Becoming Americans

by Donald Batchelor

  Pirates paid well for the tallow when time came to careen their boats. Fewox allowed his new friends to sail into the Scuppernong, into and around the hidden turn to where the river narrowed and the sailors could beach the ships. Sometimes they used ropes and pulleys attached to nearby trees to lay the ship on a side for scraping away worms and barnacles it had collected in tropical waters. They melted tallow to coat the hull. A busy ship might require this overhaul three times in a year. Most of a ship's year of illegal enterprise was spent in the waters near New Providence, Bermuda, the home base for many pirates whose range of operations carried them from the busy Spanish Main to the equally prosperous and crowded trade routes of the Red Sea. The greatest delight of Anne's Anglican patrons was the arrival of an occasional captured Turk, brought here from those distant raids. With them came exotic goods: silk, spices and scents.

  Anne had protested at first, then turned her head when James began trading with the pirates. Ale, spirits and trading goods were payment for homecooked meals, sport, and salted pork and beef for the sailors to take with them on their longer raiding voyages. Their behavior seemed no ruder than most of the patrons'. She remembered that her first husband's friend—the renowned Captain Bartholomew Ingolbreitsen—was not a man of pure reputation and, at last, her daughter, Edy, was finding happiness with one of them. His name was Thomas Carman.

  Thomas Carman was an on-again, off-again pirate. He was loud, he was vulgar, and he was exceptionally offensive to behold. The pox had left him more scarred than Edy, and—worse—his last twenty-years diet of nothing but pork—so typical in Carolina— had given him the eating-away sickness of yaws, to the degree that most of his nose was gone. A patch, sometimes, covered the place where his right eye had been; a loss in battle, for which his captain and crew had paid him the traditional five hundred pieces-of-eight. Anne was talking with Carman when her daughter finally awakened from the month-long sleep and looked up, saw him first, and never looked her mother's way. The possibility of her child having happiness made Anne think differently and less hastily.

  Anne had talked with Thomas Carman on the many occasions he'd drunk at Batts Grave tavern. He spent freely and he paid his bills—frequently, in gold. Carman was from the town of Maidstone, in Kent, where Anne's father was born. His was among the many peasant families who'd been evicted from their small land holdings when, during the last century, peasant families were being displaced by flocks of sheep to supply England's booming textile industry. The starving Carman family sold Thomas to a ship's captain to serve as cabin boy, but the boy was soon taken by Dutch privateers during the conflicts of the 1660's. He was recaptured by an English privateer the next year and sold to a Virginia planter. But the boy craved the sea, by then, and after suffering in the tobacco fields of Lancaster County for the rest of his indenture, he signed on with an English merchant who had traded with his master. When this ship, too, was seized by pirates and the crew was offered an opportunity to join-up, Thomas Carman gladly swore his oath of loyalty to the new captain, crew, and to their black flag.

  Anne hadn't known that her daughter even knew the disfigured Carman, but it was obvious from the girl's demeanor—and from the tenderness shown her by the man—that they were already together.

  Anne thought of the dreams she'd once held for her older daughter. Those dreams of wealth and position had vanished years ago, though, gone with the pox and with the dowry spent on Sarah Alice. The mother's wish, now, was for her tormented child to find comfort and some happiness. If this noseless pirate could provide that, Anne would not protest. So, in April 1695, Edy Williams sailed away with her declared husband, now a quartermaster for Captain Low's ship, Revenge.

  For James Fewox, that was a happy union of business and pleasure. He'd become fond of the young woman, finding her appearance unremarkable among these frontier women. Plus, she was eager to please, and gave quick, efficient help in the tavern and in the garden. But, this union with a ship's quartermaster made her a valuable business link. A quartermaster, like a captain himself, was elected by the crew. He held great authority by choosing what loot to keep, knowing how much could be stored on the small ships, and in knowing which goods could be easily sold. For this responsibility he was paid one and one-quarter share of the loot. Carman would be a good provider for Edy, and he'd bring business to his new family.

  "Be careful what you wish for," Anne warned her husband.

  The November Court of 1695 declared that James Fewox had killed cattle illegally and ordered that he stop. The Quaker faction was determined; they would have no bull baiting. At that same court, James lost a suit he'd made against a patron and had to pay court costs. A distant bright spot ended the dark year when news arrived of the birth of a grandson in Middlesex.

  The decline continued, though, and for Anne, 1696 became a cursed year like '67 or '82. In February, Fewox was arrested in his place on a small island in the Scuppernong. He was charged with having "hides, with no ears, and barrels of meat, barrels of tallow." By the time of the July Court he was liable for his old debts again, was sued, lost, and promised to pay. The October Court of 1696 declared that "Fewox, being a person of Evil fame, ordered that he not be allowed to hunt cattle or any game." Fewox was out of business and deeply in debt.

  In November, James was sued for eight barrels of tar, but he'd disappeared from home, that month, and he didn't appear in Court.

  In December, James Fewox and David King, a friend, were accused of counterfeiting coins! Witnesses even testified that the tools had come from Virginia. False Spanish doubloons were presented as evidence in court, and ordered to be broken and destroyed. James was ordered to pay the court an amount that required his selling all the chattel he owned. That chattel included the headrights of himself, Anne, Robert, and Edward. William Glover, Clerk of the Court and a rising power in the Anglican community, placed a bag of coins before the Court to claim the headrights.

  James left immediately with Glover to seat the new land, leaving Anne, Robert, and Edy to handle the move south into the newly-named Bath County— the large, southern half of the fist-shaped peninsula.

  Within days of her "sale," as she had termed it to James, word reached Anne, through the Quaker community, that her father was dying. Anne screamed at the messenger to take her "thees" and "thous" with her, straight to hell! She was an aging woman, but she suddenly became the child she had once been, whose nurturing father had loved and tended her as he would have done the Holy Chalice.

  She had to see her father. He'd give her comfort and love while she made sense of her life; her life with this man, in this place.

  Leaving without her master's—Glover's—permission, would be a serious offense, but Anne was too distraught for reasoning. She appealed to her visiting son-in-law, Carman, to help her reach Norfolk County.

  On a blustery night in late December, the two of them sailed out from the now-named Bull Bay, into the east, pushed by a harsh, northwesterly wind that whipped the shallow Sound into froth. Carman suggested that it would be best to put ashore somewhere this side of the Currituck Inlet and wait until morning. But Anne was like the Sound, the storm of worries had shipped her into a froth, and she hurled encouragement and curses at the one-eyed sailor. There was no moon and no star to light or guide Carman, and his small craft struck an oyster reef and sank before dawn, beneath the waves that crashed over the marshes on the western side of the Outer Banks.

  Anne and Carman waded through the cutting grasses until they reached dry land. Strangely, there was no rain, just a biting, cold wind that blew from the western mountains. Across the high dunes, to the east, would be protection from the wind.

  From the dune's ridge, they looked down to a bonfire on the sheltered beach. A canvas tent was probably the shelter of fishermen, for their canoe—with a mast and sail—lay nearby. There was little necessity for precautions against noise since the roar and whistle of wind covered conversation. Carman tried to tell her that the idea was senseless. They couldn't sa
il directly into the winds! Anne was not dissuaded. The wind would change. That was a certainty. They needed a boat. That was a certainty. She had to see her father! She had to get home! She still had a home at Deep Creek!

  Together they flipped the boat over and dragged it to the water. Anne was tugging at the mast and sail when one of the men stepped from the tent into the rain, followed by two more men; one with a sword, the other with a gun.

  All three of the men knew Anne from Fewox's place. Two of them had sailed with Carman. They would make no trouble, but neither would they venture into Virginia, so exposed. Their lives would be forfeit in that colony.

  When, indeed, by morning the wind had changed, the men agreed to return Carman and the now-compliant Anne to Bull Bay. She spoke less as they neared the headland that had been her husband's.

  Anne was silent during the fortnight that it took to learn of her father's death. Then she packed the few things that were hers; her Quaker furniture, her Grandmother Ware's iron pot, and the other articles that were hers and not Fewox's; things, and parts of old things that reminded her of other times. At this age, she had come to a level lower than that of Richard Williams when she first met and laughed at him, lower than the blubbering Shaw, lower than her Bourne in-laws, lower than the treacherous Harveys and Durants. From Gloucester County manor to Perquimans Precinct bull-baiting shed. From mistress to servant. From dilettante daughter, to defamed mother. John and Joseph would be ashamed; Edward and Richard surprised. Sarah Alice would disown her. Edy would take care of her.

  Joseph was surprised and distressed when his youngest brother, Richard, galloped up the Great Bridge Road in late 1697, soon after having turned twentyone. Joseph was distressed when told of the official condition of servitude that bound his mother in her old age. Richard tried to reassure him. William Glover merely wanted the headrights that Fewox had claim to. Robert, James, Edward, and Anne had moved to Bath County, thereby seating the land for Glover by being the physical presence required on new land grants. When the seven years occupancy was fulfilled, they would all be free to return to Scuppernong.

  "Mother is too old to keep moving from place to place," Joseph protested. He remembered his mother as a beautiful young woman, and he'd last seen her with a lined and worried face. "And now she's a servant? Damn me, for this. I shouldn't have allowed her to marry that rascal, Fewox."

  Richard laughed, reminding his brother that Anne Biggs Williams Shaw Fewox was not a woman to be controlled by anyone.

  "Glover's a most influential man in Carolina," Richard said. "And one of the richest. He's promised to see to it that Fewox's land at Scuppernong will stay reserved for him to purchase when the time comes. He'll have to buy it then, but old Fewox always manages to come out smelling sweet. Glover knows Aunt Mary in Middlesex. He's met John. He's a staunch supporter of the Established Church and has no animosity towards Fewox. I served him rum at two of Fewox's bull baitings! Mother claims he's the type of man she was raised to marry."

  Richard had come to sell his portion of the Deep Creek plantation. Joseph expressed his sorrow that his brother wanted to abandon the heritage that their father had bequeathed to them.

  "I'm a Carolinian, now," Richard told him. "I don't want to be tied to land, here in Virginia, that I can't work. I can dispose of these one hundred acres left me by Pa, and take the proceeds to invest in Bath County; buy some land, do coopering."

  The proposal worried Joseph. He had no faith in the prospects of that nearly anarchic, proprietary colony.

  "Why not wait until the Crown re-claims Carolina or, at least, until the boundary line is drawn?"

  "It's only that land north of the Albemarle Sound that's in dispute. The land I want is down in Bath County. Dark-water creeks, Joseph, like here. Plenty of bad sorts and dangerous men, of course. Pirates, too, but there's a new settlement of good Germans on the Pamticoe. My land's on the Machapungo River, near where it feeds into the Pamticoe River and the Pamticoe Sound. Dependable winds take you the fifty-miles past Ocracoke Island to the ocean. Pine barrens stretch on for miles, Joseph, and there's tobacco land…."

  Richard's focus drifted, and Joseph knew that he'd lost his brother to Rogues Harbor. How could the boy give up the land his father died protecting, and that their mother had almost sold her soul to reclaim?

  "You can't sell the land outside the family, anyway," Joseph pointed out to his brother. Their father's will left them portions for their lifetime use only, then to be inherited by their sons, "lawfully begotten of their bodies.

  "I can lease it," Richard said, and within days he did so—for ninety-nine years. He received notes for four thousand pounds of tobacco in cask from Richard Tucker, an optimistic neighbor in Deep Creek.

  Richard Tucker had only recently arrived in Virginia, not having passed a full year there. Tucker was still filled with enthusiasm, aroused by tracts and pamphlets that were still distributed in England attesting to the easy life and quick riches to be found in the New World. His enthusiasm was buoyed by a rapid and comfortable passage. The proximity of the growing Norfolk Town to Deep Creek excited him. The evidence of growing prosperity in the area was reinforcing. Tucker's new friend, Joseph Williams, was proving those prospects to be attainable.

  Joseph had bought his mysteriously troubled brother John's one hundred acres and manor house two years earlier. Then he'd installed wooden floors, added a second story to the old part, and—through John—had ordered beds, linen, and pewter ware from their cousin, Edward Williams, John's factor in Bristol.

  Richard, too, was impressed with Joseph's situation. For a moment he considered his brother's suggestion to stay in Deep Creek and work in Joseph's business. Only for a moment, did he consider. As he said to Joseph, he was a Carolinian, now. He did not tell Joseph that he couldn't stand by and watch his sister-in-law, Mary, and her parents, the Bournes, take over Deep Creek. He returned to Carolina by a Carolina Road that was wonderfully dry and easily traveled in November.

  Richard walked his horse through blowing leaves and wondered if Mary had given up on having more children. She had become bitter and shrewish after ten years of marriage. They had no children except two girls, and those were born in the first two years of the marriage. Was she denying her husband? Richard had neither seen nor felt any warmth between the couple on his visit. Joseph seemed driven to rise in the morning and immediately get to work. Mary spent most of her days with her mother, cooking meals, hoeing corn, picking tobacco worms, or carding flax. There was always enough to do so that husband and wife would fall asleep, exhausted, soon after eating supper. With an unsatisfied appetite for respectability and independence for their offspring, the Bournes had urged Richard to request—to convince!—his mother to formally relinquish—sell, if she insisted!—her dower rights to the Deep Creek manor. Anne's mad attempt to return to Deep Creek the past winter had shaken the Bournes.

  "She's gone completely mad," the older Mary said. "You heard your mother! She tried to sail here in that storm. And with a pirate!" Richard smiled to himself at the pot calling the kettle black. He grinned as he conjured the vision of his mother's response to the request. Joseph had taken his brother aside and confessed that his wife was refusing to allow his mother to see the granddaughters until a deal was made. Richard was ashamed of his brother, and determined never to let a woman rule his household.

  ***

  Richard Williams bought fifty acres joining part of the hundreds of acres of William Glover's property. Richard wanted to be near his mother and he felt secure in adjoining the purchase of such a man. Mister Glover owned land in Virginia, still; owned much in Albemarle; and was acquiring much in Bath County. He was among the most well-to-do of the colony. Richard's neighboring acreage fronted on the eastern side of the Machapungo River, giving him a good landing for ships entering through the nearby Ocracoke Inlet. Glover was a clever man, Richard thought, and there was talk of the Proprietors establishing as a town and second, formal Port of Entry at the French Huguenot settleme
nt in the area, adding to the Albemarle's Roanoke Port of Entry. Richard felt certain that Glover intended for that new, first town in North Carolina to be here. Already, the settlement was growing, with French Huguenots being joined by Germans. There was some concern in Chowan about these additional dissenters, but some of these settlers were sponsored by Glover and other vocal Anglicans in order to get headrights. Glover was not so particular about their religion if they brought him land, Fewox said.

  Religion, rights, and obligation were the talk of the day. Weren't certain rights due members of the Church of England, and weren't there obligations of all colonists to adhere to the rules and regulations of the Established Church? When Bath County had been created in '96 there was a rush of settlers eager for rich land open to the Pamptico. Some of it was grabbed by big landowners like Glover, but dozens, then hundreds of people bought small plots, and the German and French tongues were often heard. These diverse peoples found interests and problems in common, and soon found occasions to meet and talk. They had concerns. There were no militia days in Carolina and there was fear of an Indian uprising. The court was too distant for gathering.