Free Final Fridays by John Barth

Maryland’s military-naval debut; it accounts for the careful wording of a prominent historical marker on Route 50 just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge from Annapolis: The first English settlement within Maryland happens to have been a settlement of Virginians, not of Marylanders. Their expulsion was the overture to a veritable floating opera of waterborne friction between the Old Line State and the Old Dominion that ongoes yet; as recently as 1984 [the year I wrote this paragraph] the Virginia crabbers were complaining that the Maryland crabbers were checking into motels on the lower Eastern Shore, crabbing right around the clock in Virginia waters, cutting loose the Virginians’ pots, and
“hot-sheeting” the motels into the bargain by paying one tab and sleeping in shifts....
    My point is that the seeds of such prickly nettles had already sprouted when the first Marylanders arrived to cultivate their garden. Even the African slave business was fifteen years old already; by 1634 it was a going concern, and by century’s end a growth industry, like computer software nowadays. In short, what Lord Baltimore’s “boat people” accomplished—that band of more or less intrepid, more or less Roman Catholic adventurers, self-exiles, and politico-religious refugees from a now-and-then anti-papist homeland—was not the discovery of Maryland, but its invention, followed by its appropriation (expropriation where necessary), and as quickly as possible thereafter by its busy “development.” That is to say, by the exploitation of its abundant and scarcely scratched natural resources for their own and their patron’s benefit and—the expedition’s chaplains being Jesuits—“for the greater glory of God.”
    Amen, and end of quotation. My point here is that in the extent of that “development,” by the century’s turn the Virginians remained substantially ahead of the Marylanders, for good and for ill. I venture to say that while the serial misadventures of Ebenezer Cooke’s original sot-weed factor (of whom more presently) could perhaps have befallen him in colonial Virginia, their comic plausibility is strengthened by their happening in colonial Maryland.
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    WHAT WERE THOSE misadventures, and what do they tell us about life back then and there? Knowledgeable as you-all are, I’m not
going to assume that every single one of you has read and retained in memory the 600-plus pages of my Sot-Weed Factor novel or even the couple-dozen pages of the original Eben Cooke’s satiric poem of 1708—which, by the way, I warmly recommend. Let me briefly summarize the situation of both, and then I’ll get on with our subject.
    No need to explain here the terms sot-weed and factor —although some readers are surprised to learn that those terms don’t refer to an element in a situation, like the “fudge factor” in statistical analysis or the notorious “sleaze factor” in some national political conventions. Wholesale tobacco agents who traded English manufactured goods for hogsheads of tobacco from the plantations of tidewater Virginia and Maryland were a feature of everyday life here in the colonial period, and they supplied both the title and the luckless hero of one of the very first American literary satires: Ebenezer Cooke’s fierce and funny antidote to the promotional puffs that characterized most other contemporary writing about life in colonial Tidewaterland: the Edenic landscape, the noble savages and honest tradespeople, the civilized gentry on their elegant and hospitable plantations.... All true enough of colonial Virginia, maybe; but when Cooke’s anonymous first-person narrator, a young Englishman down on his luck, arrives in this fabled New World to try his hand at sot-weed factoring, he finds tidewater Maryland to be an uncouth, pestilential place where the natives stink of bear grease; 3 the