Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
planters, Quakers, inn-frequenters, conditions of living, the new capital
at Annapolis as a wretched town, and something of government, though
most political satire is reserved for later work. "Buildings, Feasts, Frolicks,
Entertainments and Drunken Humours" are some of the topics suggested
in his long title.
Among the significant aspects of the poem per se and indicative of
future American literature are the treatment and character of his principl
persona. For the factor who is the dupe of wily and unscrupulous Marylanders
of every class is by no means Cook himself but his creation from
a perhaps all-too-familiar type. Cook the poet, like A.B. Longstreet or G.W.
Harris or Twain, can and does stand off from his creature who satirizes
and is satirized, who portrays the crudity and cruelty and ignorance of a
New World society. The factor is also, as Lemay has perceptively suggested,
a means or instrument, even more than the facts themselves, for ridiculing
British concepts of America. This particular satire-satirized tradition was
to have its greatest examples in the colonial period in Benjamin Franklin.
The old poet behind the scene here is a sophisticated gentleman, the speaker
a greenhorn who is victim frequently because of his own ignorance. Exaggerations
are carried to what would have been for contemporary American
readers absurdity, as in the allusion that in one particular county there
was actually a justice of the peace who could read and write. Englishmen
almost certainly would have taken this as fact. Suggestions are made that
the planters are all Presbyterians, that none but a very few were able to
afford breeches, that the aborigines came to America from any one of the
various places or by the means mentioned above in Chapter II, that the
novice is frightened into believing a herd of cattle bawling is actually a
pack of wolves. Women are slatterns, men are drunkards and/or cheats,
the food is all greasy and likely to be bear meat, the Indians are totally
naked and always murderous-these are among the "facts" both the narrator
and his British readers probably believed but Cook's fellow provincials
would have laughed away as absurd.
This is a well-organized poem in Hudibrastic couplets, beginning with
the speaker's reasons for leaving England (to escape prosecution or imprisonment)
in a ship "Freighted with Fools" on a voyage which took
three months. Landing with his trade-goods at Piscataway inlet (near the
present District of Columbia ), he is met by a throng of sunburned ("tawny
as a Moor" ) hatless, stockingless, and shoeless planters. The narrative continues
in episodic fashion, with hundreds of allusions to the alleged crudities
and miseries of backwoods life, including some exaggerated and vivid
descriptions of foul air and fearful snakes which cause the narrator to
spend the night in a tree, bitten all the while by mosquitoes and irritated
by croaking frogs.