Another Dutch description of the country was printed the same year (1685) at Rotterdam, Missive van Cornelis Bom,[807] and has become very rare.
In 1685 Penn also printed A Further Account of his grant, signing his name to the tract, which appeared in quarto in separate editions of twenty and sixteen pages, followed the same year by a Dutch translation.[808] After Penn’s letter to the Free Society (1683) this is the most important of these early tracts.
In 1686 the series only shows a brief Dutch tract;[809] but in 1687 we derive from A Letter from Dr. More,[810] etc., partly the work of Nicholas More, president of the Free Society of Traders, an idea of the growth of the province at that date. Of a similar character is a tract printed four years later (1691), Some Letters, etc.[811] In the following year (1692) we have a poetical description[812] of the province, which contains many interesting facts. Little is known of the author, Richard Frame. It is said that he was a teacher in the Friends’ School of Philadelphia. He was certainly a resident of Pennsylvania, and the first of her citizens to give his thoughts to the public in the form of verse. The first four lines will suffice to show its merits as a poem:—
“To all our Friends that do desire to know
What Country ‘t is we live in—this will show.
Attend to hear the Story I shall tell:
No doubt but you will like this country well.”
The pamphlet was a colonial production. It appeared on paper which was possibly made here, and was printed by William Bradford.
Soon after the appearance of Frame’s verses, the poetic fever seized upon John Holme, and he wrote “A true Relation of the Flourishing State of Pennsylvania.” The poetic taste of the community was either satiated by the effort of Frame, or Holme shrank from the honors of authorship, for his poem did not see the light until published by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the thirteenth number of its Bulletin in 1847.
In 1695 one of the party who emigrated with Kelpius gave the public an account of his voyage and arrival,[813] under the pseudonym of “N. N.” He dated his letter “from Germantown, in the Antipodes, Aug. 7, 1694.”
GABRIEL THOMAS’S MAP, 1698.