You see how we storytellers operate: Truth, yes — but not always truth to the historical data. And how do historians operate? Well, my caller dropped me a note somewhile later to thank me for my assistance and to announce her intention of staying with “Bill,” despite my warning, on the strength of The Sot-Weed Factor’s “general historical authenticity.” It makes a person wonder.
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.