The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “We’ll put into port when I say so,” Pound declared, and returned the pistols to his sash. Two men stepped forward to retrieve their wounded shipmate.

  “Over the side with him,” the Captain ordered, and despite the fact that he was not yet dead, the Carolinian was tumbled into the ocean.

  “The next man I shan’t waste a ball on,” Pound threatened, and did not even look back to see his victim flounder in the wake.

  “Why is the Moor so happy?” Bertrand whispered to Ebenezer. “Ye said he was the wrathfulest of all.”

  The poet, stunned by his first sight of death, shook his head and swallowed furiously to keep from being ill.

  Just then the lookout cried “Sail, ho! Sail to eastward!” The pirates looked to see a three-master heading in their direction, but were too chastened to display any great interest.

  “There, now!” laughed Captain Pound, after examining the stranger through his glass. “If Patch had held his peace ten minutes more, he’d not be feeding sea-crabs! D’ye know what ship stands yonder, men?”

  They did not, nor did the prospect of robbing it fill them with enthusiasm.

  “ ’Tis the London ship I’ve laid for these two weeks,” Pound declared, “whilst you wretches were conspiring in the fo’c’sle! Did ye ne’er hear tell of a brigantine called the Cyprian?”

  On hearing this name the crew cheered lustily, again and again. They slapped one another’s backs, leaped and danced about the deck, and at the Captain’s orders sprang as if possessed to ratlines, sheets, halyards, and brace. Topsails and forestaysail were broken out, the helm was put hard over, and the shallop raced to meet her newest prey head-on.

  “What is this Cyprian, that changed their minds so lightly?” Bertrand whispered.

  “I do not know,” his master answered, sorry to see the mutiny come to nothing. “But she hath sprung from the sea like her namesake, and haply we’ll have cause to love her. Look sharp for your chance to slip aboard; I hope to steal the Journal if I can.”

  15

  The Rape of the Cyprian; Also, the Tale of Hicktopeake, King of Accomack, and the Greatest Peril the Laureate Has Fallen Into Thus Far

  IN LESS THAN a quarter of an hour the shallop and the brigantine, sailing smartly on opposite reaches, were within cannon-range of each other. Dozens of the brigantine’s passengers were crowded forward to see the shallop, possibly the first vessel they’d met in weeks; they waved hands and kerchiefs in innocent salute. The pirates, every idle hand of whom was similarly occupied, responded with a fearsome cry and fired a round into the water dead ahead of their quarry. It was not until then, when the others screamed and ran for cover, that Ebenezer began to guess in a general way what was afoot: every one of the passengers he could see was female.

  “Dear Heav’n!” he breathed.

  The captain of the brigantine realized the shallop’s intention and came about to run north before the wind, at the same time firing on the attacker; but his defense came too late. Anticipating exactly such a maneuver, Captain Pound had his crew already stationed to follow suit, and the shallop was under way on the new course before the brigantine finished setting her sails. Moreover, although the several square-rigged sails of the brigantine were better for running before the wind than the fore-and-aft rig of her pursuer, the shallop’s smaller size and lighter weight more than compensated for the difference. Captain Pound ordered his men not to return the musket- and pistol-fire; instead, taking the helm himself, he cut so close under the brigantine’s stern that the name Cyprian, on a banner held by carved oak cupids, was plainly legible on her transom. At the very moment when the shallop’s bowsprit seemed about to pierce the victim’s stern, he veered a few degrees to starboard; the cannoneer in the bow fired a ball point-blank into the brigantine’s rudder, and the chase was over. The Cyprian’s crew scrambled to take in sail before the helpless vessel capsized. By the time the shallop came about and retraced her course the brigantine was rolling under bare poles in the swell; the crew stood with upraised arms, the first mate ran a white flag up the main halyards, and the captain, hands clasped behind him, waited on the poop for the worst.

  The pirates were beside themselves. They thronged to the rail, shouting obscenities and making lewd gestures. It was all Boabdil could do to bring the shallop alongside, so preoccupied were they all with their joy: the Moor himself had stripped off all but his tall red headgear and stood like a nightmare at the helm. At length the grapples were made fast, the sails struck, and the ships lashed together along their beams, so that they rode like mated seabirds on the waves. Then with howls the pirates swarmed over the rails, cursing and stumbling in their haste. The Cyprian’s crew backed off in fright, but no one paid them the slightest attention: indeed, Captain Pound had finally to force three of his men at pistol-point to tie them to the masts. The rest had no thought for anything but breaking open the companionway and cabin doors, which the terrified passengers had bolted from inside.

  Their savagery made Ebenezer blanch. Beside him where he stood near the shallop’s foremast was the oldest member of the pirate crew, Carl, the sailmaker—a wizened, evil-appearing little man in his sixties with a short, dirty beard and no teeth at all—chuckling and shaking his head at the scene.

  “Is the ship full of women?” the Laureate asked him.

  The old man nodded mirthfully. “She’s the whore-boat out o’ London.” Once or twice a year, he explained, the Cyprian’s captain took on a load of impoverished ladies who were willing to prostitute themselves for six months in the colonies, where the shortage of women was acute. The girls were transported without charge; the enterprising captain received not only their fares but—in the case of girls with special qualifications such as virginity, respectability, or extreme youth, or comeliness—a bonus as well from the brothel-masters who came to Philadelphia from all over the provinces for the purpose of replenishing or augmenting their staffs. As for the girls, some had already been prostitutes in London, others were women rendered desperate by poverty or other circumstances, and some simply hard-reasoning young serving girls bent on reaching America at any cost, who found six months of prostitution more attractive than the customary four-year indenture of the colonial servant.

  “Every pirate on the coast keeps his eye out for the Cyprian this time o’ year,” the sailmaker said. “There’s better than a hundred wenches behind that door. Lookee there at Boabdil!”

  Ebenezer saw the naked Moor push aside his shipmates and raise a huge maul that he had found nearby, probably left on deck by the brigantine’s carpenter. With one blow he splintered the door and dived headlong inside, the others close behind him. A moment later the air was split with screams and curses.

  Ebenezer’s knees trembled. “Poor wretches! Poor wretches!”

  “This!” scoffed Carl. “ ’Tis but a bloody prayer meeting, this is! Ye should have shipped with old Tom Tew of Newport, as I did. One time last year we sailed from Libertatia to the coast of Araby, and in the Red Sea we overhauled one o’ the Great Mogul’s ships with pilgrims bound for Mecca; a hundred gun she carried, but we boarded her without losing a man, and what do ye think we found? Sixteen hundred virgins, sir! Not a maidenhead more nor less! Sixteen hundred virgins bound for Mecca, the nicest little Moors ye e’er laid eyes upon, and not above a hundred of us! Took us a day and a night to pop ’em all—Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Portogeezers, Africans, and Englishmen, we were—and ere we had done, the deck looked like a butcher’s block. There is not the like o’ that day and night in the history of the lickerish world, I swear’t! I cut a brace myself, for all I was coming on to sixty—little brown twins they were, and tight as a timber-hitch, and I’ve ne’er got up the old fid since!”

  He rambled on, but Ebenezer could not bear to hear him out. For one thing, the scene on deck was too arresting for divided attention: the pirates dragged out their victims in ones and twos, a-swoon or awake, at pistol-point or by main strength. He saw women assaulted on the decks, on the stairways, at
the railings, everywhere, in every conceivable manner. None was spared, and the prettier prizes were clawed at by two and three at a time. Boabdil appeared with one over each shoulder, kicking and scratching him in vain: as he presented one to Captain Pound on the quarter-deck, the other wriggled free and tried to escape her monstrous fate by scrambling up the mizzen ratlines. The Moor allowed her a fair head start and then climbed slowly in pursuit, calling to her in voluptuous Arabic at every step. Fifty feet up, where any pitch of the hull is materially amplified by the height, the girl’s nerve failed: she thrust bare arms and legs through the squares of the rigging and hung for dear life while Boabdil, once he had come up from behind, ravished her unmercifully. Down on the shallop the sailmaker clapped his hands and chortled; Ebenezer, heartsick, turned away.

  He saw Bertrand a little distance behind him, watching with undisguised avidity, and recalled his plan. The time was propitious: every member of the shallop’s crew except old Carl was busy at his pleasure, and even Captain Pound, who normally stood aloof from all festivities, had found the Moor’s trophy too tempting to refuse and had disappeared with her into the brigantine’s cabin.

  “Look sharp!” he whispered to the valet. “I’m going for the Journal now, and then we’ll try to slip aboard the Cyprian.” And ignoring Bertrand’s frightened look, he made his way carefully aft to the doorway of Captain Pound’s quarters. It required no searching to find what he sought: the Journal lay in plain view on the table, its loose pages held fast by a fungus-coral paperweight. Ebenezer snatched it up and scanned the first page with pounding heart: a transcription of the Assembly’s convening, meaningless to him. But on the recto—

  “Ah!”

  A Secret Historie of the Voiage Up the Bay of Chesapeake From Jamestowne in Virginia, he read, Undertaken in the Yeer of Our Lord 1608 By Capt Jno Smith, & Faithfullie Set Down in Its Severall Parts By the Same. And below, in an antique, almost illegible hand, the narrative commenced, not as a diary at all but as a summary account, probably meant as the initial draft of part of the author’s well-known Generall Historie of Virginia:

  Seven souldiers, six gentlemen, DrRussell the Chirurgeon & my selfe did embark from the towne of Kecoughtan, in Virginia, in June of the present yeer 1608,

  To walk a wayless Way with uncouth Pace,

  Wch yet no Christian Man did ever trace… .

  Much farther than this the poet dared not read at the moment, but he could not refrain from thumbing rapidly through the rest of the manuscript in search of the name Henry Burlingame. It did not take long to find: No sooner was the King asleep, he read on an early page, then I straightway made for the doore, and wd have fulfill’d his everie wish, had not Ld Burlingame prevented me, and catching hold of my arme, declar’d, That he did protest my doing this thing…

  “Burlingame a Lord!” Ebenezer exclaimed to himself, and joyfully thrust the manuscript into his shirt, holding it fast under the waist of his breeches. He peeped out onto the deck. All seemed clear: the only man in a position to spy him was the Moor in the Cyprian’s mizzen-rigging, and he was occupied with climbing down for further conquests, leaving his first quite ravaged in the ratlines. The sun was setting; its long last rays lit the scene unnaturally, from the side, with rose and gold.

  “Hi ho, Master Eben!”

  The Laureate quailed at the salute; but the voice was Bertrand’s.

  “Stupid fellow! He’ll do me in yet!” He looked for the valet in vain on the shallop’s deck: the sailmaker stood alone by the railing.

  “Come along, Master Eben! Over here!” The voice came from the direction of the brigantine. Horrified, Ebenezer saw Bertrand standing in the vessel’s stern, about to have at a plump lass whom he was bending over the taffrail. Ebenezer signaled frantically for the man to come back, but Bertrand laughed and shook his head. “They’ve asked us to join ’em!” he called, and turned to his work.

  For Ebenezer to slip aboard unnoticed was unthinkable in the face of this defection. All over the Cyprian the debauch continued; the hapless women, gilded by the sunlight, had for the most part abandoned hope, and instead of running, submitted to their attackers with pleas for mercy or stricken silence. The poet shuddered and fled to his cell in the rope-locker, determined, since he could not make his escape, to take advantage of the diversion to read through the precious manuscript. He borrowed a lamp from the fo’c’sle, closed the heavy door, took out the Journal, and lay on his bed of tattered sailcloth, where he read as follows:

  Seven souldiers, six gentlemen, DrRussell the Chirurgeon & my selfe did embark from the towne of Kecoughtan, in Virginia, in June of the present yeer 1608,

  To walk a wayless Way with uncouth Pace,

  Wch yet no Christian Man did ever trace.

  We took for the voiage a barge of three tonnes burthen, to the provisioning whereof I earlie set the great Liverpooler Henry Burlingame, that I durst not leave behind to smirch my name with slander & calumnie. Yet scarce had we dropt Kecoughtan to Southward, then I found the wretch had play’d me false; to feed the companie of fifteene men the summer long, he had supply’d one meager sack of weevilie oats and a barricoe of cloudie water! I enquir’d of him, Wd he starve us? Or did he think to make me turn tayle home? Wch latter hope I knew, he shar’d with all the idle Gentlemen his fellows. Then I set them all to short rations and fishing over the gunwales, albeit I knew no means to cooke a fish in the barge. The truth was, I reckon’d on a landfall within two days, but said naught of it, and what fish they caught I threw back in the Bay. I then commenc’d instructing one & all in the art of sayles & tiller, wch matters the souldiers took to readilie and the Gentlemen complayn’d of—none lowder then Ld Burlingame, that I had a-bayling water from the bilge.

  This Burlingame wd say to his neighbour, What doth the Captain reck it if we perish? What time he getteth in a pickle, we Gentlemen must grubb him out, else some naked Salvage wench flieth down from Heaven to save his neck. By wch he referr’d to Pocahontas, Powhatans daughter, that some months past had rescu’d me, and I saw, he meant to devill me through the voiage.

  Next day we rays’d a cape of land, lying due North of Kecoughtan, and the companie rejoyc’d thereat, inasmuch as there bellies all complayn’d of meale & clowdie water. We made straightway to shoar, whereupon we found a pair of fearsome Salvages, arm’d with bone-poynt speares. I made bold to salute them, and was pleas’d to learn, they spake a tongue like Powhatans, to wch Emperour they declar’d them selves subject. The fiercenesse of these men was in there paynt alone; they were but spearing fish along the shallows. Upon my entreatie, they led us to there town and to there King, that was call’d Hicktopeake.

  Then follow’d an adventure, wch I cannot well include among my Histories. I shall set it down upon these privie pages, for that it shews afresh that enmity I spake of, betwixt Ld Burlingame & my selfe, wch led us anon to the verie doore of Death…

  “Mercy!” Ebenezer cried, and turned the page.

  This Hicktopeake, then, bade us well come to his Kingdom, the wch he did call Accomack, and lay’d before us a sumptuous meale. I observ’d him, while that we ate, and I sweare him to be the comliest, proper, civill Salvage we incounter’d. I din’d well, as is my wont, and also Walter the physician and the souldiers, but our Gentlemen shew’d smalle appetyte for Salvage cookerie. Burlingame, in especiall, shew’d little stomacke, for a man of his corpulencie, and who had been erst so lowd of his bellie. The meale done, Hicktopeake deliver’d him selfe of a smalle speech, again bidding us well come to his towne, and offering to replenishe our supplies ere we left him. It seem’d to me then, he shew’d a curious eagernesse, that we shd tarrie somewhile with him, but I learn’d not the cause of it at once.

  On my enquiring of him, the extent of his Kingdom? Hicktopeake reply’d onely that it was of considerable breadth, and ran awaye up the countrie, untill that the land grewe wider. This territorie he rul’d conjoyntlie with his Brother, one Debedeavon, called by the Salvages, the Laughing King of Accomack. Debedeav
ons towne, we learn’d was farther inland, where he liv’d with his Queene in a goodlie house. I ask’d then, Where was Hicktopeakes Queene? meaning no more then a courtesie by my question. But seeing his face grewe all beclowded, I sought to change the topick, and inquir’d, Why was Debedeavon call’d the Laughing King? Whereupon, albeit I knew not why, Hicktopeakes wrath did but increase, so that he was scarce able to contain him selfe. I sawe no frute in farther inquirie, and so held my peace, and smoak’d of the tobacco that was then past round.

  Hicktopeake at length regayning somewhat of his controll, he did command my partie to be given lodging for the night, and I consented, for that the skye was lowring, and bade fowle weather. The Gentlemen and my selfe, were given place in Hicktopeakes howse, that for all his being King, was but a single roome of large dimension. All did forthwith set them selves to sleep, save Burlingame, who ever hownds my steps, and sleeps not save when I sleep also. The King & I then smoak’d many pipes beside the fyre, in all silence. I knew well, he was desirous of speaking farther to me, but that after the manner of the Salvages, he tarry’d long ere commencing. For this reason I yearn’d that Burlingame shd retyre, that we might speake privilie, but this he wd not, maugre my hints & suggestions.

  At last Hicktopeake spake, and talk’d a great while of trifling things, as is the Salvages wont. Then he said, in substance (for I am here Englishing his speech), Sir, ye doubtlesse mark me a batchelor, for that no wife attendeth me in my house, or at my board, and farther, that upon thy enquirie, Where was my Queene? I mayde thee no replie. Yet in this thou art mistaken. Queene have I in sooth, and of surpassing comelinesse, that I have onely latelie had to wife. Yet wife she is not, for is it not the first requirement of a wife, that she seeke not farther than her wedded spouse, for her felicitie? But my Queene, she findeth me deficient, though I mark my selfe a man in everie wise, and she goeth about unsatisfy’d. And Queene she is not, for is it not the first requirement of a Queene, that she doe naught but what will shewe the greatnesse of her King? But my Queene, from her dissatisfaction with my manlinesse, doth ever seek pleasure in the howses of other men, thereby bringing disgrace upon my head; and stille she goeth unsatisfy’d, by her own pronouncement. Now this is an evill thing, for that not only doth this woman dishonour my selfe, and keep me for ever wearie, but also she fatigueth all the young men of my towne, and old as well. She is even as is the leech, that having tasted bloud, can never drink his fille; or as the owle, that devoureth all the myce of the field, and goeth yet hungrie to her nest. My Brother, Debedeavon, maketh much of this matter, and laugheth at me still (wherefor they call him, the Laughing King). A wife he hath, that he keepeth well satisfy’d, and hence regardeth him selfe my better, as doe his people mine. (Yet is his wife a mowse, and lightlie fill’d, for that oft have I try’d her my own selfe, the while my brother fish’d.) Therefore I aske of thee of the faire skinne this, that ye assaye to please the Queene, or teach her to be pleas’d even with that wch she hath alreadie, to the end that peace & honour may reign in my towne, and my Brother mock me no farther. For I judge of thy dress, thy strange vessell, and thy manlie bearing, thou art no common man, but a doer of wonders.