God’s Protecting Providence, better known as “Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal,” is a firsthand account of the 1696 wreck of the ship Reformation near Jupiter Inlet. The Indigenous peoples through whose territories the captive castaways passed protected them from famine and flood, and the peoples of Spanish Florida helped them on their journey up the east coast to St. Augustine and Charles Town. First published in 1699, the narrative has become a valuable resource for historians, archaeologists, and ethnographers. Studies of “Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal” are about to enter a new phase. Looking through the Loudoun Mansion (Germantown) Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Jason Daniels came upon a 111-page manuscript in a copyist’s hand, dated 1696 and titled “Journal of the Travels of several persons their sufferings―being cast away in the gulph among Cannabals of Florida.” This earlier version, stopping when the party was debriefed in St. Augustine and differing markedly from the first printed edition of God’s Protecting Providence, leaves no doubt that Dickinson’s original account was drastically cut, rearranged, and rewritten before it was approved for Quaker consumption. As far as we know, this badly damaged copy is the only proof that an earlier version of the narrative actually existed. With permission from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, it is published here for the first time.