The journals of Christian Daniel Claus and Conrad Weiser Book

This book ended up being a valuable source for my history thesis, so I'm more than a little bit biased.

Adriaen Van der Donck was setting himself up as the next governor of New Amsterdam. He had returned to the Netherlands after eight years in the colony to persuade the States General to take over (up until that point, the Dutch West India Company was doing a terrific job of botching the whole thing.) Description was meant to attract new colonists to the sparsely populated Dutch colony, which extended from Hartford to Albany. Van der Donck describes the natural history of the region and Native customs. It's a valuable primary source but definitely needs to be read with secondary context (I recommend Shorto's Island at the Center of the World.) I'm surprised Charles Gehring, who's translated pretty much everything else from the New York State Library's Dutch archives didn't work on this directly, but the translation feels honest to me.