BRINGING HOME THE EXOTIC:
Andrew Burnaby
Travels Throughout the Middle Settlements in North America
(1775)
"Arts and sciences have made no greater progress here than in the other colonies; but as a subscription
library has been lately opened, and every one seems zealous to promote learning, it may be hoped they
will hereafter advance faster than they have done hitherto."
This is the judgment of Andrew Burnaby on
the New York Society Library in 1759, when he visited New York City as part of a large tour of what he
called the American "middle colonies."
Burnaby was born in 1734 (some sources say 1732), the eldest son of a moneyed Leicestershire rector.
He attended elite Westminster School and took bachelors and masters degrees at Queens' College,
Cambridge, by his early twenties. Although ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1756, he was
more interested in taking his wealth and good breeding abroad. He spent most of 1759 and 1760 visiting
Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, and riding a "little white horse" around Virginia.
Burnaby's keen eye for detail notes unfamiliar birds and animals and lists the industries and local
governmental practices of each colony. He shares anecdotes about everyone from naval officers to a
strolling company of actors, yet keeps his political remarks to a minimum—even George Washington
would write him after his departure that he could share no news of this sort, because "I deal little in
politics." Everywhere, however, Burnaby shows his primary preoccupations, education and religion. He
is impressed by the diversity of religious communities on tiny Manhattan; in fact, his remarks about New
Yorkers anticipate many other observers: "More than half of them are Dutch, and almost all traders: they
are, therefore, habitually frugal, industrious, and parsimonious. Being, however, of different nations,
different languages, and different religions, it is almost impossible to give them any precise or determinate
character."
These relatively flattering remarks about New York contrast strongly with his feelings about Virginia,
where he met many prominent planters and condemned their "extravagance, ostentation, and...disregard
of oeconomy." "The climate operates very powerfully upon [the southern farmers], and renders them
indolent, inactive, and unenterprising; this is visible in every line of their character," he says elsewhere.
In addition to this general contempt, Burnaby found himself strongly opposed to American practices of
slavery, largely because it further debased the slaveowners, rather than for the sake of the slaves themselves.
Based on his observations, Burnaby opposed the general English sense of the colonies as any kind of
united group and doubted they could ever form a separate country. "An idea, strange as it is visionary, has
entered into the minds of the generality of mankind, that empire is travelling westward; and every one is
law to the rest of the world." On the contrary, Burnaby suggests, "America is formed for happiness, but
not for empire."
The beginning of the American Revolution in 1775 swept Burnaby's book into print, while its author was
back in England working toward his Doctor of Divinity degree. It would swiftly go through two more
expanded editions before the turn of the century, and it remains a widely quoted source on the colonial
way of life and the delicate relationship between the colonies and their mother country.
After returning from America, Burnaby continued to travel to places of imminent upheaval. He spent
five years as a British chaplain in Livorno (or Leghorn) in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, for some time
even substituting for the absent consul. The year 1767 saw a widespread and violent expulsion of the
Jesuits from Spain and parts of Italy. Members of the order were marched in chains to the coast of
Naples and dumped onto ships, which were then caught in bad weather near Leghorn. Burnaby singlehandedly
averted a humanitarian disaster by persuading the Grand Duke to give them shelter from the
storm. After this he resigned from the Leghorn position and toured Italy, ending up in Corsica. There he
became a close friend of Pasquale Paoli, commander-in-chief of the Corsican independence forces. His
admiring description of Paoli would be lifted into James Boswell's An Account of Corsica, published in
1768, which popularized the cause of Corsican independence and the image of Paoli as a heroic freedom
fighter. Burnaby's version would be published in 1804 with a volume of Paoli's letters.
In 1769 Burnaby returned to England to become the vicar of Greenwich and eventually archdeacon of
Leicester. Though he stayed there until his death in 1812, his wandering spirit kept its hand in: one
of his published sermons is entitled "Moral Advantages to be Derived from Travelling in Italy." In the
1780s and 90s Burnaby led the local opposition to the British slave trade, perhaps influenced by his early
exposure to the results in Virginia. A contemporary described him as "a person of address and affable
behaviour."
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