The Infortunate

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Editors’ Introduction

The comments and observations of European visitors have served as invaluable sources for our knowledge about early America. However, wealthy travelers left most accounts, and they frequently saw the New World through the windows of fancy carriages and formed their opinions in conversations with the colonial elite. William Moraley’s memoir, first published in 1743, offers a decidedly different perspective.

William Moraley (1699–1762) was born in London in 1699 (listed as 1698 in the “old style” calendar). He was trained in the law, but saw his legal education interrupted by a financial crisis. His family moved to Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1720s, where he was apprenticed to his father, a watchmaker. It was not a happy relationship. Moraley was disowned, moved back to London, and was soon impoverished. He then ventured to the British American colonies in 1729 as an indentured servant, where he worked in various capacities, rambled about the countryside on foot, and mingled with white and black bondpeople, laborers, artisans, and other common folk, as well as prominent Indian and colonial figures. He returned to Newcastle and eventually wrote an account of his life and travels. While the very act of writing makes Moraley unusual, his experiences resembled those of many eighteenth-century European migrants, the majority of whom sold themselves into bondage to secure transport to North America.

Many journals, diaries, and letters by affluent early Americans survive, but autobiographies, wherein individuals reflect on the course and meaning of their lives, are rare. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, written near the end of his exceptionally successful career, stands out as one of the few eighteenth-century American accounts. More extraordinary still are memoirs of people like Moraley who stood on the bottom rungs of American society and who, unlike Franklin, were unable to ascend the social and economic ladder.

Moraley’s travels in North America form the central event in his autobiography, originally entitled The Infortunate: or, the Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, of Moraley, in the County of Northumberland, Gent[leman,]From his Birth, to the Present Time. Containing Whatever is Curious and Remarkable in the Provinces of Pen[n]sylvania and New Jersey: an Account of the Laws and Customs of the Inhabitants; the Product, -Soil and Climate; also the Author’s Several Adventures though Divers Parts of America, and His Surprising Return to Newcastle. To Which is Added His Case, Recommended to the Gentlemen of the Law. As the subtitle suggests, he designed the book both to inform and to entertain. He describes various exotic features of North America, both its land and its inhabitants, and narrates his life and escapades in the New World. He also includes three unrelated stories (in Chapters 2, 4, and 9), examples of the anecdotes he undoubtedly told to pass time on board ship, in a tavern, or to his customers while cleaning and repairing their clocks. The memoir concludes with a detailed justification for his behavior and his failures after returning to Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

The remainder of this Introduction provides information to help readers understand and interpret the memoir. It considers the characteristics of labor and migration in the world of William Moraley, the places he visited and the kinds of people he met, the transformation in the nature of families of which he was a part, the occupational groups to which he belonged, the intellectual developments that shaped his thinking, and the literary developments of the era within which he wrote the autobiography, as well as suggestions about how to approach the text.

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