Like a long-dormant volcano, the Journals of explorers Philipp Crandall and Samuel Murray are finally ready to explode upon the world in all their unexpurgated glory. Until now, the first-hand chronicle of their exploits has been published only in a marred, truncated, heavily-censored form. Thanks to overly fastidious editors, meddlesome bureaucrats, criminally inept archivists, and biased historians with axes to grind, the public has not been allowed to become fully acquainted with the complete, original Journals for over two hundred years. This travesty has been rectified with this present edition.
Any Amerikan schoolchild can rattle off the basic facts about the Transcontinental Exploratory Corps of Eastward Expansion, better known as the Crandall and Murray Expedition. The two great men, dispatched by President Ian Torso and accompanied by eleven others, crossed the unknown, unmapped regions of the Amerikan continent after the finalization of the so-called New Makedonian Transaction, which was the purported purchase from Tsar Ludovico III of Ruthenia of vast swaths of land stretching from the New Nilos River to the Great Eastern Ocean. The Tsar, in deep arrears after years and years of unsuccessful military campaigns in Central Asia, needed capital quick, so he parted with his Amerikan holdings for a mere $15 million1. Of course the Transaction was all a big ruse, and what was to be the crowning glory of Torso’s presidency led to not only the downfall of his administration but to that of the Amerikan Republic as a whole.
Additionally, the Expedition’s fortitude in the face of heartbreakingly beautiful but at-times pitiless Nature, their often-awkward encounters with various monotheistic Autochthonic Peoples, their battles against formidable enemies both human and animal, and their eventual return to a country notably different from the one they had left are more or less familiar to all.
Yet all this time we have known both the Journals and the Expedition without really knowing them. What the earlier editions of the Journals and the history books based on them have heretofore left out are the innumerable passages which touch on matters of ethnicity, politics, religion, sex, philosophy, and mental health, among other topics. Apparently the Captains’ delvings into such matters has up to this time been considered either irrelevant, unseemly, or heretical politically-speaking. But a slowly growing broad-mindedness amongst the Amerikan public coupled with less strict enforcement of federal codes by the Bureau of Public Morals has now made the publication of the complete Journals possible. What’s more, the recent rediscovery of the original manuscript2 has given us an opportunity to go straight back to the unadulterated source.
This rediscovery has also allowed us after all this time to finally get to know Crandall and Murray as individuals, since in earlier editions of the Journals they were but the rather colorless narrators of the day’s events, all of the best bits having been excised. But now they reveal to us their private thoughts, fears, foibles, and aspirations, and at times it is as if they are standing or rather sitting right before us, recounting their astounding experiences to us like confidantes. In this sense these Journals are more like diaries.
In terms of literary style, the entries of Crandall and Murray are a study in contrasts. While Crandall is verbose and rambling (one might even say at times pretentiously so), his counterpart Murray tends to be more matter of fact and indeed outright laconic. This stark difference in styles will either jar the reader or please her/him/them with its variety. In any case, this disparity is of course a reflection of the two men’s different personalities and backgrounds.
Philipp Crandall, the scion of a fairly well-to-do land-owning family, left his hometown of New Delphi as a teenager to attend the Amerikan Military Academy at East Pointe. After graduating he served at various military installations around the northwestern United States until in the final years of the 18th century he settled in the capital of Warshingtown, where he came under the wing of then-Secretary of Statecraft Ian Torso. The seasoned statesman Torso soon become a father figure to Crandall, who had lost his own father at an early age. We do not know exactly how the two first met, but no doubt their mercurial temperaments and love of both the ancients and modern science contributed to the special bond they formed. When Torso became president in the much-contested elections of 1798 he chose Crandall to be his personal secretary and immediately began to groom him to lead the Expedition.
Samuel Murray on the other hand was the son of a bargeman and washerwoman, and grew up in the tiny settlement of New Platea in the present state of New Arcadia. Samuel often accompanied his father on his various trips up and down the New Nilos River during summer breaks, while during the school year he ventured with his uncles into the middle eastern wilds on sometimes-epic hunting excursions. In his sixteenth year, excelling both in academics and in the arts of the backwoodsman, the members of his tiny community evidently not wanting to let a young man of such talents go to waste pooled their meager resources in order to pay his tuition to East Pointe, which of course is where he met Crandall.
So close was their relationship that after graduation they always sought to be stationed at the same fort. Historians have recently begun to question whether their relationship was totally platonic—yet it must be kept in mind that friendships in that particular epoch were notable for their intensity, often displaying a passion rivalling and sometimes even outstripping that expressed between spouses. Doubtless the fact that both men were only children greatly contributed to their brotherly affection for one another. Whatever the case, it is generally agreed that they perfectly complemented one another, each serving as the yin to the other one’s yang, and that this complementariness led to the Expedition’s success3.
While this edition of the complete Journals can be said to elucidate matters previously left obscure, it will still fail to dispel some of the rumors and controversies which have dogged the Expedition and its lead figures since almost its very inception. It has long been held by some scholars that Philipp Crandall and Samuel Murray were actually one and the same person. For no birth record or death certificate or even a grave has ever been found for Murray, and the only existing first-hand descriptions we have of him come from the pen of Crandall. Defenders of Murray’s existence, however, point to the fact that outside evidence for the existence of Crandall is very scanty as well, and, invoking Occam’s Razor, there could be no conceivable motive for such a strange fabrication nor any reason for the conflation of the two Captains—except of course if Crandall were trying to secure double-pay!
There are others, however, who argue that Crandall himself could very well be the fabrication and that Samuel Murray because of racial prejudice created Crandall, probably in collusion with Ian Torso. Murray and Torso, it is argued, probably had misgivings that Congress would allow funding for such a weighty enterprise were it led by a person of color, so they created the fictional character of Captain Philipp Crandall.
But what adherents to this theory fail to take into account is that the Amerika of the late 18th century was vastly different from the Amerika of today. Pre-Imperial Amerika, although not a Liberal Utopia by any means, was very egalitarian and broad-minded not only when it came to race but also when it came to matters of cultural variation, religion, sex, and gender. It must be remembered that our own prejudices of today weren’t necessarily the same as those living in previous eras, and that projecting contemporary mindsets onto people of the past is something which must be avoided by any serious student of history.
Of course there are those who go to even greater extremes by saying that both Crandall and Murray—and the entirety of the Expedition for that matter—were literary creations and that the Journals are pure fiction, perhaps even written by Ian Torso himself while in prison. But this is a supposition which the current editor will not even dare to dignify with a reply.
Another unsolved enigma is the Expedition’s exact route. Due to extreme changes in climate, drastically-shifting river beds, considerable seismic activity, several major meteor impacts, and general overdevelopment, the terrain that Crandall and Murray passed through would be almost totally unrecognizable to them today. What’s more, the book of instrument readings mentioned several times by the Captains has been lost to time, and we can only hope that it will be miraculously found just as the original Journals were4. Until then any Crandall and Murray fanatic wishing to retrace the steps of the explorers has only a few still-existing points of reference to go by—the rest is pure guesswork.
The once-mighty Great River, which was the Expedition’s main thoroughfare on their journey to the east, has long since dried-up and lies buried under parched earth. The lush northeastern forests were likewise logged-off long ago and the location of the Expedition’s Fort Melancholy on the East Coast now lies several hundred feet beneath the Ocean. Even Degrassi Knoll just outside of New Babylon which plays such a prominent role in the final entry of the Journals was leveled over a hundred years ago for its precious copper deposits.
Thus the maps included in this edition of the Journals should be considered as nothing but rough approximations, while the Crandall and Murray Expedition as a whole can justly be regarded as a glimpse of the Amerika that was but is no more, and also as an Amerika That Might Have Been. Reading these Journals, one can still feel the enthusiastic, optimistic energy of people living in a fledgling democracy as yet unmarred by rabid political divisiveness, unencumbered by the soul-draining succubi of industry and technology, blissfully ignorant of the coming disasters both natural and man-made headed their way. In many ways, the Expedition can be seen as the swan song of the so-called Amerikan Spirit, which hopefully one day like the Phoenix will be rekindled and resurrected.
Yes, theirs is a world long gone—but at least we have these Journals.
J.A. Eckblad, Editor
University of New Syracusa
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
While it is very tempting for the modern editor to correct the numerous misspellings, rectify the many malapropisms, modify the unorthodox punctuation, and demystify the scores of confusing passages in the Journals of Crandall and Murray, these are temptations which the current editor has resisted with all his main and might.
My aim has always been to present the Journals in their original, unadulterated state—even at the expense of readability and coherence. I know this goes against all current trends but I personally feel it is important to present the Journals exactly as they were written. And I believe that if one exercises a modicum of patience and allows oneself to acclimate to the textual irregularities the pleasure that will be derived shall be enormous.
Yet I still feel that it is incumbent on me (or recumbent on me, as Crandall might say) to warn those grammar prudes out there—those who are enraged by spelling errors, improper usage of the apostrophe, mixed metaphors, run-on sentences, malapropisms, warped syntax, and capitalization run amok—that the reading of these Journals will be an exercise (or exorcise as Crandall might put it) in masochism unless one is willing to lay one’s pet-peeves aside and just read with an open mind.
In the Captains’ defense5, it should be kept in mind that standardization of the English language had not yet taken place when the Journals were written, and so spelling6, capitalization, and other grammatical conventions (such as double- and sometimes even triple-negatives) were highly subjective matters. What might particularly rile modern readers is their injudicious, scattershot use of the apostrophe; but let the public be warned that even these “errors” have been retained in this present edition in order to maintain the unique charm and vivacity of the original Journals.
The author of each particular entry appears in brackets and footnotes have been kept to a minimum7.
Crandall and Murray Illustration by Mark Cousin
Landscape Illustration by Eamonn Fitzmaurice
Equal to roughly $250 billion today—which would still be a steal.
It had been inexplicably shunted to the fiction section of the Bibliothéque Amérikain in Warshingtown and sat there neglected for nearly one hundred years!
“Success” is here of course meant in the broadest of terms.
Yet even if it were found it would probably not be all that useful because the various instruments they used had intrinsic design flaws which would have made their readings highly untrustworthy.
Crandall is the chief offender when it comes to non-standard usage yet Murray, who seems to have an unhealthy addiction to hyphens, has his moments as well.
For example, Crandall spells his counterpart’s surname in at least eight different ways: Murrey, Murry, Mury, Murey, Murrie, Moray, Murree, and Murray.
To promote ease of reading.
