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, really, 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!
No doubt I’m improving this story a bit, but I swear I’m not making it up wholesale. The standard device of satire is supposed to be exaggeration, yet time and again I found myself having to tone down the historical facts of everyday life in the early colonies in order to make them plausible even in a satirical farce. Who would believe, for instance, that a boatload of mere rogues and renegades could sail up the river one fine afternoon while the provincial assembly was in session, bar the door of the assembly building with the members inside, and make off with the sterling silver Great Seal of Maryland? Well, something very like that happened — but at this remove, don’t ask me for the details. “History,” says Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” I, too, found it dreamish — more and more so as I left the history-textbooks and consulted the original documents — but I often woke up chuckling, and rolling my freshly-opened eyes.
IN THIS VEIN, by way of conclusion I might as well confess — acknowledge, insist, whatever — that some of the farthest-out bits of everyday colonial life in my version of The Sot-Weed Factor—bits that nearly all reviewers took for granted had been invented out of the whole cloth — happen to be literal transcriptions of (reported) historical fact. The infamous eggplant-aphrodisiac recipe, for example, that I thoughtfully provided Captain John Smith with for his defloration of the impregnable Pocahontas, you will find in a work entitled Untrodden Fields in Anthropology, by one Dr. Jacobus X, privately printed by the American Anthropological Society in 1934 or thereabouts. Doctor X was a 19th-century French army surgeon and amateur anthropologist who, during his service in sundry outposts of empire, developed what you might call a Phallic Index for men of various ethnicities, and who collected from his native informants such esoterica as that inflammatory African eggplant concoction, whose ingredients, preparation, and mode d’emploi I faithfully plagiarized in the novel, although I cannot vouch for its efficacy.