The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “ ’Twas the run o’ the tide in the sea anchor,” Captain Cairn declared thoughtfully. “It hath dragged us something eastwards of our sternway—which is to say, something south of Hooper’s Island. My guess is, ’tis Limbo Straits we’re in, and yonder surf is a marsh called Bloodsworth Island. If it is in sooth—I’Christ now, let me think!” He tugged ferociously at his beard, while Ebenezer and Bertrand watched with awe. “No surf astern yet, or to starboard?” he demanded again of the Negroes, and was answered in the negative. The breakers to larboard were still moving slowly forward; now the sound reached them from due south—about four points off the larboard bow—and had diminished somewhat in volume, as had the seas in height.

  “Is’t our ruin or our salvation?” asked the poet, at the same time endeavoring to remember where it was that he had previously encountered the name of the straits.

  “It could be either,” said the Captain. “If that be Bloodsworth Island yonder, why, there is a cove in the top of’t called Okahanikan, just abeam, where we might run for shelter; or we can drift through Limbo Straits and take our chances with the surf on the Dorset mainland. Ye can see the waves are something smaller now we’re past that point o’ land; if yonder’s Okahanikan and we leave’t to windward, ye’ll soon see ’em large again as e’er they were before…”

  “Then prithee let us run for’t!” Bertrand begged.

  “On the other hand,” the Captain concluded, with a great tug of the whiskers, “if we run for’t and it isn’t Okahanikan, or we miss the deepest part of’t, we’re as good as run aground and swamped.”

  “I say let’s try it,” Ebenezer urged. “As well risk drowning as freeze for certain.” Indeed, stripped of his boots and outer garments, he had never been so cold. His great jaw chattered; he hugged himself and pumped his legs on the pitching deck. He recalled an observation made winters before by Burlingame: once when the twins had marveled at a tale of the tropical heat endured by Magellan or some other voyager of the horse latitudes, their tutor had observed that, given a covering of clothes and ample water, the severest heat is simply more or less uncomfortable and can be dealt with, but cold is in its essence inimical to life. The image of equatorial climate has at its center those swarming beds of procreation, the great rain forests; but to think of what lies above the Arctic Circle is to think of Chaos, oblivion, the antithesis of life. Even thus (so Burlingame had declared to his charges) do men speak of the heat of passions, and refer to various sentiments and social relationships approvingly as warm, forasmuch as the metabolism of life itself is warm; but fear, contempt, despair, and deepest hatred—not to mention facts, logic, analysis, and formality of dress or manner—however involved they may be in the human experience of living, have forever in the nostrils of the race some effluvium of the grave and are described in mankind’s languages by adjectives of cold. In sum (Ebenezer remembered Henry concluding with a smile and raking up the fire in his converted summer-house with the ramrod of a Spanish musket on the wall), hot days may well elicit sweat and curses, but chill winds cut through the greatcoats and farthingales of time, knife to the primal memory of the species, shiver that slumbering beast in the caves of our soul, and whisper “Danger!” in his hairy ear. The surf now was a muffled thunder well forward. The Captain ordered the triple-reefed jib and mainsail up and took the helm himself. The Negroes having their hands full with sheets and gaff-halyards, he stationed both passengers forward, Bertrand to take soundings with a pole (the sloop itself, chine-bottomed, drew less than three feet of water, and the keel only two or three more) and Ebenezer to watch and listen for trouble ahead. The luff of the sails cracked like pistol-fire in the wind, and the heavy boom whipped back and forth over the deck. When the anchor pendant had been shortened until the grapple barely held the bow to windward, the Captain put the helm up hard and close-hauled the jib: the bow fell off at once to larboard, both sails filled with a snap that heeled the sloop far over and bid fair to take out her mast, and the anchor was desperately weighed. For a moment the fearful forces hung in balance: surely, Ebenezer thought, the ship must capsize or broach to, or the mast let go, or the shrouds, or the chain plates, or the sails. But as the next great wave rolled under, the Captain eased the helm; the bow pointed just a shade nearer the wind’s eye, and to the accompaniment of cheers from the crew, the sloop righted herself to a reasonable angle of heel, took the next crest fairly at forty-five degrees, and gained steerageway due southwards on a sluggish starboard tack.

  Almost at once they found themselves in comparatively calm water, though the wind howled as furiously as ever; clearly they were in the lee of whatever land they’d raised, and while their troubles were by no means over, they were temporarily relieved of the danger of losing their ship from under them. Moreover, with the island, or whatever, to break the wind, they were able to proceed with greater caution and control: almost at once, on their southerly bearing, Bertrand touched bottom with his pole and bawled the news aft—indeed, the sound of the wind in reeds and trees could be plainly heard in the darkness ahead. The Negroes at once slacked off the sheets, and the sloop was brought over on a broad reach paralleling the apparent shoreline, with just enough way to steer by. For ten minutes the soundings remained constant, at between nine and ten feet of water, and the trees howled steadily off the starboard beam. Then this land-sound became more general—seemed, in fact, almost to enclose them everywhere but astern—and at the first brush of the keel against the bottom, heard and felt by none besides Captain Cairn, he ordered the anchor dropped and came up into the wind.

  “Dear Heav’n!” Ebenezer cried. “Can it be we’re safe?”

  “Only the wittol can know he is no cuckold,” said the Captain, repeating a proverb Ebenezer had heard before, “and only a dead man is safe from death.” Nevertheless he stroked his beard with obvious relief and admitted that, barring a shift in the direction of the wind, there seemed to be no reason why they could not ride out the night at anchor.

  “ ’Tis some manner of cove, right enough,” he declared when the vessel was properly secured, “else we’d hear more sea astern, instead of trees. Whether Okahanikan or some other we’ll learn anon.”

  There being, incredibly to Ebenezer, nothing further to do until daybreak, all hands put on the clothes they had discarded some time before and made shift to warm and rest themselves. The chore of standing watch for changes in the weather or other perils was assigned to the exhausted crew until Ebenezer protested that the Negroes had already labored valiantly and prodigiously the whole night through, and volunteered to give up his place in the cabin to them and stand watch with Bertrand in their stead.

  “Ye may do as ye please,” the Captain replied. “Keep a lookout lest we drag anchor, and take soundings astern if we swing with the tide. For the rest, don’t wake me unless the wind comes round and blows into the cove.”

  Having made these injunctions, he retired, but the Negroes, despite Ebenezer’s invitation, made no move to follow after. They had followed the conversation as impassively as if they understood not a word of it, and indeed, judging from their reticence, their difficulties with the English language, and the bashfulness—manifested by averted smiles, great rolls of the eyes, and much shifting of their feet—with which they declined his offer of shelter, the poet concluded that despite their seamanship they were not long out of the jungles. This impression was strengthened not long after, when he commenced his watch with Bertrand: the Negroes spread on the deck between them a spare jibsail, folded once leech to luff, and commencing one at the head and one at the foot rolled themselves up in it against the weather. The adroitness with which they performed this feat gave it an air of outlandish ritual, and when it was done and they lay face to face as snug and immobile as scroll-pins, they entertained themselves for a time with a chuckling, husky-whispered colloquy in some exotic tongue—unintelligible to the Englishmen save for the often-repeated name of their supposed anchorage, Okahanikan, and another recurrent word which (though Ebene
zer was not so certain on this head) Bertrand declared with much emotion to be Drakepecker. So moved was he by this conviction, in fact, that he expressed his determination to inquire at once of the Negroes whether they knew any more than he of Drakepecker’s welfare and whereabouts and was restrained only by Ebenezer’s reminder that their fellow castaway had been clearly a fugitive of some sort, the less said about whom, the better for his safety. The valet was obliged to grant the prudence of this counsel; reluctantly he took up his watch in the vessel’s stern, alee of the cabin, where Ebenezer, on his first circuit of the deck a quarter hour later, found him wrapped in a bit of canvas himself, and already asleep.

  “ ’Sheart, what a hawk-eyed sentry!” He moved to rouse the man, but checked himself and decided to stand the watch alone so long as all went well. He had, at the hour of their departure from St. Mary’s, little but contempt and mild disgust for Bertrand, nor had he now, assuredly, any new cause for affection. That he felt it—or at least the absence of its contraries—not only for the valet but also for Henry Burlingame, he could attribute only to the violence of the storm, and more especially to the purgative ordeal of three hours’ dancing on the doormat of extinction.

  He strolled forward again. The rain had stopped entirely, and though the wind held strong it came now in quick gusts, the intervals between which were mild. But the best sign of all that the storm had blown its worst was the break-up of the lowering blanket of cloud into a heavy black scud that first opened holes for the gibbous moon to breach, then gave way, broke ranks, and fled across its face before the whips of wind like the ragtag of an army in retreat. For the first time since nightfall, Ebenezer could see beyond the white sprit of the sloop: the inconsistent moon disclosed that they were indeed in a cove, a marshy one of ample dimension. The island into which it made was ample too (so much so, that for all the poet could tell it might as reasonably have been the mainland), entirely flat, and, as best one could discern in that light, entirely marshy, its landscape relieved only by the loblolly pine trees, alive and black or dead and silver, that rose in lean clumps here and there from the marsh grass. It was a prospect by no means picturesque, but under the pale illumination stark and beautiful. Ebenezer even thought it serene, for all its bending to the wild wind, just as he felt the Island of his spirit, though by no means tranquil, to be peculiarly serene despite the buffet of past fortune and the sea of difficulties with which it was beset.

  So did he savor this reflection, and the spiritual peace from which it had originated, that for a considerable period he was oblivious to wind, weather, and the passage of time; had the tide swung the ship onto a sand bar, or the wind moved round the compass, the change would have escaped his notice. What aroused him, finally, was a sound from the marsh to larboard; he started, saw that the moon had risen a great way into the sky, and wondered whether to rouse the others. But when the sound came again his fears were allayed: it was a hooting chirrup as of doves or owls, some creature of the marsh as glad as he to see the storm pass over.

  “Too-hoo!” The call came a third time, louder and more clear, and “Too-hoo!” came a clear reply—not from the adjacent marsh but from the deck immediately at Ebenezer’s back. He thrilled with alarm, spun about to see what bird had perched on the vessel’s rail, and was seized at once by the Negro crewmen, who had noiselessly unrolled themselves from the jibsail. One pinioned his arms and held fast his mouth before he was able to cry out; the other held a rigging-knife against his throat and called out over the side, “Too-hoo! Too-hoo!”— whereupon, as if materialized spontanetously in the reeds, three canoes slid out of hidden waterways nearby, and half a minute later, to the poet’s expressible terror, a party of silent savages was swarming over the rail and creeping with great stealth towards the cabin.

  5

  Confrontations and Absolutions in Limbo

  WHAT WITH EVERY military advantage—arms, numbers, and absolute surprise—the strange war party of Indians was not long in attaining its objective, which seemed to be the capture of the sloop with all hands. Bertrand and the Captain were wakened with spearheads at their throats and brought forward, the former inarticulate with fright, the latter bellowing and sputtering—first at his captors, then at Ebenezer for not sounding some alarm, and finally and most violently, when he grasped the situation, at the treacherous members of his crew.

  “I’ll see ye drawn to the scaffold and quartered!” he declared but the Negroes only smiled and turned their eyes as if embarrassed by his threats. The leader of the party spoke sharply in an incomprehensible tongue to one of his lieutenants, who relayed it in another, equally strange language to the Negro sailors, and was answered in the same manner; during their colloquy Ebenezer observed that, though the boarders were dressed almost identically in deerskin match-coats and hats of beaver, racoon, or muskrat, nearly half their number were not Indians at all, but Negroes. The Captain remarked this fact as well and began at once to rail at them for fugitives and poltroons, but his audience gave no sign of understanding. Apparently satisfied that there were no more passengers aboard the sloop and no more vessels in the cove, the raiders then bound their captives at wrist and ankle, handed them bodily over the rail, and obliged them to lie face-down, one to a canoe, throughout a brief but circuitous passage into the marsh, which, like the earlier phases of the coup, was executed in total silence. Presently the canoes were secured to a clump of wax myrtles, the ropes around the prisoners’ ankles were exchanged for a longer one that tethered them by the neck in a line, and the party proceeded on foot down a path as meandering as the waterway, and so narrow that even single file it was hard to avoid misstepping into the muck on either side.

  “This is outrageous!” Ebenezer complained. “I never dreamed such things still happened in 1694, in the very bosom of the Province!”

  “Nor I,” the Captain replied, from his post in the van of the prisoners. “Nor e’er heard tell of an Indian town on Bloodsworth Island. I’Christ, ’tis naught but marsh from stem to stern, and not dry ground enough to stand on.”

  “God save us!” Bertrand groaned—his first words since he’d fallen asleep some hours before. “They’ll scalp our heads and burn us at the stake!”

  “Whatever for?” the poet inquired. “We’ve done ’em no injury, that I can see.”

  “ ’Tis e’er the salvages’ wont,” his valet insisted. “Ye’ve but to run afoul of one in your evening stroll, and bang! he’ll skin your pate as ye’d skin a peach! Why, ’tis still the talk in Vansweringen’s how a wench named Kersley was set upon by Indians in Charles County, year before last: she was crossing a field of sot-weed ’twixt her own house and her father’s, with the sun still shining and a babe on her arm besides, but ere she reached her husband’s door she had been scalped, stuck with a knife, and swived from whipple to Whitsuntide! And again, not far from Bohemia Manor—”

  “Be still,” the Captain snapped, “ere your own tales beshit ye.”

  “ ’Tis all quite well for you to take your scalping without a word,” Bertrand replied undaunted. “ ’Twas you steered us hither in the first place—”

  “I! ’Sblood and ’sbody, sir, ’tis thy good fortune the salvage hath belayed my two hands, else I’d have thy scalp myself!”

  “Gentlemen!” Ebenezer interposed. “Our case is grave enough without such talk! ’Twas I that hired the passage; you may hold me answerable for everything if ’twill ease your minds to do so, though it strikes me we’d do better to give over wondering who got us into this pickle and bend our minds instead to getting out.”

  “Amen,” the Captain grunted.

  “Still and all,” Bertrand said disconsolately, “I must hold Betsy Birdsall to some account, for had she not rescued me last March in such a deuced clever manner, I’d not be trussed up here like a trout on a gill string.”

  “Really!” the Captain cried. “Thou’rt unhinged!”

  “Stay, prithee stay,” Ebenezer pleaded. Since the Captain’s first sharp words to Bertrand,
the poet’s brow had been knitting, and his admonitions were made distractedly. Now he asked the Captain, “Was’t not the Straits of Limbo we entered yonder cove from, or did I mishear you?”

  “That was my guess, sir,” the older man said, “unless the tide fetched us down as low as Holland or Kedge’s Straits, which I doubt.”

  “But if not, the name of the strait is Limbo? And is there a river mouth not far hence, with an Indian name?”

  “A hatchful of ’em,” the Captain replied, not greatly interested, “and they all have salvage names: Honga, Nanticoke, Wicomico, Manokin, Annamessex, Pocomoke—”

  “Wicomico! Aye, Wicomico—’tis the name Smith mentioned in his Historie!”

  The Captain muttered something exasperated, and to avoid being thought deranged by fear like his servant, Ebenezer explained in the simplest way possible what he had been grasping for since the first mention of Limbo Straits and had recalled only with the help of the word beshit: that Captain John Smith of Virginia, almost ninety years previously, had discovered those same straits during his voyage of exploration up the Chesapeake; had, like themselves, encountered a furious storm therein and suffered the additional discomforts of a diarrhetic company; had in consequence of his ordeal bestowed the name Limbo on the place; and finally had been made prisoner, with all his party, by a band of warlike Indians—perhaps the grandfathers of their present captors!

  “Ye don’t tell me,” the Captain said. Neither did Bertrand appear to be overwhelmed by the coincidence, for when to his single inquiry, “Prithee, what came of ’em?” his master confessed that he had not the slightest idea, the valet relapsed into gloom.