Thirst in the Wilderness

In the autumn of 1743, David Brainerd rode his horse through the forests of eastern Pennsylvania, feverish with tuberculosis, utterly alone. The twenty-five-year-old missionary had been expelled from Yale, rejected by the woman he loved, and sent to preach among the Delaware people in conditions so harsh that he sometimes slept on boards in an open lean-to. His diary from those months reads like a man drowning on dry land.…