Travels into North America, Volume 2 (of 3) — Reading Notes

Observations on Population and Liberty

Kalm begins with a demographic puzzle: why do people multiply more in North America than in Europe? His answer is economic. A young man can marry without fear of poverty because uncultivated land is cheap, taxes are low, and liberties are great. He illustrates this with Maons Keen, a Swede near Raccoon who could count forty-five living descendants. Kalm then cites two cases from the Philadelphia Gazette: Sarah Tuthil, who had sixteen children and saw 177 grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and Richard Buttington, whose assembled family numbered 115. These examples are not merely anecdotal; they serve as evidence for Kalm’s broader argument about the relationship between political freedom and population growth. He does not, however, explore the darker side of this expansion—the displacement of Indigenous peoples—which remains absent from these excerpts.

The Spoiled Settler and Imperfect Agriculture

Kalm is sharply critical of colonial farming. He argues that the ease of clearing virgin forest—where the soil lies “as loose between the trees as the best bed in a garden”—has spoiled European settlers. They adopt the Indian method of shifting cultivation: sow until the ground is exhausted, then move on. This, Kalm insists, has made agriculture “so imperfect” that one can learn nothing from English, Swedes, Germans, Dutch, or French settlers. He laments that the English nation, “so well skilled” in husbandry at home, is unrecognizable here. The settlers are “blind to futurity,” focused only on present gain. Kalm’s frustration is palpable; he sees daily opportunities to learn from their mistakes, but the inhabitants themselves remain indifferent to the science of natural history, which they dismiss as “a mere trifle.”

Natural Knowledge and Neglected Pastures

Kalm claims that with a small knowledge of natural history, the poorest ground could be turned into fertile meadow. He observed plants that horses and cows preferred—wild species that grew on dry, poor soil—but the inhabitants did not know how to use them. He was “astonished” to hear complaints about bad pastures while seeing excellent plants on the very same grounds, neglected by their owners. Kalm’s certainty is “founded upon experience,” yet he offers no specific plant names in these excerpts. His tone shifts from observation to moral reflection: he found everywhere “the wisdom and goodness of the Creator,” but seldom any acknowledgment among men. He closes this section with a Latin quotation from Virgil’s Georgics—O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint, Agricolas!—implying that farmers are fortunate if they only knew their own good.

Kalm’s journal is not a systematic treatise but a traveler’s record, shaped by his training as a naturalist and his impatience with colonial waste. Readers should note that the excerpts here are drawn from the opening pages of the volume; later sections may offer more detailed botanical or economic data. The translator, Johann Reinhold Forster, adds occasional notes, but the voice remains Kalm’s—curious, critical, and convinced that science could improve daily life. Approach this volume as a primary source for eighteenth-century attitudes toward land, labor, and nature in the mid-Atlantic colonies.

Leafing through Kalm’s journal, I was struck by how restless those colonial farms felt—soil abandoned almost as soon as it was cleared. It made me think of A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince — Story, Setting & Ideas, where movement wasn't a choice but a constant thread. Both records feel less like places pinned down, and more like footsteps briefly held in the earth, already fading.