by John Barth
IS THAT THE end of my disclaimer? Not quite, for it needs to be pointed out that except for Sot-Weed’s “true story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas”2—which a Richmond book-reviewer back in 1960 found so scandalous that he seriously wondered whether present-day Virginians who claim descent from Chief Powhatan’s daughter mightn’t find my version legally actionable—except for that interpolated story-within-the-story, the novel deals almost exclusively with life in late-17th/early-18th century Maryland rather than Virginia, and as everyone here knows, “the fruitful sisters Leah and Rachel” (as John Hammond called the two colonies in his promotional tract of 1656) were different siblings indeed. To the Native Americans of Chesapeake country who were busily being displaced, it may well be that one boatload of paleface imperialists seemed much like another; but by the end of the 17th century the third and fourth generation of mainly Anglican colonial Virginians were a relatively established and even somewhat civilized operation, at least in the Old Dominion’s tidewater areas. Catholic-refugee colonial Maryland, by contrast—R.C. in its origins, I mean, although its policy of religious tolerance soon enough led to the displacement of Catholic by Protestant regnancy and the attendant shift of the colony’s capital from St. Mary’s City to Annapolis in 1695—was a generation behind and in my (amateur) opinion still comparatively raw at the century’s end. Fourteen years ago, on the occasion of Maryland’s 350th birthday, I spoke about this difference in a little commemorative piece for the Baltimore Sun’s Sunday magazine, from which I’ll quote a few paragraphs here by way of approaching our subject:When Lord Baltimore’s expeditionary vessels Arke and Dove entered Chesapeake Bay 350 years ago [1634], their passengers and crew did not discover Maryland. The place was already here. The main features of its present topography—the ocean barrier islands, the flat eastern peninsula with its southern marshes, the piedmont country rolling west to the mountains, and at the heart of it all the great bay with its intricate estuaries and tributaries—these had been pretty much in place since the latest glaciers leaked away 10,000 years before. Various “Indians” had settled in over the last millennium or two and, like Adam in the Garden, had given names to the things around them. In our ears now, those names are both a litany and an elegy: opossum, raccoon, tomahawk, tobacco; also Chesapeake, Choptank, Patapsco, Piankatank, Sassafras, Susquehannah, and the rest.... These musical Algonquian names are about all that remains to us of the people who lived here many times longer than our comparatively short but enormously consequential residency. From time to time the aboriginals hassled one another; the northern Susquehannocks were regarded by their tidewater neighbors as particularly pushy, as are some out-of-state weekend watermen by today’s locals. But rearranging the landscape on any very significant scale was both against their principles and beyond their technology.
Other settlers before Lord Baltimore’s, however, had already made a fair start on that. A quarter-century before Arke and Dove raised the Virginia Capes, Captain John Smith’s Anglican crowd had reconnoitered the upper Bay from their Jamestown base. The official reason for that cruise from the James River all the way up to the Susquehannah and back—two cruises, actually, in the summer of 1608—was exploration: the Northwest Passage and all that. But the skipper famously notes that the gentlemen who comprised his crew were a bunch of layabouts and troublemakers; he wanted to get them out of town and keep them busy. Cruising the Bay is good for that; my wife and I have occasionally taken houseguests out on the water for somewhat similar reasons. “A surpassing clumsie daye of Sayling,” Captain John exasperates to his log-book at one point; we too, with novice crew-members aboard, have known a few of those. By 1634 the trees of tidewater Virginia were fast being cleared for agriculture, its aboriginals were more or less in hand, and its soil was being leached of nutrients by commercial tobacco-farming and permitted to silt the pristine creeks and coves. Nothing large-scale yet, but a beginning.
On the other hand, illicit interstate commerce, so to speak, was already a growing enterprise. The forcible takeover of William [‘Black Bill’] Claiborne’s prosperous but not quite legitimate Kent Island trading post would be Maryland’s military-naval debut; it accounts for the careful wording of a prominent historical marker on Route 50 just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from Annapolis: The first English settlement within Maryland happens to have been a settlement of Virginians, not of Marylanders. Their expulsion was the overture to a veritable floating opera of waterborne friction between the Old Line State and the Old Dominion that ongoes yet; as recently as 1984 [the year I wrote this paragraph] the Virginia crabbers were complaining that the Maryland crabbers were checking into motels on the lower Eastern Shore, crabbing right around the clock in Virginia waters, cutting loose the Virginians’ pots, and “hot-sheeting” the motels into the bargain by paying one tab and sleeping in shifts....
My point is that the seeds of such prickly nettles had already sprouted when the first Marylanders arrived to cultivate their garden. Even the African slave business was fifteen years old already; by 1634 it was a going concern, and by century’s end a growth industry, like computer software nowadays. In short, what Lord Baltimore’s “boat people” accomplished—that band of more or less intrepid, more or less Roman Catholic adventurers, self-exiles, and politico-religious refugees from a now-and-then anti-papist homeland—was not the discovery of Maryland, but its invention, followed by its appropriation (expropriation where necessary), and as quickly as possible thereafter by its busy “development.” That is to say, by the exploitation of its abundant and scarcely scratched natural resources for their own and their patron’s benefit and—the expedition’s chaplains being Jesuits—“for the greater glory of God.”
Amen, and end of quotation. My point here is that in the extent of that “development,” by the century’s turn the Virginians remained substantially ahead of the Marylanders, for good and for ill. I venture to say that while the serial misadventures of Ebenezer Cooke’s original sot-weed factor (of whom more presently) could perhaps have befallen him in colonial Virginia, their comic plausibility is strengthened by their happening in colonial Maryland.
WHAT WERE THOSE misadventures, and what do they tell us about life back then and there? Knowledgeable as you-all are, I’m not going to assume that every single one of you has read and retained in memory the 600-plus pages of my Sot-Weed Factor novel or even the couple-dozen pages of the original Eben Cooke’s satiric poem of 1708—which, by the way, I warmly recommend. Let me briefly summarize the situation of both, and then I’ll get on with our subject.
No need to explain here the terms sot-weed and factor—although some readers are surprised to learn that those terms don’t refer to an element in a situation, like the “fudge factor” in statistical analysis or the notorious “sleaze factor” in some national political conventions. Wholesale tobacco agents who traded English manufactured goods for hogsheads of tobacco from the plantations of tidewater Virginia and Maryland were a feature of everyday life here in the colonial period, and they supplied both the title and the luckless hero of one of the very first American literary satires: Ebenezer Cooke’s fierce and funny antidote to the promotional puffs that characterized most other contemporary writing about life in colonial Tidewaterland: the Edenic landscape, the noble savages and honest tradespeople, the civilized gentry on their elegant and hospitable plantations.... All true enough of colonial Virginia, maybe; but when Cooke’s anonymous first-person narrator, a young Englishman down on his luck, arrives in this fabled New World to try his hand at sot-weed factoring, he finds tidewater Maryland to be an uncouth, pestilential place where the natives stink of bear grease;3 the colonials are drunken, brawling, illiterate sharpsters whose hospitality is not to be trusted; the women are bawds and fishwives; and the courts of law are prevailingly corrupt. Among other misfortunes, the poor greenhorn is robbed of his clothes, treed by hound dogs, plagued by mosquitoes and by the “seasoning” fever so often fatal to new arrivals, and ultimately cheated out of his
stock in trade. A ruined man, he takes ship homeward from what he calls “that Shore where no good Sense is found, / But Conversation’s lost, and Manners drown’d,” and the poem closes with his malediction:May Wrath divine . . . lay these Regions wast
Where no Man’s faithful, nor a Woman chast!
So much for everyday life in early-colonial Maryland. Cooke’s poem is of course a satire, programmatically hyperbolical for comic effect like most satires; and it is to be noted that unlike its antihero, the poem’s author (about whom not a great deal is known) evidently chose to live out his life over here instead of back in London, where the first edition of the poem was published.4 But like any good satire, Cooke’s “Sot-Weed Factor” overstates for corrective purposes what our sense of reality tells us must have been overstatements in the other direction by the existing literature, which has the air of a sales prospectus. In any case, having been born and raised on the Choptank River just a few miles upstream from Cooks Point (named for Ebenezer’s father, who established a seat there in the 1660s), I knew the name and the geography long before I knew anything of its history. During my student days at Johns Hopkins I came across the Sot-Weed Factor poem in Roy Harvey Pearce’s 1950 anthology of colonial American writing, and later in my literary apprenticeship it occurred to me to imagine a novel premised on the notion that Cooke’s poem was more or less autobiographical: the misadventures of a programmatically innocent aspiring writer, precociously commissioned by Lord Baltimore to go sing the praises of life in early colonial Maryland—“the Graciousness of Maryland’s Inhabitants, Their Good Breeding and Excellent Dwelling-places, the Majesty of Her Laws, the Comfort of Her Inns & Ordinaries, &t &t”—in a word, a Marylandiad. In my version, Cooke’s misdirections and innocent pretensions cost him not only his goods but the family estate. While then regaining that lost estate at the sacrifice of his ever more technical innocence, he also learns the hard way some facts of literary life; under all his rhetorical posturing and attitudinizing he finds an authentic voice and discovers his true subject matter and most congenial form. In short, by writing not the fulsome Marylandiad commissioned by his patron but the satirical Sot-Weed Factor instead, he manages to become the writer that he had innocently presumed himself to be.
The same went, needless to say, for the author of the novel—officially certified as a Master of Arts well before I had attained any mastery of the art I aspired to. Even in 1956, with two novels under my belt, I innocently presumed that since I had knocked them off in about six months each, this larger and very different project might take me as long as . . . two years, maybe? In fact it took four, and my only subsequent venture into historical fiction, two decades later—a huge, intricate novel called LETTERS, having to do with our War of 1812—took seven years. Never again. It is one thing, I soon discovered, to decide to write a satirical 20th-century novel based on a satirical early-18th-century poem about colonial America, and quite another thing to learn enough about the facts of life back then to bring the thing off. In a comic novel, obviously—especially in a satirical farce—one has more license for anachronism than one would have in a straightforward historical novel or a period romance, such as those I cited before. I remember a conversation with William Styron back in 1965, in the course of which he mentioned to me that he was at work on a “straight” novel about Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and I asked him how he planned to avoid nit-picking from experts on period detail. His working strategy, Styron told me, was systematically to avoid such detail as far as possible and to concentrate instead on the characters’ psychology; my working strategy in Sot-Weed was to invoke the Muse of Comedy rather than her grim-faced sister.
All the same, it seemed important to me to acquire a fair degree of amateur expertise in three main areas—the history of the two colonies, the homely details of everyday life there (such as clothing, food and drink, and what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “all trades, their gear and tackle and trim”), and the detailed flavor of the colonists’ written and spoken language, which also affords some access to their thoughts and feelings. If I perpetrated anachronisms of detail or language or psychology—and no doubt the novel has its share of those—I wanted them insofar as I could manage to be intentional anachronisms, not inadvertent ones. Even in satirical farce or fantasy, one ought not ignorantly to put carburetors on fuel-injected engines, for example, or have Charles Calvert call William Claiborne “Black Bill” if that nickname hadn’t yet come into use.
Back then I was living up in State College, Pennsylvania, on a meager assistant professor’s salary and had neither the funds nor the leisure (nor for that matter the temperament) to make research expeditions to St. Mary’s and Jamestown, Annapolis and Williamsburg. Other than such documents as Captain John Smith’s Generall Historie, William Byrd’s Secret Diary of the Dividing Line, and above all Ebenezer Cooke’s Sot-Weed Factor poem, my primary resource in this enterprise—and it turned out to be a splendid one—was the multivolume Archives of Maryland, which I discovered in the stacks of Penn State’s Pattee Library and immersed myself in for the next several years while drafting the novel. This formidable shelf of heavy folio volumes comprises mainly transcripts of the proceedings of the Governor’s Council and the General Assembly of the province from the time of its chartering up to the Revolution, but it also includes all sorts of depositions and complaints to the Provincial Court—an invaluable source for the names of everyday items, the kinds of hassles that folks were involved in, and the language they used to voice their grievances or defend their behavior. I wish I could give you pregnant examples, but at 40 years’ distance I have forgotten what frowes and inkles are, and suckets and pookes, and how many ells make a firkin, although those magical terms still sing in my memory. I do recall being impressed with differences between the English English of the late-17th/early-18th century and the English of the American colonials at that time. The language of Captain John Smith, both in his own writings and in the documents that I ghost-wrote for him (such as his Secret Historie of the Voiage up the Baie of Chesapeake), has an Elizabethan flavor because Captain John was a bona fide Elizabethan; the language of Eben Cooke’s Sot-Weed Factor a hundred years later, and of Maryland Provincial Court depositions taken at the time of its writing, remains more Elizabethan than Georgian, no doubt for the same reason that one still hears occasional Elizabethanisms in the speech of Tangier and Smith Island waterfolk: isolation from the evolving mother tongue. A few critics of my novel picked linguistic-historical nits: The verb swive, for example, meaning “copulate,” which my characters employ with some frequency, is really more Chaucerian than early-18th-century, one such critic complained (“Thus swyvèd was that carpenteris wyf,” Chaucer remarks in “The Miller’s Tale”). True enough in merrie England, maybe, but we colonials were still a-swiving away and calling our pleasure by that name during the reigns of Queen Anne and George I. Call it cultural lag if you will; anachronism it is not. Thus swivèd was that particular book-reviewer, without his knowing it.
What else did I learn back then about everyday life hereabouts back then from my homework as a temporary amateur historian? What impressed me most, perhaps—and still does whenever my wife and I sail up the Potomac to St. Clements Island, where the Arke and the Dove first landed, or down-bay toward the James and Jamestown—is the dismaying fragility of those first English settlements, together with the formidable tenacity of the (surviving) settlers themselves: a tenacity in many cases born of desperation, to be sure, and of virtual lack of alternatives. Those little vessels and their meager provisions—meager even for those who could afford to bring with them the whole inventory recommended in Father Andrew White’s 1634 Relation of Maryland (which inventory he lifted almost verbatim from John Smith’s Generall Historie, and from which I lifted those aforementioned frowes and inkles and suckets and pookes)—so meager in the face of that green wilderness vaster by far than any of them could imagine, and their forsaken home so endlessly far behind! They were Robinson Crusoes, reall
y, every one of them. We drop anchor and dinghy ashore; I try to imagine us landing not for a stroll and maybe a picnic and a swim, but for keeps, with fall and winter coming on, and the natives not necessarily delighted to see us laying claim to their turf, and everything to be done from scratch: shelters and defenses to be built, forests to be cleared and crops planted and clothing made and mended, teeth pulled and broken bones set and bread baked and babies delivered, not to mention courts and legislatures and such to be established....
I shake my head. A catastrophe-in-the-making it undeniably was for the indigenous peoples and their cultures, this literal and figurative European infection; it was arguably a disaster-in-the-making for the natural environment, too—yet what a testament all the same to the intrepidity of those men and women! A flick of the fingers, one can’t help feeling, would have been enough to push the whole fledgling operation back into the sea, for better or worse depending on your perspective; yet not only did the surviving new arrivals hang in there and quickly begin their fateful outspreading through the territory, but in no time at all they were hassling each other with their left hands while scratching out niches for themselves in the wilderness with their right: Marylanders versus Virginians, papists versus antipapists, neighbors versus neighbors, while rumors abounded that the French and the Indians, or the Jesuits and who have you, were conspiring up-country to sweep down and massacre all hands.
The first murder in colonial Maryland, for example, as I dimly remember, occurred not long after Lord Baltimore’s settlers stepped ashore: Fellow killed his wife or vice-versa, I forget which or why. No court to try the offender in; no law to sentence him under, come to that; no jail to send him to—they’re still unloading and unpacking after months at sea, you know? And so with a figurative rap of the gavel (I like to imagine this taking place right on the beach of St. Clements Island, with the Arke and Dove still freshly anchored offshore) the Governor’s Council turns itself into a virtual legislature and in effect affirms that murder is against the law in the Province of Maryland; then turns itself into an inquest and takes depositions in the case; then turns itself into a court of law, tries the defendant, finds him guilty as charged (we’ll assume it was the man; it usually is), and sentences him to hang for his offense. Then, like mythical Proteus, they turn themselves back into the Governor’s Council and commute the sentence, lest in all this more or less desperate improvisation there have been some miscarriage of justice!