Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
much more than they had in Parks' Maryland Gazette. For example, on
July 27, 1737, dated from "Hanover, July 25" and signed "J.C.J[ohln
C-s-y" appeared a ribald mock will, sexual and scatological, including such
gems as "I give to the Poor of the Parish of Martin, / Three Bushels of
Wind, to be laid out in F-rt-ng." On February 10, 1737/8, one F.R. contributed
lively verses against the bonds of matrimony. On October 20 in a
sworn-as-true letter from a "William Thomas" of North Carolina to his
Virginia father-in-law, the satire may be directed at the same Carolinians
Byrd was to caricature : "As to my Transactions in America, I came as a
Servant into Virginia, drubb'd my Master, ravish'd my Mistress, and ran
away. I turn'd Weaver, married a wife, and soon killed her with Kindness."
Then on November 24 "W.W." sent in a facetious short essay, "Instructions
how to make a perfect Quaker," beginning "FIRST, Take a Handful
of the Herb of Deceit, and a few leaves of Folly, and a little of the Rose of
Vain-Glory, with some of the Blossoms of Malice . .. :' and carrying it on
to a complete recipe. More serious as well as stronger satire was to accom­
pany or take the place of such light mocking pieces in later issues.
Before turning to the major satirist of the pre-1745 period, one should
note that John Lawson in A New Voyage to Carolina (London, 1709)
contributed to the southern humorous tradition of the tall tale. In describing
the tulip tree and its "prodigious Bigness" he remarks that he has
been informed of one of this species so large that "a lusty man had his
Bed and Household Furniture, and lived in it, till his Labour got him a
more fashionable Mansion. He afterwards became a noted Man, in his
Country, for Wealth and Conduct." He passes on Indian stories of huge
rattlesnakes which devoured canoes full of red men, or of one which bit
a locust tree as thick as a man's arm and caused the tree to die. And there
was the rattlesnake put into bed with a dying man. The next morning the
man was found sound and healthy and the snake dead. Lawson certainly
relishes the tall tale, but usually he is careful to differentiate those he believes
to be true from the superstitions and lies of the red men. Dr. Brickell's
The Natural History of North Carolina (Dublin, [1737]) , which
owes most of its data to Lawson, adds a good deal of nature lore, as that
whales copulate standing upright with their heads out of the water,
though whether this is tongue-in-cheek reporting is not clear. Brickell also
has additional stories of remarkable Indian medical cures. These, with
the earlier George Alsop's and Robert Beverley's (The History and Present
State of Virginia, 1705 ), as that of the Indian who brought rain for two
bottles of rum, with other tales of conjuration regarded skeptically by the
white narrator, helped to establish a comic as well as a supernatural folklore
about the red man which was to persist in American literature.78