The documents in this volume are not the more familiar congregation diaries or records of governing bodies that figure so prominently in many studies of Moravian communities. Rather, they are journals kept by four individuals who spent time in Georgia between 1735 and 1737: two high church officials (Spangenburg and Nitschmann) who visited but did not settle, one (Töltschig) who served as “a kind of civil ‘manager’” (xxxvi) among the Moravian settlers, and one (Dober) the editors describe as the closest to being a “commoner” (181) among the settlers. Together, their journals reveal more about the actions and thoughts of a small group of eighteenth-century Moravians than they do about conditions in early Georgia.

Extensive and very well-researched introductory materials and notes provide detailed and helpful information about the documents themselves, their authors, and their contents. This is especially important as the journals were written for an audience of contemporary Moravians who understood immediately the authors’ references to individuals, events, and church practices that modern readers may not understand. Chapter 1 (Spangenberg) includes two journals. The first, written in London, provides glimpses of London in 1734–1735 and modest information about the financial and organizational planning of the Moravian settlement in Georgia. The second, written in Georgia, describes the indigenous population, wildlife, and geography of the colony; the Moravians’ relations with other settlers and with John Wesley; and life within the Moravian community. Chapter 2 (Nitschmann) focuses on details of the group’s daily devotional exercises while travelling to Georgia with occasional references to the delays and frustrations of an eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic voyage. Chapter 3 (Töltschig) generally describes events within the Moravian community in Georgia with relatively few references to anything beyond that community. It does, however, describe several extended interactions with John or Charles Wesley and extensive discussion about meetings with members of the Cherokee Nation. The latter sections are especially interesting as they reveal the Moravians’ early plans for proselytizing among the Cherokee and include several fascinating glimpses of the Cherokee response to those plans. Chapter 4 (Dober) includes two journals. The first is largely an account of the group’s daily devotional exercises on the voyage to Georgia; the second briefly describes the author’s voyage back to England. An appendix reprints a 1998 article from the Georgia Historical Quarterly in which George Fenwick Jones and Paul Martin Peucher translated and annotated three letters written by August Spangenberg that provide additional information about conditions in Georgia in 1735.