Circumstantial Geographical Description of Pennsylvania

On 20 August 1683, a lawyer from Frankfurt landed at Philadelphia with eighty fellow passengers. Commissioned by a society of Pietists, he had come to buy land in William Penn's brand-new province on the banks of the Delaware.

Francis Daniel Pastorius had travelled all over Europe, from Cambridge to Ghent, without finding the piety he sought. In Pennsylvania he founded Germantown, the province's first German settlement, became its first burgomaster, and described everything he saw: the charter of Charles II, Penn's laws, the fertility of the land, wampum, the sachems and their language. One Indian king sits at the governor's table; another, on his sickbed, names his nephew as his successor.

Then come sixteen years of letters to his father, who had stayed behind in Windsheim. French privateers intercept the mail, the Port Royal earthquake strikes a friend, and the Indians prove more honest than the "Christians in name only" of Europe. Anxious, the father writes to William Penn himself, then tells his grandsons the story of his own youth: Erfurt sacked by the Swedes, Rome, Paris starved during the Fronde.

Penn himself finally describes his province and the plan of Philadelphia. A book of many voices, a first-hand witness to the birth of German America, in which a world is built letter by letter.