I was myself a witness to this
tantalizing deception, and, with the Librarian, read enough to show
the date and character of the perishing record.
Through this accident, the Council Journals of a most interesting
period, embracing several years between 1666 and 1692, were
irretrievably lost. Others sustained less damage, and were partially
preserved. Some few survived in good condition.
Our Maryland historians have had frequent occasion to complain of the
deficiency of material for the illustration of several epochs in the
Provincial existence, owing to the loss of official records. No
research has supplied the means of describing the public events of
these intervals, beyond some few inferences, which are only
sufficient to show that these silent periods were marked by incidents
of important interest. The most striking of these privations occurs
towards the end of the seventeenth century,--precisely that period to
which the crumbling folios had reference.
This loss of the records has been ascribed to their frequent removals
during periods of trouble, and to the havoc made in the rage of
parties. The Province, like the great world from which it was so far
remote, was distracted with what are sometimes called religious
quarrels, but what I prefer to describe as exceedingly irreligious
quarrels, carried on by men professing to be Christians, and
generated in the heat of disputes concerning the word of the great
Teacher of "peace on earth.
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