Read Online Final Fridays by John Barth - Free Book Online Page B

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