Letters

The horse-couplet is a quotation from the earlier poem; the original Roan had inspired a trial of rhyming betwixt Cooke & Burlingame-disguised-as-“Cockerouse”; Ebenezer & his sister had indeed been “left in the lurch,” and Andrew III born therefore outside “the Church.”

More subtle is the reference to his guide as “the Spurious Offspring of some Tawny-Moor” (Ebenezer’s prostitute-wife, Joan Toast, was once ravisht by the Moorish pirate Boabdil, and Burlingame’s ancestry, like yours & mine, was racially mixt). “… to glut the Market with a poisonous Drug” refers of course to the overproduction of “sot-weed” in the colony, the poem’s explicit theme; but it alludes covertly to the opium traffic in which Burlingame involved Ebenezer Cooke in the 1690’s.

I call’d the drowsy Passive Slave

To light me to my downy Grave…

and

…we thought it best

To let the Aethiopian rest…

overtly refer to the “one that pass’d for Chamber-Maid” at the inn where this encounter takes place (note that she too is suspected of being other than she seems), whilst they secretly remind Burlingame of the poet’s near-martyrdom at the stake in 1694 by that conspiracy of escaped slaves & Ahatchwhoop Indians on Bloodsworth Island, which Burlingame had gone ostensibly to “put to rest.”

Most interesting of all is Cooke’s prediction that his fellow Marylanders

Will by their Heirs be curst for [their] Mistakes,

E’er Saturn thrice his Revolution makes…

That is, literally, within three generations, when the land will have been deforested & the soil exhausted by one-crop tobacco farming. But the “three revolutions” (Saturn’s period is 29½ years), reckon’d roughly from the date of Cooke’s composing Sot-Weed Redivivus, echo a prediction by Henry Burlingame III of three “revolutionary” upheavals: 1st, the Seven Years War betwixt Britain & France, which by 1759 would have reacht the fall of Fort Niagara to the British & the consequent shift of Indian allegiances from the losing to the winning side, paving the way for the surrender of the Canadas to Lord Jeffrey Amherst & for “Pontiac’s Conspiracy,” as shall be shown; 2nd, the American & French Revolutions (i.e., about 1789, when George Washington was elected, the Tennis Court Oath sworn, the Bastille taken); 3rd, what we now approach: the decline & fall of Napoleon’s Empire & the commencement of America’s 2nd Revolution. “Rise, Oroonoko, rise …” Cooke urges his disguised mentor at the beginning of Canto III, which in cunning emblem of eternal recurrence, or revolution without end, he ends with the exhortation “Begin…” and the invocation of time’s Stream

That runs (alas!) and ever will run on.

Anna Cooke indulged this folly, if folly it was, but resisted the temptation to folie à deux. Upon her brother’s death in 1732, she confided to her “nephew” Andrew (by then a successful lawyer in Annapolis) that his “Uncle Henry” had been her common-law husband; she declared moreover her private conviction that he had not, as Ebenezer believed, gone over to the side of the conspirators whose ally he had pretended to be: had he done so, she was firmly convinced, the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy would have succeeded, and Maryland at least, if not all thirteen of the English colonies, would no longer exist. It was Anna’s belief that H.B. III had successfully divided & thwarted the designs of the Indians & Negroes, then been discover’d & kill’d by them; otherwise he would have rejoin’d & officially married her long since. As for the anonymous donations, they were in her opinion the compensation traditionally provided sub rosa by governments to the widows of secret operatives lost in the line of duty, whose supreme sacrifices must perforce & alas go as officially unacknowledged as her brief “marriage.”

Upon Anna Cooke’s death not long after, Andrew found among his “aunt’s” papers a letter addrest to him, to be open’d & read along with her will (both documents are here in the Castines’ library). It confest the facts as aforerehearst: that she, not Joan Toast Cooke the prostitute, was his mother, Henry Burlingame III his father, Eben Cooke his uncle.

At his then age (about 36), his parents’ names were of less interest to Grandfather than their nature: accepting as true Anna Cooke’s final version of the former, what Andrew felt the greatest urgency to decide was whether, as his Uncle Eben had maintain’d, his father had been a fail’d revolutionary in the cause of his Indian brothers & their African allies, or, as his mother affirm’d, a victorious anti-revolutionary in the cause of the British colonial government. Nota bene, nota bene, dear child! It is that same question which has vext all of his descendants vis-à-vis their progenitors, & which occasions these pre-natal epistles!