Letters

Burr & Arnold, reaching Quebec in mid-November with what remains of their company after the ordeal of crossing the Maine wilderness, find the British garrison forewarn’d (not impossibly by Ethan Allen himself), and are obliged to wait in freezing “siege” until Allen & General Montgomery come up victorious from Montreal. There they shiver, starve, & curse — Joel Barlow’s three older brothers amongst them — whilst Barlow himself frets thro his sophomore year at Yale writing mock-heroic couplets on the subject of undergraduate snowball battles—“And Jove descends in Magazines of Snow”—& down in the golden marsh my parents come ardently together.

Or would so come! But ’tis we who come now to that curse of the male Burlingames I mention’d in my 1st. Andrew Cooke III was a man of normal parts, like myself: Andrée’s insistence that he get her with child ere they marry was no reflection on his manliness, only a kind of test laid on him in view of his age & innocence, which test he lovingly (if slowly) rose to. But my father, like his namesake, was all but memberless — and, alas, had not yet rediscover’d his grandsire’s secret. Here, it may be, is another clue to “Alexis Cuillerier’s” rage against the Fisher child: it is common practice amongst the Indians to dismember male prisoners in the course of torturing them; any males among themselves who happen to have been by nature underendow’d are teased as having been thus captured and tortured—” ’tis well you escaped with your nose & ears,” et cetera — and are further advised, if they have not the womanly nature of a berdache, to take a girl-child to wife…

His celibacy at Princeton & Yale, too, we may now take understanding pity on; for while undergraduates in those Puritan longitudes were not given to the wenching of their Oxbridge counterparts, they were normally preoccupied with courtships & flirtations. ’Twas simple shame, my mother told me in later years, drove my father to the excesses that punctuate his life. He had not his namesake’s “cosmophilism”; he wanted only & simply to husband Nancy Russecks McEvoy, and he could not do it, and the frustration very nearly unhinged him. Indeed, not knowing the root of the problem, as ’twere, my mother thot him 1st uncommonly proper, then uncommonly shy, at last uncommonly odd — whether madman or faggot she could not decide. For things had reacht that point betwixt them, by his initiative as much as hers, where “St. Anthony himself would have had a time of it.”

When at last the truth came out, she was immeasurably relieved. “I straightway ask’d him,” she told me, “could he not so much as piss with it? He could, said he, tho his aim was not the best. And had he not, says I, ever had a lusty dream, as young men will, and woken to find his musket fired? Would it were a musket, says he, even a proper pistol; but fire it did, especially of late, in hot dreams of me. Then marry, says I, ’twere strange indeed if such a malady be unknown to the upper storeys of the Russecks Tavern, and the learned doctresses there have no prescription.” So leading him by the hand, off she goes to Mag Mungummory, lets him blush & sweat whilst she lays the problem plainly out, and in 30 minutes has what Henry had not found in as many years. To wit:

…left alone, my Captain straightway set to work upon the eggplant, in the strangest manner I ever did behold. Forsooth, I was that amaz’d, that even some weeks thereafter, here in Jamestown, what time I set to recording this narrative in my Journall-booke, it was no light matter to realize it was true. For had I not observ’d it my owne self, I had never believ’d it to be aught but the lewd construction of some dissolute fancie. Endlesse indeed, and beyond the ken of sober and continent men, are the practices and fowle receipts of those lustfulle persons, the votaries of the flesh, that stille set Venus & Bacchus over chast Minerva, and studie with scholars zeal all the tricks and dark refynements of carnallitie! I blush to committ the thing to paper, even to these the privie pages of my Journall. W^ch it is my vow, that no man shall lay eyes upon, while that I live…

& cetera. The writer was the 1st Henry Burlingame, his journal the Privie Journall of his capture, with Capt. John Smith, by Powhatan’s Indians in 1608. And what that old arch-hypocrite blusht to commit to paper — and forthwith went on so to commit — was the “Mystery of the Sacred Eggplant,” with the aid of which Smith had deflower’d Pocahontas & saved their necks: an encaustic, aphrodisiac decoction of Nux vomica, “Zozos,” oil of mallow, & the rest, stuft into a cored aubergine into which, in turn—