Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne
of our ancestors when we can’t accurately and objectively report what happened yesterday? How can we recite six generations when the average American nuclear family barely has two parents?
Thomas Flowers, for all his charming vernacular, attempted objectivity. In his folklore book, Flowers vows to one source to tell her story “as close to what you told me as I could remember,”19 which is valiant effort, but, like any folklorist, he can only narrate from his perspective with his voice. Each time a story is chronicled with a new voice it changes, hence, the different versions of the same tradition. Written folklore is the distillation of generations of gossip and the telephone game.
Perhaps we can’t be objective about history because the human brain cannot distinguish between perception and memory. Scientists have mapped the area of the brain that sees an object and the area of the brain that remembers the image of that same object, and those areas are identical. Seeing an apple in front of us is the same as remembering that apple in front of us. We create reality in our heads.
I heard a wonderful legend of Columbus’ arrival in the West Indies. He dropped anchor offshore and remained there for several days. The natives, who had never seen objects like the Portuguese ships before, could not recognize them, and, therefore, could not see them. A shaman, staring at the bay, noticed ripples around the ships’ hulls and finally, after much concentration, saw the full image of the vessels. Not until he told the rest of the tribe could they also see.
Are there unknown objects, like ghosts and aliens, around us constantly, but we don’t see them because we’ve never experienced them? Do we only allow ourselves to see them in places that we expect to confront them, like old houses, darkened swamps and dilapidated hotels?
The question is not whether or not the invisible world exists; the question is what stories do we create to describe it. I know there is another world, invisible to me now, like I know that my foot is below my chair yet I can’t see it, like I can feel a basement under a floor. Yet, if we could see actual electrons spinning around us in constant, overlapping dust, we would shut down. If we could daily see ghosts in other dimensions, we wouldn’t be able to function. Who could make it to work on time with dead swamp girls on Route 50? Maybe the gift of seeing the dead is a curse, and its truth is so scary that it’s cloaked in story.
We’re a species of storytellers, genetically wired to tell narrative, and religion and history are our biggest stories.
Webster’s Dictionary defines history as “an account of what has or might have happened, especially in the form of a narrative, play, story or tale.”20
Maybe those who write history should be named historytellers. Why not? History tellers exist.
Maybe when the stories of religion meet the stories of history, we create ghost stories, and it’s so big that one descriptive word can’t contain it.
And it’s so big that we talk about it for centuries and centuries.
Folklorist Carey spins a pirate legend that has survived over two centuries of turbulent change and has been recounted by at least ten generations.
Three Eastern Shore teenage boys heard rumor of pirate gold buried in the sand dunes along a river’s edge. They spent all morning unearthing the treasure; the sand was not yielding. The sun was hot, and the boys sweated and complained. Finally, they dug out the line of the chest’s lid. The lock fell away with the swing of a shovel. As they cracked the rusted lid, they were knocked back by a wind and the stench of decay. The ghost of the pirate Blackbeard rose up over the dunes, spewing fire. He was ten feet tall and wore a long, curved sword. His untrimmed beard extended down his chest and was plaited into ribboned tails. He wore lit firecrackers in his hair. When he laughed, a tooth flew out of his wide mouth and his ropes of gold necklaces tinkled. The boys fled and cowered in the reeds. After a few shivering moments, they returned to find no chest, no hole, just the blasé land and the whispering pull of the river as it lapped gently against the shore. No treasure, no tooth, and no ropes of gold.21
As a historical figure, Blackbeard ratchets that ghost story up a level into legend or myth; pirates’ tales are not all yarn. Blackbeard was real.
I called one of Judy’s leads, a volunteer librarian in the Maryland Room of the Cambridge Library. Her name was Thomasine. “Judy said I could ask you some questions, if you don’t mind,” I started. I explained the project and asked about Blackbeard.
“Chesapeake Bay pirates are all myth!” Thomasine replied in a voice that pierced the air like a ship’s whistle.
“Well, if you define myth as hyperbolic history,” I argued.
Despite this classic Cambridge denial, it’s not fabrication that pirates pillaged Chesapeake waterfront property for hundreds of years. In 1635, the first act of piracy was committed on the northern Chesapeake on Palmers Island, and from 1691-1715, freebooters or pirates so roamed the Bay that all waterfront plantations were built like small-armed forts. There were so many pirates that they impacted local architecture, and that’s not myth. Several Dorchester legends tell tale of phantoms guarding treasure boarded up in secret panels, rooms and compartments in early homes. As late as 1779, the lower counties of Maryland were infested with pirates who daily stole boats, sheep and cattle. From 1780-1781, three picaroon attacks ravaged Vienna in eastern Dorchester County. But of the pirates who terrorized the Eastern Seaboard, Edward Drummond or Edward Teach or Blackbeard was the most legendary, and he often “wore loosely-twisted hemp cord matches, dipped in saltpeter and lime water, lit and slowly burning, hanging from under his hat”22 that looked like firecrackers.
Most Maryland ship-related folklore focuses on sunken shipwrecks or shanghaied sailors but some is laced with themes of transition. As early as the 17th century, phantom ships have been sighted on the Chesapeake, and Dorchester County has its own ghost ship story.
Two men were fishing at twilight on the Nanticoke River near Roaring Point where a navigational light flashes to warn ships of a shallow sand spit. As the sun set, a low fog slowly climbed up the river through the mist. The fishermen saw a trawler coming up the channel; it had a red and green light on the bow, a white light on the stern and another white light in the center of the ship. The fishermen heard no motor but the ship was obviously not a sailing vessel. Still, it steadily sailed up the channel. Horrified, the fishermen watched as the ship headed straight for the sand bar. They called out warnings, but the boat did not respond. Instead of running aground, the ship disappeared into the foggy line between the water and the land.23
The spirit vessel crossed dimensions safely, regardless of physical impossibilities, and the warnings of the living fishermen fell on dead ears.
The Chesapeake has long been a violent battlefield. The British blockaded the waters of the Choptank and the Chesapeake during the Revolution and the War of 1812. During that later war, the British berthed in the Patuxent River and stole provisions, burnt small craft and often kidnapped able-bodied men as prisoners of war. Ships sank. People drowned. The Dorchester sand’s paved with ancient coins, and Cambridge residents still dig for buried gold on nearby Golden Hill.
According to Judy, Thomasine has “dug up some doubloons” in local swamps with her husband and a metal detector. I asked Thomasine about her coin search.
“I never dug through the marsh for buried treasure! Who told you that?”
“Well, Judy had heard . . .”
“Only crazy kids go into the DeCoursey marsh to look for Big Liz, and they’re usually drunk and get into car accidents!”
“Well, they probably need the liquor for bravery.”
“And I never read anything about pirates or the hangings at the courthouse!” Thomasine continued in a high-pitched whine.
Hangings at the courthouse, I wondered. Who brought that up? And how wonderful. “When were there hangings?” I asked.
“I don’t know dates.”
I was getting nowhere fast. “Judy said that maybe I could give you a short list of topics to research . . .” I started.
“Not