ABSTRACT
Exhilaration mixed with disappointment upon Belknap’s return to Dover in the rst week of August, 1784. e images and experiences of the White Mountains continued to engage his mind and occupy his emotions. e recollection of failure continually replayed in his thoughts. He wrote to his friend Hazard almost by way of confession:
Belknap, writing from Portsmouth, where he had gone to pick up his mail, among other things, promised to write about the journey at large when he returned to Dover and felt settled. In the meantime he sympathized with his friend’s su erings with gout. He had himself likewise su ered on the journey to the White Mountains. e pains of the temporal state taught Belknap not to have ‘such an opinion of long life in this world as some people are fond of entertaining’. According to Belknap, the best remedy for life in general and for gout in particular was ‘patience and annel, my good friend’ – as well as, perhaps, ‘a piece of lean raw beef applied to the hands and feet when hard swelled, and shi ed every 12 hours’, which ‘will so en the skin and help the exudation of the morbi c matter’. And why contemplate the length of life when God holds out for us the promise of eternal life? Hence Belknap wrote to console his friend: ‘May Heaven spare your child, or, if taken away, grant you the comfort of believing that the promise of salvation extends to it, – notwithstanding all that Adam and Eve did’.2
