Letters

overtly refer to the “one that pass’d for Chamber-Maid” at the i

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 wi

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

A

Upon A

At his then age (about 36), his parents’ names were of less interest to Grandfather than their nature: accepting as true A

In the absence of any documentary evidence — for which he scour’d the colonies as tenaciously as had his father before him in search of his—A.B.C. III hearken’d to the verdict of his heart: he decided that while his grandfather Chicamec, the originator of the Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy, had been an unsuccessful idealist, his father Henry Burlingame III had been a deplorably successful hypocrite, betraying his own aboriginal blood in the venal interest of the British Crown. A

This hard judgement upon his lately-discover’d, long-dead father profoundly changed Grandfather’s life. The course of his researches up & down the country had brot him into contact with Indians of various nations as well as with officials of the several colonies & the British & French provincial authorities. His eyes were open’d to thitherto-unsuspected dimensions of a history he had largely taken for granted. It surprised him (and surprises me) that a man of early middle age, practicing law all his adult life in the seat of a colonial government, could have remain’d politically i

They had also & no less importantly, these researches, led him here: to the newly-raised seat of the half-breed Baron Henri Castine II, son of André Castine & the Tarratine princess Madocawanda. His object was to learn what he could of that ubiquitous “Monsieur Casteene” whose name haunts the archives of the English colonies. In pursuit of it he spent a season at Castines Hundred as a guest & hunting-companion of its owner, who like all the Barons Castine (including my present host, Andrée’s brother), was an hospitable, gregarious, anti-political sportsman. And here, like Yours Truly two generations later, he lost his heart to & won the hand of the daughter of the house, whom we must call Andrée Castine I to distinguish her from your mother.

For in other respects, grandmother & granddaughter are like as twins: the fine-edged physiognomy of the Gascoigne Castines, the dark eyes & hair & skin of Madocawanda’s people — and the audacity, political passion, & disregard for convention of “Monsieur Casteene”! She it was, Andrée I, who relieved Grandfather of both his political & his carnal i

This objective, if Andrew III’s own declaration is to be believed, was not the victory of the French in America, but the defeat of the British, for which in the existing circumstances the French & Indians were the obvious instrumentality. Having decided that his father had been a British anti-insurgent, Andrew III set about in the 2nd half of his life to be an anti-British insurgent; Andrée (still in the 1st half of hers) to be an organizer of the Indian nations 1st against the British, whom she saw as the greater menace to aboriginal integrity, and ultimately against the French, who had ever been less ruthless in displacing native populations, less interested in despoiling the land, and less disdainful of intermarriage betwixt the races. To the extent that their theatres of concern can be distinguisht, Andrée’s was to resist the extension of British hegemony northward above the Great Lakes & St. Lawrence River, Andrew’s to resist its extension westward across the Appalachians toward the Mississippi. These concerns came together in the period of the French & Indian War, along the frontier betwixt Fort Niagara & Fort Detroit.