This account is dated 19 January 1797, and was read at an APS meeting on 17 February 1797. Included in the volume is a plan of a settlement near the Natches Indians, by William Dunbar (1803?).

This volume is a finished manuscript copy, probably earlier than the "Westover Manuscripts," from which this varies slightly. Byrd interpolated into the narrative of his tour remarks on Indian customs, religion, warfare, and trade, in addition to observations on his Saponi guides. Several pages were added in 1817 in the hand of Nicholas Trist.

Between 1764 and 1781, the Scots surveyor George Gauld was assigned by the British Admirality to chart the waters of the Gulf Coast off British West Florida, an area that extended from New Orleans to the modern-day Florida. In 1773, Gauld submitted some of his findings to the APS, probably in hopes of having them published in the Transactions, and although these were not published, they became one of the first mansucripts entered into the Society's collections. Contains occasional brief references to Native peoples of the areas described. The Gauld manuscript also includes an extract of a letter from John Lorimer to Gauld, 1772, and a sketch of the Middle and Yellow Rivers of West Florida by Thomas Hutchins. When it was received at the APS, it was endorsed: "This long uninteresting Paper can hardly obtain a Place in the Transactions of a Philosophical Society. It should however be preserved in the Files for the Use of Historians or map makers."

This volume is the only known copy of a manuscript probably earlier than "The History of the Dividing Line Between Virginia and North Carolina." Contains fewer Indian references and lacks interpolated information, but describes contact with Saponi and Nottoway Indians in 1728.