In any event, so aggravated grew the dispute that shortly afterwards — the party having put ashore in the Maryland marshes & been taken captive by Ahatchwhoop Indians — Smith turn’d a tribal custom into a stratagem for ransoming himself & the rest of his company at Burlingame’s expence. It was the wont of the Ahatchwhoops, upon the death of their king, to choose his successor by a contest of gluttony, he acceding to the throne who could outgorge his competitors. Such was the principle, which must have produced some odd administrators had it not in fact been modified to permit an able but temperate candidate to enter the lists by proxy, sharing the privileges of office (including the queen’s favors) with his corpulent champion, but retaining the authority himself. Smith duped Burlingame (a man of great appetite, & half-starved) into taking the field on behalf of one Wepenter, a politico of modest stomach who must otherwise lose to his gluttonous rival for the kingdom and the hand of lusty Princess Pokatawertussan. Thinking it a mere eating contest with a night of love its prize, our forebear set to with a will & narrowly bested his fat opponent Attonceaumoughhowgh (“Arrow-Target”), who died on the spot of overeating. Grateful Wepenter takes the throne, & in the morning sets Smith’s party free. But when Burlingame makes to join them (having been too ill all night of indigestion to claim his trophy), he is fetcht back in triumph by the Ahatchwhoops, their captive & co-king!

There end both the Privie Journall & the Secret Historie. Not till nearly a century later (in 1694) does anyone learn the subsequent fate of our progenitors. Old Andrew II, it seems, in 1676 engaged as tutor for the twins Ebenezer & Anna Cooke a young Cantabridgean of many parts, named Henry Burlingame III: a master of all the arts & sciences (& an array of secular skills as well, from opium smuggling to sedition) who however had no idea who his parents were or whence came his name & numeral. His researches into this subject had directed all his life, led him deep into the politics of colonial America, involved him in a dozen disguises (for which he had the original gift pass’d down to the rest of us) & as many conspiracies — chiefly Leisler’s Rebellion in New York & John Coode’s in Maryland. It also brot him in touch with “Monsieur Casteene,” as a secret agent either for the French against the British or vice-versa — the 1st of what will be a grand series of such uncertainties! — and with conspiracies of runaway Negro slaves & beleaguer’d Indians to drive their white oppressors from the continent.

But it was his hapless pupil Ebenezer, by this time (the 1690’s), done with school & in midst of his own misadventures, who stumbl’d by chance on what his tutor had subverted governments to find. Driven by a storm upon Bloodsworth Island in the lower Chesapeake, the secret base of those disaffected Indians & escaped slaves, Cooke & his companions are taken prisoner by the old Tayac Chicamec, Chief of the Ahatchwhoops, whom he discovers to be (and he owes his life to the discovery — the tale is too involv’d to repeat) none other than the son of Henry Burlingame I & Pokatawertussan: in short, Henry Burlingame II, the missing link between John Smith’s scapegoat & the twins’ formidable tutor! In Chicamec’s possession is the portion of Smith’s Secret Historie describing Burlingame’s abandonment, and Chicamec repeats his father’s vow to exterminate the “English Devils”—a resolve pass’d down thro Chicamec to his sons.

Now, as Chicamec himself was a halfbreed & his queen as well (the daughter of an errant Jesuit priest & an Ahatchwhoop maiden), their three sons were born in a variety of shades. The 1st, Mattasinemarough, was a pure-blood Indian. The 2nd, Cohunkowprets, a halfbreed like his parents. The 3rd, white-skinn’d and therefore doom’d, was named (nay, label’d, in red ochre on his chest) Henry Burlingame III, & set adrift in a canoe on the ebb tide down the Chesapeake — whence he was rescued by a passing English vessel, adopted by its captain, and fetcht back to England to begin his quest.

There is too much more to the story for this letter — enough to make a novelsworth of letters, Richardson-fashion! Indeed, I see now I must write you at least thrice more, one letter for each generation from this Burlingame III to yourself, if I am to introduce you properly to your sires & show forth that aforementioned pattern, which at this point is as yet unmanifest. But of this H.B. III, your great-great-grandfather, four things more need saying, all connected, ere I close.

1st, his brother’s name, Cohunkowprets, means “bill-o’-the-goose” in the Algonkin dialect of the Ahatchwhoops, and Chicamec’s middle son was thus denominated because, like his brothers & his grandfather (but not his father), he was born so underendow’d in the way of private parts as to move his mother to exclaim on 1st sight of him (in effect & in Algonkin), “A goose hath peckt him peckerless!” This characteristic — like a tendency to plural births — afflicts us Burlingames in alternate generations. More accurately, since the time of H.B. III, when our line began to exchange the surnames Cooke & Burlingame in succeeding generations, it has afflicted all the Burlingames: you yourself, we expect, should you emerge a Henry, will be but a few centimeters’ membership from Henriettahood in this particular. Yet do not despair, for as my existence attests (& that of Andrew Cooke III, my grandfather, & of Chicamec as well, my grandfather’s grandfather), the Burlingames have found ways to overcome their deficiency. We shall pass along to you, when you reach young manhood, the “Secret of the Magic Eggplant,” which, I now learn, we took originally from the Privie Journall.

Indeed (here is my 2nd point), as a man born short of the average stature may outdo taller men in feats of manliness, so Henry Burlingames III & IV (the latter my father) were men of uncommon sexuality. H.B. III, who concerns us here, was by his own denomination a “cosmophilist,” who not only lusted after both his charges, Anna & Ebenezer Cooke, but claim’d to have had carnal connection as well with sundry sorts of barnyard animals, plants, inanimate objects, the very earth itself — long before his discovery of John Smith’s eggplant recipe made it possible for him to beget a child.

Thirdly, from this “cosmophilism,” or erotical love of the world, must have stem’d H.B. III’s endless interests: his passion for everything from astronomy, music, politics, rope-splicing, & chess, to the practice of medicine, law, & nautical piracy, for example; in particular for what he call’d “the game of governments,” and my father “the practice of history.” He successfully impersonated, at various times, both Lord Baltimore & Baltimore’s arch-enemy John Coode; perhaps “Monsieur Casteene” as well. At 1st, one gathers, the motive for his intrigues, at least their occasion, was his research into his parentage: the Secret Historie & Privie Journall were involved in Coode’s conspiracies against Baltimore, and thus involved anyone who sought them. Later, when Ebenezer Cooke had brot to light his tutor’s lineage, Governor Nicholson of Maryland prevail’d upon Burlingame to forestall — if possible, to subvert — that “Bloodsworth Island Conspiracy” of Indians & Negroes. Burlingame accepted the task with relish; but the Cooke twins apparently fear’d that his fascination with his newfound brothers might win out over his loyalty to white civilization. According to my grandfather, who wrote of these things some decades later, they wonder’d whether Burlingame, once on Bloodsworth, would work to divide the jealous factions of ex-slaves & Indians from several tribes, or to unite them, ally them with Casteene’s “Naked Indians of the North,” & return America to its aboriginal inhabitants.