The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr. / 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 Ebenezer Cooke

"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

^[1]Sot-Weed, i. e. the sot making or inebriating weed; a name for tobacco, used at that time. A Sot-weed Factor, was a tobacco agent or supercargo.