The American Revolution
About this book
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: know what the world outside Europe was like four generations ago, distance of time is less of an obstacle to us, in an age when all read, than was distance of space to our ancestors before the days of steam and telegraph. A man bound for New York, as he sent his luggage on board at Bristol, would willingly have compounded for a voyage lasting as many weeks as it now lasts days. When Franklin, still a youth, went to London to buy the press and types by which he hoped to found his fortune, he had to wait the best part of a twelvemonth for the one ship which then made an annual trip between Philadelphia and the Thames. When, in 1762, already a great man, he sailed for England in a convoy of merchantmen, he spent all September and October at sea, enjoying the calm weather, as he always enjoyed everything ; dining about on this vessel and the other; and travelling " as in a moving village, with all one's neighbours about one." Adams, during the height of the war, hurrying to France in the finest frigate which Congress could place at his disposal, — and with a captain who knew that, if he encountered a superior force, his distinguished guest did not intend to be carried alive under British hatches, — could make no better speed than five and forty days between Boston and Bordeaux. Lord Carlisle, carrying an olive-branch the prompt delivery of which seemed a matter of life and death to the Ministry that sent him out, was six weeks between port and port, tossed by gales which inflicted on his brother Commissioners agonies such as he forbore to make a matter of joke even to George Selwyn. General Ried- esel, conducting the Brunswick auxiliaries to fight in a quarrel which was none of theirs, counted three mortal months from the day when he stepped on deck at Stade in the Elbe to the day whe...