Chesapeake (21 page)

Steed personally supervised each step in raising tobacco, from hoarding the precious seed—ten thousand did not fill a teaspoon—to topping the young plants, an operation which prevented useless leaves from proliferating high on the stalk and ensured a few big rich leaves at workable height; it had to be performed during the hottest days of July and August, when heat shimmered on still waters. Then Steed moved among his plants, nipping off tops by catching them between his right thumbnail and forefinger; in time his right hand grew larger and stronger than his left, his right thumbnail huge and dark and thick.

One morning at breakfast Martha Keene—she would not adopt the name Steed before she was properly married—noticed the discoloration on Edmund’s thumb and surprised him by leaning across the table and kissing it—‘The badge of our real nobility.’

At that time in distant England, Edmund’s older brother held the baronetcy and was known as Sir Philip Steed, but in the New World a new nobility was being born, of which the Steeds of Devon would be one of the founding families.

When Martha Keene had volunteered to emigrate to Virginia, she performed an act of courage oft repeated, rarely appreciated; but when she moved on to the isolation of Dover Island, it was sheer heroism.

How did she survive? Precariously. There was no doctor and only the slightest medication: calomel for indigestion, sassafras tea for fever. Constipation was a constant fear, for it could lead to more serious ills, so every family had its favorite purge; the ague was also a torment. Teeth were a special problem, and each locality owned one pair of forceps, worn and rusty, for the yanking away of rotting molars, plus some strong-armed man with good eyesight who did the job; two men held the patient by the shoulders, another lay across his knees, and the forceps
would go to work, twisting and pulling until something shattered.

Mothers watched with anguish as their children contracted an endless chain of diseases, sitting awake through fevered nights and grieving as the little ones were buried beneath loblolly pines. However, if the children survived this deadly assault, they developed an immunity that was striking; often they would live from eighteen through forty-eight with scarce an illness, rocklike people who could resist cold and hunger and poor nutrition, but by then they were elders and at fifty they were usually dead. Women especially died young, and it was not unusual for one husband to bury two wives before he left a young widow to survive him for twenty years.

The house to which Martha came had been much improved by its former occupant, the lively Meg Shipton, but it was still little more than a primitive hut. It was superbly sited: as you left the Chesapeake your shallop moved due east through the channel north of the island, then turned south to enter the broad estuary leading to Devon Creek. A mile up that deep body of water brought you to a wharf projecting out from the northern shore, and above the wharf, on a small plateau of fine level land overlooking vast distances, stood the house. It had been built in stages, first a shack, then a separate kitchen located to the east so that the sun reached it at dawn, then a second floor with bedrooms fearfully cold in winter, and finally some connected sheds and storage areas.

Meager furniture slapped together from local wood, sparse utensils carved from oak, a few knives and forks with spoons of wood, those were the things Martha had to work with. She had one iron kettle, suspended by a hook over an open fire, and a kind of iron-and-clay oven in which she performed miracles. A low fire was kept burning day and night, fueled by immense piles of wood outside the door. The place had few blankets but many animal skins, which in some ways were better, for they showed little soiling, and no sheets. Clothing was precious, a man’s trousers lasting for twelve or fifteen years of constant use, a woman’s dress surviving innumerable alterations and additions. Adornments were few, and those which a husband did bring were rarely worn though deeply cherished.

The house had two peculiarities, one which infuriated Martha, one which provided foolish contentment. Since there was little glass in Jamestown and none in Devon, the Steeds had covered their windows with oiled paper, itself a precious commodity, and a score of times Martha, contemplating windows which allowed light but not vision, would catch herself complaining, ‘I do wish we had glass that someone could see through,’ and each time a ship left their wharf for Bristol she begged, ‘Can’t they bring back some Holland glass?’ What pleased her were the heavy pewter dishes; they had a solid quality, and to see them piled neatly in their pine cupboard was an experience she treasured. ‘I
value them more than silver,’ she told her husband, and as she washed them, she exulted: They are mine.

Labor was specialized, for with the arrival of slaves at Jamestown it became practical for plantation managers there to cultivate particular skills among them. Slave women who could sew were taken indoors; men who could make shoes were valued; and especially treasured were those blacks who could convert oak trees into staves, and staves into hogsheads for shipping tobacco. Poor Steed, without access to slaves, had to master all the mechanical arts himself, then teach them to new servants as they reached Devon. It was a thankless task; he would spend two years instructing some clumsy lad how to shape a barrel, then enjoy only four years of profitable work from the young man, because the seventh year was largely wasted: the servant spent most of that time trying to locate land of his own on which to start a farm. Steed became the master teacher of the Eastern Shore, and Devon the university through which the Choptank would be civilized.

A peculiar feature of life on Devon was that money did not exist. Sometimes the Steeds would go three years without seeing a coin, and when they did, it was apt to be of either Spanish or French origin. English pounds and shillings were incredibly scarce, a planned design on the part of the government in London and the king’s officers in the colonies. ‘As long as we control the flow of coins,’ they reasoned, ‘we shall be in command.’ So the plantations were strangled for lack of exchange; no Steed boy ever had a penny to spend, for there were no pennies, no place to spend them and nothing to spend them on.

In self-defense the colonists invented their own specie: roanoke was universally accepted; tobacco could be legally used to pay any debt; and taxes were specifically levied in hogsheads of the weed. The total wealth of the Steeds, which was becoming impressive, was represented in tobacco, either in the fields, or in the drying sheds, or in hogsheads awaiting shipment, or in transit across the Atlantic, or in some warehouse in London. Slips of paper, often tattered, represented their savings.

They looked to London for everything good. How precious a packet of needles was, how Martha grieved if she lost even one. Nails were like gold; one servant did nothing all year long but carve wooden nails, becoming so skillful that his fine products were exchanged widely throughout Virginia. Books came from London, and cloth, and utensils, and furniture, and every other thing that made a remote island tolerable. The Steeds still loved England, and when cross-ocean ships came into the creek the entire family crowded the wharf to find what good things had arrived from home, and often the letters brought tears, not from loss but from terrible homesickness.

The wharf was interesting. To it and from it moved the lifeblood of the plantation, and its survival became a paramount concern. Tall cedar trees were sought, heavy at the base, tapering as they rose. These were
cut, trimmed and hauled to the water’s edge. There heavy crossbars six feet long were nailed and lashed to a pole, whose thin end was then driven as far into the mud as the strength of two men determined. Then two additional men swung from the ends of the crossbar and worried the cedar pole into the river bottom. Finally, when it was well settled, two other men climbed a stand and with heavy blows of sledge hammers drove the piling home. It was to twenty-six such pilings that the wharf was attached, and it became so solid that even large ships could tie up to it with security.

Learning was a constant concern. Martha taught the three boys arithmetic and Latin, knowing that no young man could be considered educated unless proficient in that splendid tongue. Edmund felt it his responsibility to teach them history and Greek, but sometimes, after working so hard in the fields, he would fall asleep as the lessons progressed, and Ralph would nudge him and he would mumble, ‘Get on with your Greek. Do you want to be savages?’ Each morning at five Edmund prepared himself for the day by reading books he had brought from Oxford—Thuycidides and Josephus in Greek, Seneca and Cicero in Latin—and from these authors, along with Plutarch, whom he loved, he gained insight as to how men and nations should behave.

Finally there was the chapel, that unpretentious building with the wooden crucifix. Here the Steeds met for prayer and the reaffirmation of their faith. They believed that God supervised their lives and marked it in their favor when they were kind to servants; but whenever the family left this place of prayer Martha lingered at the door, looked back at the altar and thought: One day I shall be married here.

The problem of Steed’s religion no longer troubled the leaders of Virginia; he was known to be a difficult type, adhering to the faith for which his grandfather had been hanged, and certain books containing woodcuts of Sir Latimer being quartered for being a treasonous Papist circulated in the colony, but most Virginians seemed quite content to have him off to one side, across the bay and out of sight. Trouble arose in late 1633 when his son Ralph, now seventeen, felt that it was time to marry and start his own farm in the fields opposite Devon. Accordingly, he sailed down the Chesapeake, put into Jamestown, and asked permission to marry the daughter of a Virginia planter; relatives pointed out that the boy was Papist, son of an avowed Catholic father and a mother specially imported from England, but others argued, and with right, that young Ralph was hardly the son of the Catholic wife but of Meg Shipton, who was as fine a Protestant as the colony provided, she being the wife of the leading factor in the region. That left Ralph only half Catholic, but that was enough to prevent a marriage.

The boy was desolated by this rebuff and retired to Devon in such low
spirits that his father and mother halted what they had been doing to counsel with him. ‘Our family adheres to the one true faith,’ Edmund said. ‘My grandfather died for it. My father suffered grave disqualifications. And I fled preferment in England so that I could raise my own chapel in Virginia. This is a heritage so precious that the loss of any girl, no matter how—’

‘Penny’s not any girl,’ the boy countered.

‘She’s lovely,’ Martha conceded, ‘and now she’s engaged to another, and what can be done about it but forget her and go back to work?’

‘I’ll never forget her,’ Ralph said.

‘Nor should you,’ Edmund said quickly, adding when his wife scowled, ‘I mean in the sense of remembering her as a fine young lady. But she’s gone, Ralph, and you’ve discovered what it means to be Catholic.’

The boy must have been tempted to shout, ‘I don’t want to be Catholic!’ but instead he folded his hands in his lap and lowered his head. ‘I always intended being a good Catholic,’ he said. ‘I think I should like to be a priest.’

‘Now, Ralph!’ his mother began, but Edmund halted whatever protest she was about to make: ‘Have you a sincere calling?’ He proposed that they go to the chapel, and when they were inside, with bluebottles buzzing against the thick glass imported from Holland, he asked his son if he had ever heard of the Blessed Edmund Campion, and for some hours he spoke of that luminous spirit. He recalled the folklore of the subterranean Catholic movement in England, and especially of how he himself had for a brief period denied the church until that moment when he wakened near strangled with remorse. It was under such circumstances that he had decided to come to a new world where he could practice his love of God in the ways God Himself had decreed.

Ralph’s parents were dedicated to the belief that only one church could represent the will of God, and for proof they cited those solemn words which sealed the matter for sensible people. Taking down the heavy Bible that Edmund had imported from England, the new one translated by the scholars of King James, they opened it to the page on which Jesus Himself launched the one true religion:

‘It was this truth that sustained our family,’ Edmund said, ‘just as it sustained Campion and will sustain you.’ He told Ralph that if he was experiencing a true call to the church, no summons could be more profound, and that if he wanted to become a priest, he must dedicate his life now to that high purpose.

‘How?’ the boy asked.

‘In Virginia it’s impossible,’ Steed said, excited by the possibility that the Steeds of Devon might produce a priest. ‘What we’ll do, Ralph, is ship you to London with Captain Hackett, and from there you must make your way to Rome and the seminary for Englishmen.’ In an ecstasy he grasped his son’s hands and suggested that all kneel and pray. ‘You are treading in the path of martyrs.’

The plan proved impractical. Captain Hackett, disoriented by the huge profits to be made in the slave trade, announced on his next arrival at Jamestown, when Ralph was there to take passage, that he would probably never go back to England. ‘I’m heading straight for Luanda.’

‘Where’s that?’ Edmund asked, impatient to get his son to Rome.

‘Portugal. A shipping point in Africa.’

This made no sense, and Steed demanded an explanation, so Hackett spelled out the facts: ‘Luanda’s a miserable town owned by Portugal in Africa. Arabians collect slaves in the jungle and drive them in chains to Luanda for easy shipment. We load the
Victorious
there and you have slaves here.’