Near the end of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, Moll returns to America with her new husband, Jemy. They disembark on the Virginia shore of the Potomac, as bad luck would have it, near her son's plantation where her former husband (who is also her brother) lives. Moll, desperate to keep her past and present lives from colliding, convinces Jemy that they should seek their fortunes elsewhere. They pitch on Carolina as a place to settle. “We began to make enquiry for Vessels going to Carolina, and in a very little while got information, that on the other side of the Bay … in Maryland there was a Ship, which came from Carolina, loaden with Rice, and other Goods” (MF, p. 265).

They were, Moll says, “full a hundred Miles up Potowmack River, in a part which they call Westmoreland Country” (MF, p. 265). They sail five days down the Potomac and across the Chesapeake Bay to the Maryland Eastern Shore, a “full two hundred Mile” (MF, pp. 265–266). They land at “Phillips's Point,” where they had hoped to board the Carolina ship, but it has already departed.