Letters

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 ru

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 wi

’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 ma

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 A

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 i

But not your only artful! For with A

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.