& 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—
But no matter. We have the Journalclass="underline" the “fowle receipt” shall be yours, when & if! Burlingame I made use of it to beget on Pokatawertussan, Queen of the Ahatchwhoops, the Tayac Chicamec (Henry Burlingame II), to whom the Journall (and its author’s justified Anglophobia) pass’d. Ebenezer Cooke discover’d its existence during his own Indian captivity at the hands of Chicamec in 1694; Burlingame III resorted to it to engender Andrew Cooke III on Ebenezer’s sister the following year. And then the Journall—together with Smith’s Secret Historie—disappear’d from sight.
“ ’Twas the dying wish of the whore Joan Toast, Ebenezer Cooke’s wife,” Mag Mungummory explain’d to the lovers, “that the receipt not be made public, lest we poor women be done to death. For what will turn your minnow into a buck-shad, will turn your buck-shad into a shark. Mister Ebenezer was all for destroying it, but his sister takes pity on the Burlingames to come, & on the Anna Cookes that love ’em — which is to say, the likes of Miss Nancy McEvoy! So they give both books to their old friend Mary Mungummory, as the trustiest judge o’ their application; and Mary gives ’em to her Mag; and Mag gives ’em to you.”
She did, and the lovers gratefully retired, with receipt & necessaries, into the gossamer woods. There Jove straightway descended in a shower of golden leaves, and Yours Truly was begot. What’s more, the rest of that same Privie Journall convinced my father, not only that the 1st Henry Burlingame had turn’d his back upon his English heritage & become an Ahatchwhoop Indian, but that Henry Burlingame III, encountering that record of his grandsire’s conversion, must surely have similarly so turn’d, being half Indian to start with! All hesitation then was purged from his own mind, which had anyhow never misdoubted its tendency, only its tactics: if the Appalachians were to dam the white invasion, either the “Continentals” (as the rebels now call’d themselves) must be supprest, or their “republic” kept weak & hemm’d round by territories of the Crown — especially by the Canadas, the key whereto, as always, was Niagara. And the key to Niagara was the allegiance of the Iroquois…
For all this, my mother’s testimony. She & Father wed on New Year’s Eve day in Old Trinity, the church after which Church Creek is named, and in whose yard a pair of nameless millstones mark the grave of Henry Russecks, Nancy’s grandfather. Whilst their vows are exchanging, Arnold, Burr, Montgomery, & Allen make their belated joint attack on Quebec: a debacle in which Montgomery is kill’d & one of Joel Barlow’s brothers so severely wounded that he dies in the retreat.
It had been my father’s plan to go north early in the spring and try to persuade his friends to reconsider their positions, even perhaps to join him in a different kind of thrust along the Mohawk Valley. But by then I had made my existence known, and both Burr & Arnold (in response to discreetly worded postal inquiries from Church Creek) reaffirm’d their patriotism, tho readily acknowledging their disillusionment & the justice of Father’s earlier cautions.
He linger’d on therefore in lower Dorchester, as I linger now at Castines Hundred; and whilst like you I slept towards birth, he associated himself with the Marshyhope Blues, a militia company charged with protecting the rebel citizenry against Lord Dunmore’s flotilla, then in the Chesapeake; also against the Loyalist “Picaroons” assisting that fleet, and in particular against the depredations of one Joseph Whaland, a rogue who piloted British vessels up the estuaries of the County & made foraging raids with his own boats, which then struck their masts & hid in the labyrinth of the marsh. My father’s actual purpose (Mother said) was to keep this Whaland safely inform’d of the militia’s movements & of the several attempts to intercept him at sea. Shortly thereafter, Joseph Whaland and his picaroon schooner were captured in the lower County, where they had thot themselves perfectly secure.
“Your father was barely able to talk him out of prison,” my trusting mother said.
He was not pleased by the coincidence of my birth (a little premature) and the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. I was duly dubb’d Andrew Cooke IV and charged to redeem that name: a great charge, my mother thot, for so delicate a babe.
The truth was, I was not expected to survive. When Washington lost Long Island in August & evacuated New York, my father decided he must tarry no longer: Burr had distinguisht himself in the retreat from Long Island by saving a brigade from capture (young Joel Barlow, on vacation from Yale, was in that brigade), but he had been obliged to disobey his superiors to do it, and they were not pleased. Arnold had had to withdraw from Montreal, so expensively won, and was building a flotilla on Lake Champlain to meet the superior British force there. Guy Johnson (Sir William’s nephew & successor as His Majesty’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New York, whom Father had befriended at Castines Hundred) wrote that the Six Nations had so far been successfully bribed into neutrality, but were “spoiling for action.” That their likeliest leader, Johnson’s Mohawk secretary Joseph Brant, was so gone into English scholarship & English religion that nothing could rouse him from his translation into Mohawk of the Book of Common Prayer. The iron was hot, Father declared, and must be struck ere it cool’d: he bade Mother join him at Castines Hundred as soon as she was able, “with or without the child, as fate will have it,” and went on ahead to stir this Joseph Brant to action, whose motives he believed he understood.
Against all odds, Mag Mungummory & her clever company kept me this side of death, even nurst me toward robustness, but we were obliged to remain in Maryland thro the winter. In October Father wrote (in the family cipher, here decipher’d): “B[enedict] A[rnold] has lost, albeit brilliantly & against great numbers, the 1st naval engagement betwixt Crown & Continentals. I am stirring up charges against him of misconduct in Montreal, to incline him uswards.” In January: “A[aron] B[urr]‘s disgust with Washington is dangerously weaken’d by C[ornwallis]‘s defeat at Princeton, alma mater to us both and, to B, pater as well.” (Burr’s father was its 2nd president.) In March, as we were leaving for the hazardous journey north: “Cannot stir B[rant] from his books. He is much like Yrs Truly of a few years back, discovering his other self, & hates the memory of having fought in ’63 with the renegade Iroquois against Pontiac, whom too late he much admires. His sister Molly is the warrior in the family: B & I are like as twins, she declares, and she urges me to do in his name what he will not.”
That name, in Mohawk, was Thayendanegea. The deeds associated with it, and their attributions, are a house built on the sands of my mother’s love for & faith in my father, whom she saw thenceforward rarely, and always in equivocal circumstances. Hers was a harder fate than Anna Cooke’s, I think, whose Henry Burlingame never convincingly reappear’d to her. If Father’s letters are to be believed — I mean the letters in his hand, over his initials, which, never doubting them herself, Mother kept at Castines Hundred with the Journall & the Secret Historie—on my 1st birthday anniversary he assumed the role of “Joseph Brant” to head 500 Senecas & Cayugas in the St. Leger expedition against Fort Stanwix on the Mohawk, a siege not unlike the one of his boyhood. It was a siege soon lifted, not by the battle at Oriskany (which, tho costly to both sides, was indecisive), but by secret agreement between my father & the leader of the Continental relief force sent up after that battle: “Major General B[enedict] A[rnold] is still embitter’d that his new commission came so tardily, after the promotion of his juniors & inferiors & so many brave exploits of his own. Only Washington’s personal entreaties keep him in the rebel service. By giving him the victory at Stanwix (at small expense to us), I have put his dunderhead superior in such a passion of jealousy as B will find intolerable — when we shall meet again.”