Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· Literature, Principally Belletristic .
native southern American. Several early fragments or partial texts exist,
including two official reports written by Byrd as leader of the Dividing
Line expedition, which offer some clues as to how the author worked from
his raw materials. Unfortunately what would be the most valuable of
primary documents, the diary or diaries which he undoubtedly kept on
the journeys and which formed the basis for the diurnal-entry format of
all four works, is still missing.
Byrd probably waited several years after the expedition was over before
he began writing even one of the two histories. Not until July 1736 does he
mention in a known letter that he is shaping his rough notes into something
more, from internal evidence "The Secret History." "The History
of the Dividing Line" was probably begun about 1738, for he refers to the
multitudes flocking to hear George Whitefield, who came to the South in
that year and began his popular preaching in England the year before.
Prior to that he had offered to let London friends see the rough journal,
probably "The Secret History," which was "only the skelleton & Ground
Work of what I intend, which may sometime or other to be filled out with
vessels, & flesh, & have a decent skin drawn over all to keep things tight
in their places and prevent their looking frightful. I have the materials
ready, & want only leisure to put them together." He added a little later
that he would like his friend Mark Catesby to do the "figures," or illustrations
of plants and animals referred to. In other words, he intended to
publish his work. 79
Almost surely "The Secret History" is the earlier version and one not
intended for London publication. One half as long as "The History," it
omits the prefatory history of Virginia, uses tag names for the principal
participants, and is much more sharply satirical, even sarcastic, than "The
History." It contains provincial allusions which would have been totally
lost upon a British reading public, for example, to "the Commissary"
(James Blair). It may have been meant as an intermediate stage of composition,
but it was also a version designed for reading aloud around a
colonial fireplace, where congenial gentlemen and ladies accustomed to
ribaldry enjoyed the tale of a western adventure by people they knew.
What the two histories have in common is that they are both travel
accounts of the same expedition and that both possess a mock-heroic quality,
though in the case of "The History" mock-epic unobtrusively merges into
genuine epic. Both may be promotion pamphlets, though the propaganda
quality is certainly much stronger in "The History." The basis for most of
the humor in both versions is sex, as in Alsop, Cook, and even Cotton, but
the sex is much more abundant and much coarser in "The Secret History"
than in "The History."
Stylistic qualities in general are the same. Antithesis, analogy, witty dis-