Early 'ball' report in 1734 Colonial New York Newspaper

[HistoricNewspapers]

Hi guys,

I was reading my 1734 New York Journal newspaper, printed by John Peter Zenger, when I noticed a neat account of a "ball and racket" game played by the Native Americans.

It is quite rare to find any sporting report in this early of a colonial newspaper...but the reason why I am posting is to see if anyone has any insight as to what type of game this could be referring to.

Obviously, my hope was to find any connection to baseball type activity. I have read where instead of rackets the Indians used sticks or clubs instead, in some of their games.






original old newspapers.com

[judsonhamlin]

I believe that would be lacrosse

[Kawika]

Lacroffe

[slidekellyslide]

Originally Posted by HistoricNewspapers

It is quite rare to find any sporting report in this early of a colonial newspaper...but the reason why I am posting is to see if anyone has any insight as to what type of game this could be referring to.

Lacrosse?

edited to add: I should have just hit send instead of watching to see if Thome was going to charge the mound.

[Tcards-Please]

Reading that article made me sound like I had a speech impediment. Tuefday, Wednefday, Thurfday, diftance, refolution, Houfe. Was that how they actually spelled words back then or did someone not know where the "s" key was?

r/
Frank

[judsonhamlin]

maybe the printer was an affhole

[Wite3]

Two things...if I recall...the s/f was very common and only happened in the middle of typeset words. If the s falls on the end of a word, it is printed as an s.

Second...James Oglethorpe was the founder of Georgia if I recall...and the meeting of the Cherokee and the King was a big deal as well. Interesting little piece of history.

Thanks for sharing.

Joshua

[Tim Fritz]

I'm pretty sure that it's not an f, but a long s. If you look closely at the print the long s is not crossed like a normal f. I think it was just fancy (and very confusing) way of printing the letter s.

[barrysloate]

If you look at the first sheet posted above, around the middle of the paragragh, the word "before" is typed directly over the day "Wednesday." If you look closely you can see that the "f" of "before" is constructed slightly differently than the internal "s" of "Wednesday." The "f" is accorded an extra little serif sticking out the right side.

Nevertheless, those internal letters were pronounced "s". Just try to say those words with an "f" sound and nearly all would be tongue twisters. I don't know what year that practice fell out of use, but maybe someone on the board does.

[JasonL]

The guy who found Georgia (how long was it missing or lost?) watched a game of lacroffe, played 13v13 by a group from the future?!?!?! I wonder if they were wearing helmets...

[HistoricNewspapers]

Those letters are an "s". It was a style thing. It was the practice when using hand written letters, to make an elegant elongated 'S', so to sort of carry that practice into print, they used a character to sort of 'match' that.

If you look closely at what looks like a lower case 'f', it really isn't an 'f'. The horizontal slash does not go through the stem on both sides...only on the left side. Compare that with the real letter f and you see that is normal.

It started fading out of practice in the late 1700's, and was still in strong use during the Rev War