williamsburg, Richmond and Petersburg, and from Petersburg set out for Halifax, in North Carolina. From Halifax he took the Hillsborough Road and thence passed to Camden, in South Carolina, coming back to Hillsborough as a base from whence to proceed to Kentucky, better known at that time as Henderson’s Settlement. Smyth saw Judge Henderson[B] in North Carolina, and had much talk with him, thought him an extraordinary man, and became curious to see the wonderful country beyond the Holston and the Big Sandy, the proprietary regions of Western Virginia. “From the conversation I had with this very extraordinary person, Mr. Henderson, I entertained a strong inclination to pay a visit to his domain; which must certainly afford a large field for speculation and enterprise, being situated in the very heart of the continent of America, and in a great degree precluded from the general intercourse of the rest of mankind, being likewise several hundred miles from any other settlement.” This was before the establishment of the county of Kentucky in 1776. After that year the number of emigrants from the coast country was so large it is almost a matter of surprise that anybody was left in Virginia east of the mountains.

Smyth made a rather difficult journey from Hillsborough to the North Carolina line. That was the back road in those times, which the Southern Railway has done so much to develop in recent years. In 1772 the road was scarcely a blazed path through the woods. Near the North Carolina line Captain Smyth stayed for about ten days at the upper and the lower Sawra Towns, old Indian settlements south of Dan River. “The whole settlement of the Lower Sawra Towns, being a vast body of excellent and most valuable land containing 33,000 acres, of which more than 9,000 are exceedingly rich low grounds, is the property of Mr. Farley, of the island of Antigua, in the West Indies. About the year 1761 the whole of this extensive tract of land was sold to Mr. Maxwell, who concluded the purchase without seeing it. In the spring of the ensuing year he went out to view his new estate. It happened just at that time that a prodigious flood in the Dan had overspread the whole of the lowgrounds on the river, of which near 10,000 acres were covered by the inundation. This extraordinary circumstance and very awful appearance astonished and intimidated Mr. Maxwell, who on his return to Westover, expressing dissatisfaction with his purchase, the £500 was returned to him. That same year Mr. Farley, of Antigua, being on a visit in Virginia, immediately offered £1,000 for the purchase, without ever having seen it also; which offer was as readily accepted. In the year 1769 Mr. Farley’s son, James Farley, came into Virginia, and ventured out that distance in the back country to view the estate. After some difficulty in removing accidental settlers, he divided the tract into numerous plantations and farms which he rented out, keeping in his own hands a most valuable, excellent tract, the choice of the whole. In short, the value of this estate has augmented so exceedingly that in the year 1772 Mr. Farley refused £28,000 for the purchase of it.”

This transaction is interesting enough, as showing what the apparent opportunities were for land speculation in the later colonial period, and yet how impossible it was for any exclusive business of that sort to succeed on a large scale. General Washington owned more than 500,000 acres of land to the west, the proceeds of which to his estate were not very considerable. Robert Morris, the shrewd financier, went bankrupt in attempting to develop the western country as a field for the operator in real estate. There was a continent of land to be exploited, and it was very difficult to corner even a small part of the market. The land could not be handled as capital until a sufficient number of settlers had come in, each contributing his accumulations to enhance the value of the common stock. It was from the necessity of the case a common stock at the first, and the pioneers were not long in finding that out.

In his journey to Kentucky, Captain Smyth happened upon some of these pioneers. His observations confirm the belief that the hero is a hero, but also a very fallible person. “On the 15th day of May I took my leave of Mr. Bailey and his family (at the Lower Sawra Towns), every one of whom seemed to be really more concerned for my safety than I could possibly have conceived, being all in tears and appearing almost certain that I should be destroyed by the savages; having used their most earnest persuasions and utmost endeavors to change my resolution of proceeding on this journey. The kind-hearted and truly amiable Miss Betsy Bailey insisted on piloting me over the Dan herself, rather than any of her brothers, although the ford at this place was exceedingly rapid, rocky and dangerous. In a very few hours, by pursuing the wrong path, I found myself in the woods without any track whatever to direct my course, that in which I had been having terminated, being only made by the hogs, which run wild almost all over America, and especially in the Western frontiers. It is impossible for me to ascertain how far I had traveled in this most disagreeable of all imaginable situations, when all on a sudden, on the side of a gentle ascent, I perceived a number of men sitting on the ground, and such they were as I had never seen before, painted black and red and all armed with firelocks and tomahawks.”

These were Indians, and they were very hospitable to Smyth. He gave them the stone buckle and gold lace from the crown of his hat. “They seemed much pleased with the present and made signs for me to sit down and eat with them. This I readily complied with, and partook of a repast which consisted of venison, kernels of hickory nuts and wallnuts, all mixed together with wild honey, and every one eat with his hands. Having a keen appetite I eat very heartily, which seemed to afford a particular satisfaction to my hospitable savage friends, for such indeed they were to me.” Smyth spent the night with these warriors (they were really on the war path), and the next morning one of them put him into the way to Beaver Creek, upon Smith’s River, in what was then Pittsylvania County.

Along Leatherwood Creek, Captain Smyth, the bold tourist, saw several fine plantations deserted of the owners. The cattle and horses were wandering about and presented a very mournful, melancholy appearance. Reports of the movements of the Indians had driven the inhabitants to the fort on Smith’s River. About eight miles beyond Leatherwood Creek (Patrick Henry lived on that stream for a year or two after the Revolution) a man appeared on horseback, whose horse was covered with foam and sweat. He was astonished beyond measure when Smyth told him he had come from the Sawra Towns and had eaten and slept with a party of Indians. “In riding about two or three miles further I at length came to the fort itself, which contained all the inhabitants of the country around. I was exceedingly happy at the thought of being once more among inhabitants, but this imaginary felicity was of very short duration, for when I went to the gate of the fort expecting to go in, I was positively refused admittance. They within insisted that I was an enemy or a Frenchman because I had been in company with the Indians and had escaped unmolested, and also as my accent was different from theirs. This I found they were informed of by the man I met on horseback, and who turned back full speed as soon as I acquainted him of my having been with the Indians. I continued to entreat for admittance until they threatened to fire upon me if I did not retire, which made me withdraw from the gate to consider what steps I must pursue, for I never found myself in so singular and unpleasant a predicament in my life. I wandered round and round this fortress until night began to advance, and then ventured to approach the gate once more. They again threatening to shoot me, I assured them that I would as soon be killed by them as by the Indians, and solemnly swore I would set fire to the stockades. Upon this I was desired to wait a few minutes, until they consulted together; at the conclusion of which they agreed to admit me. The wicker gate was then opened and I crept in.” The conditions inside, of necessity, were not very agreeable.

How exactly truthful Captain Smyth is it is not possible to say. By his account after a few days at the fort he procured a guide and set out for the mountains, regardless of the Indians. He had heard of the Wart Mountain[C] and climbed that eminence for the view which, as he describes it, was an amazing prospect. Doubtless with a map before him he was able to include in his description more than the eye fell upon. “Language fails in attempting to describe this most astonishing and almost unbounded perspective. On the east you could perceive the deep and broken chasms, where the rivers Dan, Mayo, Smith’s, Bannister’s and Stanton direct their courses; some raging in vast torrents and some gliding in silent, gentle meanders. On the north you see the Black Water, a branch of the Stanton; and the break in the mountains where the Fluvannah, a vast branch of the James, passes through. On the northwest you will observe with great astonishment and pleasure the tremendous and abrupt break in the Alegany Mountains, through which the mighty waters of the New River and the Great Kanhawah pass. On the west you can very plainly discover the three forks or branches of the Holston, where they break through the Great Alegany Mountains, and still beyond them you may observe Clinch’s River or Pelisippi. On the south you can see the Dan, the Catawba, the Yadkin and the Haw, breaking through the mighty mountains that appear in confused heaps and piled on each other in every direction.” It is safe to say that Smyth did not see all this. But the description is interesting. Many voyagers to the West must have beheld scenes comparable, with thoughts more or less defined that here was a land for the possessing and a new world indeed.

From the Wart Mountain Captain Smyth continued, by way of New River, the branches of the Holston (Stahlnaker’s Settlement on the middle fork), Clinch River and the Warrior’s branch to the Kentucky River. “In five more easy days’ journeys, the particulars of which are not worth relating, we at length arrived at the famed settlement near the mouth of the Kentucky on the 8th day of June, after having traveled at least 490 miles, from the fort on Smith’s River, in nineteen days. I was soon directed to the house of Mr. Henderson, where I found a most hospitable and kind reception.”

From that outpost of Virginia Captain Smyth passed down the Ohio to the territories of Spain, along the Gulf coast by water to East Florida, and so to Charleston.[D]

---