Chesapeake (29 page)

‘I ought to know the fields, seein’ they’re mine.’

‘I believe they’re held in my father’s name.’

‘Use makes title.’

‘There may be something to what you say.’

‘Especially if I have it in writin’.’

‘You do?’ Henry asked cautiously.

‘Letters,’ Janney said, looking to his wife for confirmation.

‘Letters prove nothing,’ Henry said. ‘You know I read law.’

‘Then you’ll know what a contract is,’ Janney said.

For about an hour they parried in this manner, until Paul grew restless. ‘I don’t believe Mr. Janney has any proof,’ he said peremptorily.

‘But Henry believes. Don’t you, Henry?’

‘I would judge that you have some shadowy claim,’ Henry conceded. ‘Difficult to prove, but perhaps strong enough to cause us embarrassment in court.’

‘Especially in a Virginia court.’

‘I propose we discharge that claim. Now.’

‘With what?’ Janney asked.

‘With money. With a substantial number of coins.’

He had stressed the fact of coins in order to impress Janney with the possibility of his getting hold of real money, but he was not prepared for Janney’s next step. The canny farmer consulted visually with his wife and daughter; they nodded; he loosened a board in the floor and produced from beneath it a large clay pot, from which he poured onto the wooden table a hoard of European coinage more than twice as large as the one Henry Steed had accumulated. As he fingered the coins, lovingly and with pride, he said, ‘We’re planning to buy a place on the Rappahannock. Have been for some years. Now, if you’re serious about clearing up your title, and you should be …’ He allowed his coins to clink.

‘How much do you want?’ Henry asked coldly.

‘The matter comes down to my signing your papers, don’t it?’

‘In part.’

‘I’ll sign and my wife will make her mark and my daughter Jennifer will sign. You’ll be forever clear of us’—he hesitated, and no one breathed—‘if you add substantially to our coins.’

Without hesitation Henry Steed took his purse by one bottom corner, turned it upside down and allowed all its contents to pour onto the table. ‘I think that’s substantial.’

‘I think so too,’ Janney said, and the quitclaim was signed.

On the trip home Paul said admiringly, ‘That was daring,’ and Henry said, ‘Not if you knew I kept half our coins sewed along the waist of my trousers.’ Then he became reflective. ‘The important thing is that our patents are now without blemish, and, Paul, we must keep them that way. No mortgages, no loans, and above all, dear brother, no borrowing from Fithian. Promise me that you will never order from London one item you can’t pay for. Marcus Fithian’s the most honest man I know. I trust him with every leaf of our tobacco, and he gives me honest count, but for the love of God, never fall into his debt.’

He had met Fithian at the Inns of Court; the Englishman was one year older and many years wiser. The descendant of a family that had always specialized in financing trade, his ancestors had known the Fuggers and the Medici and had rarely been worsted by either. The young men had met in 1636, and for five months young Fithian had pumped Henry for knowledge of the colonies; he was pleased to hear that Henry had stopped in Boston on his way to London and had observed for himself the prosperity of that town, but Henry kept repeating, ‘The true fortunes are to be made along the rivers of Virginia.’ To test this thesis, Fithian had made a tedious journey in a tobacco ship to the York and the Potomac and had seen at once the chances for an industrial association that would profit both the remote planter in the colonies and the factor in London.

He was never avaricious, but four great plantations had already fallen into his hands because their undisciplined owners ordered more from London than they could pay for with the tobacco they shipped from Virginia. Fithian did nothing criminal, or even suspicious; he merely filled orders and kept meticulous balances, and when the former pushed the latter into debits, he foreclosed. He never tried to run a plantation himself; he knew he was unqualified for that exacting task: ‘I wouldn’t know the value of a single slave, nor a field of unripe weed.’

What he did, once he gained title, was send an underling to the colonies to seek out the best farmer available and sell him the land at great discount, trusting to keep that man’s accounts for the next fifty years. It was in furtherance of this design that in 1651 he wrote to his friend Henry Steed:

To each of these questions Steed returned a strong affirmative, telling Paul as he did so, ‘Where land is concerned, Simon Janney is almost as trustworthy as a Steed,’ and he felt sure that the Rappahannock plantation was passing into excellent hands.

But repeatedly he returned to his basic thesis, which he preached to his mother and his brothers: ‘Never borrow a farthing from London.’ In all other respects they trusted their unseen partner: he sent them the desired cloth from Flanders, or crystal from Bohemia, or books from London. He arranged for their travel, kept their credits in the proper banks, and consistently knew more about their affairs than they. He was the absent partner at their feasts, the most trusted member of their acquaintances. They worked and ate on a river on the Eastern Shore, but spiritually they lived in London, thanks to the responsibility and integrity of Marcus Fithian.

There were other problems which could not be avoided. The Nanticoke Indians had behaved circumspectly when the first white men invaded their ancient territories, and had withdrawn, allowing the invaders a free hand in picking up the lesser sites along the southern rivers, and there had been no battles. But when additional invaders
kept crossing the bay and pushing farther and farther up the rivers to appropriate really fine hunting lands, the pressure became unbearable.

Seven minor skirmishes marred relations in these years, and there would have been more if the Nanticokes had succeeded in persuading the Choptanks to join them. On various occasions emissaries were sent north proposing that the Choptanks fall upon Patamoke and eliminate it, but the peaceful little Choptanks refused—‘We are not a warlike people. With our whites we are at peace.’ And no arguments could goad them into attacking.

This earned the Choptanks no merit with the whites; an Indian was an Indian, and when a real battle erupted in Nanticoke territory, white settlers along the Choptank assumed that they must be the next targets; in anticipation they began firing at whatever Indians they spotted. In this they were encouraged by the harsh edict promulgated by the government:

As a result of this invitation to violence, a desultory warfare developed in which the whites repulsed any Indian who sought to establish contact with any settlement; the bewildered Choptanks would come downriver to ensure peace, and before they could land, guns would blaze at them, and they would retreat in confusion. On one such occasion the oldest son of Tciblento—a full-blooded Indian—was killed, and when runners went to Turlock’s hut to inform her of this, she greeted them indifferently.

‘Hatsawap was shot by white men.’

‘What had he done?’

‘Nothing. He came to talk peace.’

She did not react to this sad news, simply sat in her rags rocking back and forth on her haunches.

‘Tciblento,’ the runners said, ‘you must talk with the white men. We are not at war with them.’

‘But they are at war with us,’ she said. They talked for a long time, recalling better days, and when Turlock came in from hunting in the marsh, dark and dirty, and wanted to know why the Choptanks were there, one of them said, ‘Tciblento’s son was killed by a white gunner.’

‘They’ll all be killed,’ he said, and Tciblento nodded. She cooked a raccoon for them and they left.

The forest warfare did not diminish, for the Nanticokes did not propose to allow white men to dispossess them. They became skilled in ambushes and made life upriver difficult, so that in December 1652 the
government issued the famous draconian orders which led to their elimination as a fighting force:

Now the hunters who clustered at Patamoke had their days of glory. They would hide behind trees that commanded well-known trails, and whenever an Indian appeared, man or woman, they would blaze away. The forests ran red with the blood of Indians, and fire consumed villages which had known no war.

The carnage was especially heavy among the confused Choptanks, who had given not a single cause for such bloodshed. In the entire history of the Choptank nation, no Indian had ever killed a white man or ever would, yet now they were hunted like squirrels. Tciblento’s second Indian son, tall Ponasque, wise like his grandfather, and a companion climbed into their canoe and came downriver to plead for sanity, but as they passed the point east of Patamoke, three hunters spotted them. Taking careful aim at the young men, who could not take evasive action or protect themselves in any way, they began firing.

The first salvo fell short, and the leader of the hunters cried, ‘Higher!’ So they aimed higher, and now they shot over the canoe. ‘Lower, just a bit!’ And on the third fusillade pellets struck the Indian in the forward position and he fell sideways.

Two of the hunters cheered, but the leader warned, ‘It’s a trick! Hit him again!’ So the hunters kept firing until Ponasque fell, too, and the canoe became so riddled that it sank with the dead bodies.

Now one of the lesser chieftains crept through the woods to plead with Turlock, and after he had informed Tciblento of her other son’s death, and she had sat impassive as before, the Indian turned to Turlock and asked, ‘What must we do?’

‘Stay covered. I keep Tcib.’

‘We’ll starve.’

‘Maybe … Tcib … too.’

‘How long will this hunting last?’

‘Year. Then … tired.’

‘Turlock, let us go to the town and prove our peacefulness.’

‘They … shoot you. Me, too.’

‘You know their ways, Turlock. What can we do?’

‘Nothing.’

And he was right. In those terrible years of elimination nothing that
the Choptanks could have done would have convinced the white men that they were different. The pressure for land had begun, and this placed Indians athwart the ambitions and destinies of the newcomers, and no kind of truce could ever be engineered.

The little Indians moved through the forest in search of deer, but it was they who became the targets. Children would go out to play—no discipline could prevent them from doing so—and they became the goal in a deadly game. White hunters cheered as lustily when they gunned down a boy of seven as they did when they eliminated a woman of seventy, and always the perimeter was pushed back, back until the remnants huddled in their huts the way Tciblento huddled in hers.

In 1660, when Timothy Turlock was fifty-two, he received word which made the later years of his life more congenial than the earlier ones had been. Life in the marshes was never easy; true, there was always food, but if he needed even the smallest tool, he found it almost impossible to acquire the goods required for barter. Coins he never saw; over a period of nine years he never touched money except for the time he stole a pot containing a hidden shilling. So through the years he had stolen an amazing assortment of things. Whenever he approached a plantation his hawklike eyes roved as he identified items he might want to appropriate on some later visit, and a magistrate once said of him, ‘If Tim Turlock were on his way to the gallows, his beady eyes would be locating things to steal on the way back.’

Miraculously, he kept his little family alive by subterfuges which required more work than if he had taken an honest job, and then his luck changed! The Indian wars, never of a magnitude equal to those on the western shore, were nevertheless nagging affairs, and hunters spent so much time shooting Indians that they overlooked the real menace that came creeping down from the north: wolves invaded the peninsula and a bounty was offered for their extermination.

With an incentive like this, Turlock could swing all his powers into action, and he ranged the forests north and south, dealing destruction to the savage predators. He became so adept at tracking the large beasts, and so lethal in dealing with them, that admiring citizens who felt their cattle safer with him around said, ‘Turlock succeeds where others don’t because he lives like a wolf and thinks like one.’

What they were not aware of was that canny Timothy Turlock had
convened a strategy session with his twin sons at which they had devised a naughty plan to subvert the new law to their advantage. ‘Stooby fine in woods,’ the admiring father had said in opening the meeting, and he was correct. Stooby, so-called because a hunter in Patamoke had said, ‘That boy looks downright stupid,’ had become at thirteen a master woodsman; he had inherited his father’s natural cunning and his grandfather Pentaquod’s inclination toward forest lore. He loved the deep quiet of this land, the way animals moved across it and the flight of birds as they searched for seeds. He was a much better hunter than his father and often detected the presence of wolves while Timothy was still fooling with his musket.