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as Robert Graves’s Roman-Imperial epic I, Claudius . Of my dozen-plus published books, only one and a half have anything at all to do with colonial Virginia and Maryland, and the one called The Sot-Weed Factor —which very much does have to do with life in early-colonial Tidewaterland—was written between 1956 and 1960, when its author was not yet thirty years old. I wasn’t exactly a greenhorn back then in the medium of fiction (my first two novels had been published already), but I was an entire novice in the area of historical fiction and its attendant research. It’s gratifying to me that this many years after its initial appearance, the Sot-Weed novel remains in print. The flip side of that gratification, however, is that its author is still sometimes mistaken for an authority on matters of regional history, when in fact what I’ll be looking back on here is not only Life in Early-Colonial Et Cetera but my researches into that subject four decades ago.
    Just recently, for example, I got a call from a bona fide colonial historian at work on a study of William Claiborne’s 17th-century Virginian trading post on Kent Island, in the upper Chesapeake: a famous thorn in the side of Lord Baltimore’s first Maryland settlers. She had noticed, this historian told me, that in my Sot-Weed Factor novel Lord Baltimore refers to that rogue Virginian as “Black Bill Claiborne”; her question was whether I could vouch for the use of
“Bill” as a nickname for William in the 17th century. Heck no, I was obliged to tell her: Back when I was up to my earlobes in the documents of our colonial history, I might have confirmed or disconfirmed that usage with some confidence, but that time itself was history now. I then offered her my guess that although “Will” was unquestionably the most common nickname for William back then, if I chose to have Lord Baltimore say “Bill,” it was quite possible that I had seen that sobriquet deployed in some colonial document or other. But I reminded her, as I now remind you-all, of Aristotle’s famous distinction between History and Poetry—between how things were and how things might have been , or let’s say between verity and verisimilitude—and further, that while my memory is that in that novel I tried to stay rigorously close to the facts of colonial life and language where such rigor was appropriate, it was not at all impossible that the muse of Poetry rather than that of History dictated “Black Bill Claiborne,” as a denunciation more euphonious than “Black Will Claiborne.” (“Wicked Will,” I guess I could’ve called the fellow, if “Bill” is in fact an anachronism—but then “Wicked Will” sounds too much like that night-calling bird, doesn’t it....)
    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.
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    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