Текст книги "Letters"

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Good riddance.

D: A. B. Cook IV to his unborn child. The origins of the Castines, Cookes, and Burlingames.

At Castines Hundred

Niagara, Upper Canada

5 March 1812

Dearest Henry or Henrietta Burlingame V,

Dreary, frozen weather the fortnight past; half a foot of new wet snow, the wind off Lake Ontario shaking the house. Then this morning, ere dawn, a cracking thunderstorm, 1st of the year, after which the skies clear’d, the wind turn’d southerly, from off Lake Erie, & wondrous warm. By dawn ’twas spring; by noon, summer! And so all day your mother & I stroll’d and play’d along the heights by Queenstown, hearing the ice crack like artillery & watching the snow go out in miniature Niagaras. A magical day; I do not wonder you flail’d about in Andrée’s belly, a-fidget to be out & on with it in such weather, till we had to sit on a rock, under the guns of Fort Niagara across the way, and sing you back to sleep in midafternoon.

Evening & chill again now, the autumn of this one-day year. ’Tis your sweet mother I’ve sung to sleep, with a Tarratine lullaby learnt from another Andrée Castine, ancestor of us all. No more playing ’twixt the featherbeds for us till after you’re born – hasten the day! She sleeps. You too, I trust: by simple love engender’d ’mid plots & counterplots enough to spin the head. The old house is still, but the fire burns on; I feel my lifetime pulsing out like blood from an artery. Day before yesterday ’twas 1800: I was fresh from France with the Revolution under my belt, and Father (perhaps) was ushering in the century by running for vice-president of the U. States under the name of Aaron Burr, denying even to me he was the 4th Henry Burlingame. Where did the dozen years go? Now I am 36, racing pell-mell to the grave; ma petite cousine your mother is a full-blown woman of 23. Bonaparte’s bleeding Europe white; the Hawks in Washington see their chance to snatch the Canadas & the Floridas; by summer we shall be at such a war as to disunite the States of America. Cities will burn & thousands die ere you’re wean’d, my precious – and this in no small part your greatgrandfather’s doing, & your grandfather’s. Aye, and your father’s as well, God forgive us! Yet I have never been more happy, more alive & more at peace, nay nor more in love than at this parlous hour.

Little woman or man to be: what blood runs in your veins! Blood of Castines, Cookes, & Burlingames whose histories, more intricate than History, are interlaced as capillaries. ’Tis a tale I knew but partially till this fortnight, when, perforce sequester’d here for a time with Andrée’s parents whilst the world looks in vain for the impostor “Comte de Crillon,” I have had both leisure & opportunity to search thro certain documents of our family. Nay, more, your mother & I have studied them with amazement, & have espied in them a Pattern, so we believe, that bids to change the course of our lives. It is to fix this pattern for ourselves that I mean to draw it out now for you, in the hope it may spare you half a lifetime of misdirected effort. For we firmly believe, Andrée & I, that ours has been a line of brilliant failures, and that while it may be too late for ourselves to do more than cancel out, in the latter half of our lives, our misguided accomplishments in the earlier, you may be the 1st true winner in the history of the house.

’Tis the house of Burlingame & Cook I speak of: the English side of the family, by contrast to which the French, or Castine, side has been a very model of consistency. The Barons Castine still inhabit St. Castine in Gascony, as they have for centuries: the American branch of the family descends from the 1st adventurous baron of the line, a young André Castine who came to Canada toward the end of the 17th Century. He took to wife a Tarratine Indian whom tradition declares to have been the daughter of “Chief Madocawando,” and from whom we Cooks & Burlingames inherit one half of the Indian blood that has served so many of us so well.

This “Monsieur Casteene,” as he was known to the English colonials, became a much-fear’d figure in the provinces of New York & New England in the 1690’s; even as far south as Maryland it was thot that he & the “Naked Salvages of the North” might sweep down & drive the English back into the sea. Amongst the children of André Castine & Madocawanda (a gifted woman who added French & English to her Indian dialects, & so master’d European manners that she quite charm’d the skeptical Gascoignes upon her one visit to St. Castine) was a daughter, Andrée, who married Andrew Cooke III and grandmother’d both the present Andrée & myself.

All subsequent male Castines have follow’d the peaceful example of their Gascon forebears and contented themselves with hunting, farming, timbering, & the breeding of handsome 1st cousins for the Cookes & Burlingames to wed. These belles cousines share their husbands’ penchant for political intrigue: a penchant that so marks our line, its genealogy, on the Burlingame side especially, is as tangled as the plots we’ve been embroil’d in.

To deal 1st with the simpler Cooks (or Cookes, as we then spelt it): Of the 1st Andrew Cooke we know nothing, save that he & someone begot Andrew II, of the Parish of St. Giles in the Fields, London. Andrew II was a tobacco factor in the Maryland plantations, who in the middle 17th Century acquired from Lord Baltimore patent to “Malden on the Chesapeake,” now call’d Cooke’s Point. Upon his wife Anne Bowyer he got twins, Anna & Ebenezer, of whom more anon. Upon his mistress from the neighboring point – a well-born French girl, disown’d by her father, Le Comte Cécile Édouard, for an earlier amour—he got a natural daughter, Henrietta, who bore her mother’s later married name of Russecks. Now, since my mother, Nancy Russecks Burlingame, was descended from this same Henrietta, ’twas but a partial pretence when I took the name Comte de Crillon for my recentest adventure: you spring from a Huguenot count on one side & a Gascon baron on the other, not to mention Tarratine royalty from Madocawanda Castine and Ahatchwhoop royalty from the Burlingames, whom I’ve yet to get to!

Thus Andrew II. His son Ebenezer Cooke is of no great interest to us, despite his claim to have been Poet Laureate of Maryland. He seems to have lost the family estate thro bumbling innocence, & to have regain’d it in some fashion by marrying a prostitute. An unsuccessful tradesman gull’d of his goods, he could make no more of his misfortunes than a comical poem, The Sot-Weed Factor. No better in the bed than at the writing desk, he got but one child, which died a-borning and fetcht its mother off into the bargain – and that ends the tale of your only artist ancestor.

But not your only artful! For with Anna Cooke, Eben’s twin, we come to the Protean Burlingames, whose operations have been at once so multifarious & so covert, that while ’tis certain they have alter’d & realter’d the course of history, ’tis devilish difficult to say just how, or whether their intrigues & counter-intrigues do not cancel one another across the generations. For a tree which, left to itself, would grow straight, if pull’d equally this way & that will grow… straight!

The 1st Henry Burlingame (a fair copy of whose Privie Journall I found last week among the family papers) was one of that company of gentlemen who came to make their fortunes in Virginia with the 1st plantation in 1607, and, disaffected by the hardships of pioneering, made trouble for Captain John Smith – whose Secret Historie of the Voiage up the Bay of Chesapeake we also possess. The two documents together tell this story: In 1608, thinking to divert the mutinous gentlemen, Smith led them on a voyage of exploration from Jamestown to the head of Chesapeake Bay, to find whether it might prove the long-sought Northwest Passage to the Pacific. After a scurrilous adventure amongst the Accomack Indians of the Eastern Shore (detail’d in Smith’s history), Burlingame became a kind of leader of the anti-Smith faction, to whom he threaten’d to tell “the true story of Pocahontas” if Smith did not leave off harassing him & return the party to Jamestown. For it was Burlingame’s opinion (set forth persuasively in the Privie Journall) that Smith was a mere swaggering opportunist & self-aggrandizer, out for glory at anyone’s cost. But Smith’s own account (I mean the Secret Historie) is also persuasive. I conceive him to have been at once an able & daring leader & a thoro rogue; our ancestor to have been both a great complainer by temperament & a man much justified in his complaints.

In any event, so aggravated grew the dispute that shortly afterwards – the party having put ashore in the Maryland marshes & been taken captive by Ahatchwhoop Indians – Smith turn’d a tribal custom into a stratagem for ransoming himself & the rest of his company at Burlingame’s expence. It was the wont of the Ahatchwhoops, upon the death of their king, to choose his successor by a contest of gluttony, he acceding to the throne who could outgorge his competitors. Such was the principle, which must have produced some odd administrators had it not in fact been modified to permit an able but temperate candidate to enter the lists by proxy, sharing the privileges of office (including the queen’s favors) with his corpulent champion, but retaining the authority himself. Smith duped Burlingame (a man of great appetite, & half-starved) into taking the field on behalf of one Wepenter, a politico of modest stomach who must otherwise lose to his gluttonous rival for the kingdom and the hand of lusty Princess Pokatawertussan. Thinking it a mere eating contest with a night of love its prize, our forebear set to with a will & narrowly bested his fat opponent Attonceaumoughhowgh (“Arrow-Target”), who died on the spot of overeating. Grateful Wepenter takes the throne, & in the morning sets Smith’s party free. But when Burlingame makes to join them (having been too ill all night of indigestion to claim his trophy), he is fetcht back in triumph by the Ahatchwhoops, their captive & co-king!

There end both the Privie Journall & the Secret Historie. Not till nearly a century later (in 1694) does anyone learn the subsequent fate of our progenitors. Old Andrew II, it seems, in 1676 engaged as tutor for the twins Ebenezer & Anna Cooke a young Cantabridgean of many parts, named Henry Burlingame III: a master of all the arts & sciences (& an array of secular skills as well, from opium smuggling to sedition) who however had no idea who his parents were or whence came his name & numeral. His researches into this subject had directed all his life, led him deep into the politics of colonial America, involved him in a dozen disguises (for which he had the original gift pass’d down to the rest of us) & as many conspiracies – chiefly Leisler’s Rebellion in New York & John Coode’s in Maryland. It also brot him in touch with “Monsieur Casteene,” as a secret agent either for the French against the British or vice-versa – the 1st of what will be a grand series of such uncertainties! – and with conspiracies of runaway Negro slaves & beleaguer’d Indians to drive their white oppressors from the continent.

But it was his hapless pupil Ebenezer, by this time (the 1690’s), done with school & in midst of his own misadventures, who stumbl’d by chance on what his tutor had subverted governments to find. Driven by a storm upon Bloodsworth Island in the lower Chesapeake, the secret base of those disaffected Indians & escaped slaves, Cooke & his companions are taken prisoner by the old Tayac Chicamec, Chief of the Ahatchwhoops, whom he discovers to be (and he owes his life to the discovery – the tale is too involv’d to repeat) none other than the son of Henry Burlingame I & Pokatawertussan: in short, Henry Burlingame II, the missing link between John Smith’s scapegoat & the twins’ formidable tutor! In Chicamec’s possession is the portion of Smith’s Secret Historie describing Burlingame’s abandonment, and Chicamec repeats his father’s vow to exterminate the “English Devils”—a resolve pass’d down thro Chicamec to his sons.

Now, as Chicamec himself was a halfbreed & his queen as well (the daughter of an errant Jesuit priest & an Ahatchwhoop maiden), their three sons were born in a variety of shades. The 1st, Mattasinemarough, was a pure-blood Indian. The 2nd, Cohunkowprets, a halfbreed like his parents. The 3rd, white-skinn’d and therefore doom’d, was named (nay, label’d, in red ochre on his chest) Henry Burlingame III, & set adrift in a canoe on the ebb tide down the Chesapeake – whence he was rescued by a passing English vessel, adopted by its captain, and fetcht back to England to begin his quest.

There is too much more to the story for this letter – enough to make a novelsworth of letters, Richardson-fashion! Indeed, I see now I must write you at least thrice more, one letter for each generation from this Burlingame III to yourself, if I am to introduce you properly to your sires & show forth that aforementioned pattern, which at this point is as yet unmanifest. But of this H.B. III, your great-great-grandfather, four things more need saying, all connected, ere I close.

1st, his brother’s name, Cohunkowprets, means “bill-o’-the-goose” in the Algonkin dialect of the Ahatchwhoops, and Chicamec’s middle son was thus denominated because, like his brothers & his grandfather (but not his father), he was born so underendow’d in the way of private parts as to move his mother to exclaim on 1st sight of him (in effect & in Algonkin), “A goose hath peckt him peckerless!” This characteristic – like a tendency to plural births – afflicts us Burlingames in alternate generations. More accurately, since the time of H.B. III, when our line began to exchange the surnames Cooke & Burlingame in succeeding generations, it has afflicted all the Burlingames: you yourself, we expect, should you emerge a Henry, will be but a few centimeters’ membership from Henriettahood in this particular. Yet do not despair, for as my existence attests (& that of Andrew Cooke III, my grandfather, & of Chicamec as well, my grandfather’s grandfather), the Burlingames have found ways to overcome their deficiency. We shall pass along to you, when you reach young manhood, the “Secret of the Magic Eggplant,” which, I now learn, we took originally from the Privie Journall.

Indeed (here is my 2nd point), as a man born short of the average stature may outdo taller men in feats of manliness, so Henry Burlingames III & IV (the latter my father) were men of uncommon sexuality. H.B. III, who concerns us here, was by his own denomination a “cosmophilist,” who not only lusted after both his charges, Anna & Ebenezer Cooke, but claim’d to have had carnal connection as well with sundry sorts of barnyard animals, plants, inanimate objects, the very earth itself – long before his discovery of John Smith’s eggplant recipe made it possible for him to beget a child.

Thirdly, from this “cosmophilism,” or erotical love of the world, must have stem’d H.B. III’s endless interests: his passion for everything from astronomy, music, politics, rope-splicing, & chess, to the practice of medicine, law, & nautical piracy, for example; in particular for what he call’d “the game of governments,” and my father “the practice of history.” He successfully impersonated, at various times, both Lord Baltimore & Baltimore’s arch-enemy John Coode; perhaps “Monsieur Casteene” as well. At 1st, one gathers, the motive for his intrigues, at least their occasion, was his research into his parentage: the Secret Historie & Privie Journall were involved in Coode’s conspiracies against Baltimore, and thus involved anyone who sought them. Later, when Ebenezer Cooke had brot to light his tutor’s lineage, Governor Nicholson of Maryland prevail’d upon Burlingame to forestall – if possible, to subvert – that “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of Indians & Negroes. Burlingame accepted the task with relish; but the Cooke twins apparently fear’d that his fascination with his newfound brothers might win out over his loyalty to white civilization. According to my grandfather, who wrote of these things some decades later, they wonder’d whether Burlingame, once on Bloodsworth, would work to divide the jealous factions of ex-slaves & Indians from several tribes, or to unite them, ally them with Casteene’s “Naked Indians of the North,” & return America to its aboriginal inhabitants.

What follow’d historically is known: there were no concerted risings of Negroes & Indians, only isolated massacres of white settlements such as Albany & Schenectady. Bloodsworth Island by 1700 was uninhabited rnarsh, as it is today. But it is not known whether this failure of the Conspiracy represents failure or success on the part of H.B. III. The man was 40 when he left Cooke’s Point for Bloodsworth Island early in 1695 (Ebenezer having regain’d his estate & been reunited with his sister & his former tutor). In April of the same year, as he had pledg’d, Burlingame reappear’d at Malden, in Ahatchwhoop dress, to wed Anna – who, however, for reasons unknown, postponed the marriage until the fall, when Burlingame’s assignment from Governor Nicholson should be completed. Her fiancé yielded to her wish & return’d to the island – never to be heard from again.

But they must have spent that final night in each other’s arms, “supping ere the priest said grace,” as Ebenezer puts it in his poem, with some assistance from the Eggplant Secret: for Anna found herself with child immediately thereafter, and in January 1696 (1695 in the old style) she was deliver’d of a son – your great-grandfather, of whom I shall write in my next letter. Enough to say now (my 4th & last matter for this night) that to cover the scandal – Ebenezer’s own harlot bride having died in childbirth two months previously – he & Anna gave out that he Ebenezer was the child’s father & she its aunt, and Andrew Cooke III was so named & raised.

Everyone at Malden & the neighboring plantations, by this same Andrew’s account, knew the story to be false, and unkindly assumed, from the twins’ general closeness, that he was not only a bastard but the child of incest as well. This suspicion was not without effect on the young man’s life.

But that is matter for another evening: sufficient here to record that it is with Andrew III that the Cooks & Burlingames begin alternating surnames thro the line of their 1st-born sons, Andrew Cooke III’s being named Henry Burlingame IV, and Burlingame IV’s Andrew Cooke IV. I.e., myself, who at my dear wife’s suggestion have dropt the e from Cooke as superfluous, and the male-primogenitural restriction as an affront to the splendid women of the Castines. Yourself therefore will be Burlingame V, whether Henry or Henrietta. With that name will be bequeatht to you a grand objective, & a formidable bloodline to aid your attaining it.

Of these—& of that Pattern, the inspiration of this letter which has fail’d to get to it – more to come, when I shall complete the chronicle of these III’s and IV’s. ’Tis far past midnight now; the wind has dropt, the fire burnt down; ’tis cold. From the neighboring farm a late dog barks; pretty Andrée stirs, stir’d in turn perhaps by you. 1812, 1812! I shall hold you both close now till you’ve quieted, without knowing who restored your peace. May we together, some sweeter year to come, do as much for History!

Till when, & forever, I am,

Your loving father,

Andrew Cook IV

E: Jerome Bray to Todd Andrews. Requesting counsel in an action of plagiarism against the Author. His bibliography and biography. Enclosures to the Author, to George III, and to Todd Andrews.

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

March 4, 1969

Mr. Todd Andrews

Executive Director, Tidewater Foundation

c/o Andrews, Bishop, & Andrews, Attorneys

Court Lane Cambridge, Md. 21613

Dear Mr. Andrews:

Every ointment has a chink. Agreeable as it was to meet last month the executive director of the Tidewater Foundation – benefactor of our LILYVAC project and thus midwife as it were to the 2nd Revolution – we regret that our meeting was occasioned by the funeral of His Royal Highness Harrison Mack II: the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most RESET If we seemed to you (or to the widowed queen or the royal mistress) distracted, even “tranced” that afternoon, we plead our bereavement (but Le roi est mort; vive le roi!) and the season. Even now our winter rest period is not ended; we can scarcely hold pen to page for drowsiness; we must count on another to RESET Yet we cannot leave this topic without presuming to warn you against Ambrose M., that person who chauffeured you to Mr. Mack’s funeral and is so bent on ingratiating himself in our circle. Never mind his attentions to Lady A. and to Miss Bea Golden, whose beautiful name he is not worthy to pronounce: our information is that A.M. is the tool and creature of the Defendant hereinafter named: we say no more.

R. Prinz, too, must be dealt with. But that is another matter.

Enclosed (with its own enclosures) is a letter we are posting today to Buffalo, N.Y. It is our intention to bring an action for plagiarism against the addressee. Since, in your capacities as director of and counsel to the Tidewater Foundation, you are the only attorney with whom we have connection, it is our wish to retain you as our counsel in this suit. Unless, indeed, you agree with us that the Foundation itself should bring the action in our behalf.

Our principal complaint, set forth in the attached, is the Defendant’s perversion (into his “novel” Giles Goat-Boy, 1966) of our Revised New Syllabus of the Grand Tutor Harold Bray. But that is merely the latest and chiefest of his crimes against us, which extend the length of our bibliography. To wit:

a. The Shoals of Love, or, Drifting and Dreaming, by “J. A. Beille” (Backwater, Md.: Wetlands Press, 1957): a novel in the format of a showboat minstrel show (But none of our books is mere fiction. See our letter to you of July 4, 1967, enclosed). Its ostensible subject is the star-crossed lovers Ebenezer and Florence, end-man and – woman of a blackface minstrel troupe aboard a drifting theater in the Chesapeake estuaries, whose love is thwarted by the heroine’s father, Mr. Interlocutor. Ebenezer is driven to the brink of humanism until Florence discovers a way to communicate with him not only despite but through her father, as a cunning wrestler turns his adversary’s strength to his RESET By means of double-entendres in the minstrel-show routine (echoing of course the great double-entendre of the “novel” itself) the lovers conduct their pathetic intercourse. The story climaxes with Flo’s ingenious re-choreography of the “breakdown” dance, which itself climaxes the nightly show, into an elaborate kinetic code, not unlike the worker-dance “language” that inspires her: its message is that Eb must sink the Floating Theatre that very night and fly with Flo to some hive of refuge. Whether or not Eb gets the message is heartbreakingly left for the reader to wonder – as the Author, no less heartbroken, wonders whether his lost parents are getting his message through the pseudofictive text. See Enclosure #3.

b. The W_sp, by “Jean Blanque” (Wetlands Press, 1959): the terse companion piece to Shoals. Its anonymous hero, a handsome young entomologist from a small agricultural college in Maryland, doing field work on Batesian mimicry in the Dorchester marshes, comes to realize that, as if “bitten by the love-bog,” he esteems the objects of his researches above his human partners; that his human roles have been as it were mere protective camouflage. As autumn passes, he withdraws into a tent of his own making in the saltmarsh, where the “novel” leaves him in a dormancy from which, perhaps, he wakes ½ – tranced come spring and takes flight with his 1,000,000 brothers. Dream? Hallucination? Transfiguration? The question is tantalizingly unresolved, while the reader her/himself takes wing on the heart-constricting beauty of the closing passage, a description of the mating flight.

c. Backwater Ballads, by “Jay Bray” (Wetlands Press, 1961), our magnum opus: a cycle of 360 tales set in the Backwater National Wildlife Refuge, our birthplace, at all periods of its history (i.e., 1600–1960: 1 tale for each year, each degree of the cycle, and each day of the ideal year, of which our actual calendars are but the corrupt approximation). The tales are told from the viewpoint of celestial Aedes Sollicitans, a freshmarsh native with total recall of all her earlier hatches, who each year bites 1 visitor in the Refuge and acquires, with her victim’s blood, an awareness of his/her history. The 1st is the Tayac Kekataughtassapooekskunoughmass, or “90 Fish,” King of the Ahatchwhoop Indians. The 9th is Captain John Smith of Virginia; the 10th Henry Burlingame I, my own foster father’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. The 360th (and the 1st to give himself to her unreservedly) is the Author, whom in return she gratefully “infects” with her narrative accumulation.

Compare these with the Defendant’s impostures. And having compared (and subdued the indignation that must follow your comparison!), let us arrange a meeting, either in your office or here in Lily Dale – where in your other capacity you can satisfy yourself with the progress of LILYVAC II on the NOVEL project – prepare our briefs, file our suit, and, companions-in-arms such as the world has never RESET He shall pay.

Were we not so sleep-ridden, we could not close without a word on the success of our fall work period; the 1st phase of the 3rd year (V) of the 5-year NOVEL plan (see Enclosure #2). But we must rest, rest for the prodigious labors of the coming spring, when in any case Ms. Bernstein will submit to the Foundation our full and confidential ½-annual report. Then let us together RESET JBB 3 encl.

(ENCL. 1)

Jerome Bonaparte Bray

General Delivery

Lily Dale, N.Y. 14752

March 4, 1969

“J.B.,” “Author”

Dept. English, Annex B

SUNY/Buffalo

Buffalo, N.Y. 14214

“Dear” “sir”:

Enclosed (so that you cannot pretend not to know us) are printouts of letters from us to His late Majesty George III of Maryland and to Mr. Todd Andrews of the Tidewater Foundation – who also acts as our attorney, and from whom, in that latter capacity, you will presently be hearing.

We know very well that August 5 of this year will be the 3rd anniversary of 1st publication of “your” “novel” G.G.B. and that therefore on that date the statute of limitations will run on actions against you connected with that “work.” 5 months hence! But it is your time, not the statute, that runs out. Only the press of other business (and our absolute need for rest at this season) has kept us from bringing you sooner to account. But our eye has been upon you as yours has been upon the calendar.

Nearly 7 years have passed since the true Giles delivered to our trust the Revised New Syllabus of his ascended father Harold Bray, Grand Tutor of the universal University. 4 years ago tonight we roused from the profoundest torpor of our life to read that Tutor-given text, and to commence the great work of expunging from it the corruptions and perversions of the Antitutor and false Giles, your Goat-Boy. Like you, he believed he had triumphed over Truth, not knowing that his nemesis but awaited the proper hour to sting!

With tonight’s Worm Moon (which by summer will become a Conqueror indeed) that hour is come. We ourselves must return for a time yet into rest; indeed we can scarcely hold pen to paper for drowsiness; must count on another to post this ultimatum. But justice now is hatched and stirring: when you next hear from us (a month hence, if you have not by then made the reparations our attorney will demand) we shall be fully awake and at work on our grand project. Do not imagine that because your thefts are of gn_t-like inconsequence by comparison with our Revolutionary NOVEL, they will go unpunished. For as our noble forebear, while conquering Europe and administering the Empire, could attend with equal firmness to such details as correcting our namesake’s American marriage, so we, while supervising the Novel Revolution, will not fail to attend also to your exposure and ruin.

B.

cc. T. Andrews

2 encl.

(ENCL. 2)

Enclosure #1

On board the Gadf_y III, Lake Chautauqua, New York, 14 July 1966

To His Majesty George III of England

Tidewater Farms, Redmans Neck, Maryland 21612

Your Royal Highness,

On 22 June 1815, in order to establish a new and sounder base of empire, we abdicated the throne of France and withdrew to the port of Rochefort, where 2 of our frigates – new, fast, well-manned and – gunned – lay ready to run Your Majesty’s blockade of the harbor and carry us to America. Captain Ponée of the Méduse planned to engage on the night of 10 July the principal English vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow, against which he estimated the Méduse could hold out for 2 hours while her sister ship, with our party aboard, outran the lesser blockading craft. The plan was audacious but certain of success. Reluctant, however, to sacrifice the Méduse, we resolved instead like a cunning wrestler to turn our adversary’s strength to our advantage: to reach our goal by means of, rather than despite, Your Majesty’s navy; and so we addressed to your son the Prince Regent the following:

Isle of Aix, 12 July 1815

In view of the factions that divide my country and of the enmity of the greatest powers in Europe I have brought my political career to a close and am going like Themistocles to seat myself on the hearthstone of the British people. I put myself under the protection of English Law and request that protection of Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my enemies.

Having sent our aide-de-camp before us with this message and instructions to request from the Prince Regent passports to America, on Bastille Day we put ourself and our entourage in the hands of Commander Maitland aboard Bellerophon and left France. Alas, Your Majesty’s own betrayal and confinement on the mischievous charge of insanity should have taught us that our confidence in your son and his ministers was ill placed, more especially as it is with the Muse of the Past that we have ever gone to school for present direction. When therefore we learned from Admiral Sir George Cockburn that our destination was to be, not London and Baltimore, but St. Helena, like a derelict student we applied in vain to our old schoolmistress for vindication: