SATYR.
Reading edition
In which is describ'd
The Laws, Government, Courts and Constitutions of the Country, and also the Buildings, Feasts, Frolicks, Entertainments and Drunken Humours of the Inhabitants of that Part of America.
In Burlesque Verse.
By Eben. Cook, Gent.
LONDON:
Printed and Sold by D. Bragg, at the Raven in Pater-Noster-Row. 1708. (Price 6d.)
e have no means of knowing the history of Master "Ebenezer Cook, Gentleman," who, one hundred and forty-six years ago, produced the Sot-Weed Factor's Voyage to Maryland. He wrote, printed, published, and sold it in London for sixpence sterling, and then disappeared forever. We do not know certainly that Mr. Cook himself was the actual adventurer who suffered the ills described by him "in burlesque verse." Indeed, "Eben: Cook, Gent." may be a myth—a nom de plume. Yet, there is a certain personal poignancy and earnestness about the whole Story that almost forbid the idea of a secondhand narrative. Nay, I think it extremely probable that it was "Eben: Cook, Gent." or, some other equally afflicted gentleman assuming that name, who—
"Condemn'd by Fate to wayward Curse, Of Friends unkind and empty purse,"—
"A pious, Concientious Rogue"
who, taking advantage of his incapacity for trade, cheated him out of his cargo and sent him home without a leaf of the coveted "Sot-weed!" This poem is, very likely, the result of that homeward voyage. With proper allowance for breadth and burlesque, angry exaggeration and the discomforts of such a "Gentleman" as we may fancy Master Cook to have been, it is well worth preservation as hinting, if not photographing, the manners and customs of the ruder classes in a British Province a century and a half ago.
The "Sot-Weed Factor" was first printed in London, in 1708, in a folio of twenty-one pages. It was reprinted, with a poem on Bacon's Rebellion, by Mr. Green, at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1731. Mr. Green cautiously reminds the reader that it was a description written twenty years before, and "did not agree with the condition of Annapolis at the time of its publication!"
The edition, now published, is taken from the London copy of 1708, as "Printed and sold by B. Bragg, at the Raven, in Pater-Noster-row (price 6d.)"
In Stevens's Bibliotheca Americana, 1861, we find the following title: "Sot-Weed Redivivus; or the Planters Looking-Glass. In Burlesque Verse, Calculated for the Meridian of Maryland, by E. C. Gent: Annapolis; William Parks, for the Author. 1730. viii and text 28 pp. 4°." Mr. Stevens describes the book as "alike curious as an early specimen of printing in Maryland, and as an example of American poetry."
"E. C. Gent:" of 1730, at Annapolis, may be the "Ebenezer Cook, Gent:" of London, 1708,—"redivivus,"—returned to America and turned Author again at Annapolis, under the auspices of our early Colonial printer, William Parks. But we have never seen this rare book, published twenty-two years after the Sot-Weed Factor was first issued in England, and know nothing of its character or authorship.
BRANTZ MAYER.
Baltimore, October 20, 1865.
Footnotes
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