Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
ernor Nicholson and thus anyone who supported him, who may be the
"Mr. R.B." mentioned in the note and was almost surely in London at the
time this burlesque appeared.70
The next chronologically among Chesapeake Bay satiric writings came
from the gifted pen of Marylander Ebenezer Cook, at least one of whose
poetic pieces has been included in a number of colonial-period anthologies
and its title borrowed in our century for a remarkable burlesque-ironic
novel by a living Marylander who has made Cook himself his dubious
hero. In his own time this lawyer and government tax collector was both
famous and infamous as a versifier. A few of his minor poems, his elegies,
are serious, though in some instances one senses irony or mockery in them.
But Cook is rightly remembered for his skill in composing Hudibrastic
satire on purely American subjects and his significant contributions to
several forms or elements of the American humorous tradition. The Sot­
Weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland (London, 1708), Sotweed Redivivus:
Or The Planters Looking-Glass (Annapolis, 1730), and The
Maryland Muse with its two distinct poems (Annapolis, 1731) mark their
author as the foremost American satirist of the first half of the eighteenth
century and as the first user or first successful user of certain character
types, language, tone, and double-purpose in humorous writing culminating
in the South in certain of our nineteenth- and twentieth-century
authors noted above as being in the main line of our comic tradition.
Born perhaps in England about 1667, Cook probably came to Maryland
in his childhood with his father, Andrew, London merchant and tobacco
(sotweed ) factor. Ebenezer probably traveled frequently between Maryland
and Britain in the capacity of tobacco salesman, and there is some
evidence that he studied law, perhaps under Thomas Bordley, attorneygeneral
of the province. The title of "Poet-Laureate of Maryland" affixed
after Cook's name in some printings of his work may have been a title
actually bestowed (through Bordley's influence? ) by a colony official, but
it seems more likely that it was a mock title suggested by Bordley and his
friends. At any rate, another poet, the Virginian John Fox, in a long poem
addressed to Bordley, asks permission to study law under that gentleman
as Cook had done and declares that he will make Cook "my Poet
Laureat too." 71
The Sot-Weed Factor; or, A Voyage to Maryland is his first known poem
and perhaps his best. Quite clearly the author knew from long personal
experience the way of life of the tobacco factor and all the idiosyncrasies
of the various segments or aspects of provincial society with which such
a merchant would come in contact. The emphasis in this first version is
on society, for he satirizes small farmers (or ordinary planters ), great
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