Customer Reviews

Satanstoe, or the Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony (Writings of James Fenimore Cooper)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

SATANSTOE is the name of a fictitious 463.5 acre estate of the Littlepage family in Southern New York's West Chester County. Cooper's novel is the first of a trilogy about as many as six generations of the English-Dutch Littlepages. SATANTOE's hero is Cornelius ("Corny") Littlepage, born May 3, 1737. His still living grandfather Hugh (born in England, educated in New York) and father Evans had been career soldiers and later members of the colonial assembly. Evans had married into a prominent Dutch family.

This novel tells of Cornelius Littlepage's courtship of Anne Mordaunt, also Anglo-Dutch, whom he met by chance in Manhattan during Pentecost street fairs by blacks in 1751 when he was 14 and she 11. This is a tale of how four repeated acts of protection or rescue steadily win fair maiden's heart. In 1751 Corny beat up a butcher boy who had knocked an apple out of Anneke's hand and made her cry. Two years after graduating from Princeton, during a second (1757) black slaves' outdoor fair in Manhattan, young Littlepage rescued young Mordaunt when a caged lion caught her scarf in its paws. During March of the following year (1758) he saved her from drowning when the ice broke up on the Hudson river near Albany. Finally, after the British defeat by the French at Fort Ticonderoga in July 1758, Corny and others saved from a Huron Indian raid a band of settlers assembled at her father's grant of land in wilderness 40 miles south of that battle site. Corny and Anneke were married in October 1758. Thirty years later Corny wrote down recollections of his life from birth to marriage. A principal goal was to preserve for posterity the facts of daily living in old New York.

At least eight or ten unforgettable characters of SATANSTOE deserve singling out. Most of the novel's people are mixtures of strength and weakness, immaturity and insight, prejudice and courage. There are loyal slaves who think for themselves. There is a worldly Anglican priest and his successor as school teacher, the latter an opinionated prig from Connecticut. At least one memorable Indian, the Onandago Susquesus, is translator, guide, runner and mentor to whites in ways of the forest.

Let me content myself with just a few words about one striking person: Duerck Ten Eyck, only 24 when he is mortally wounded in defense of the Mordaunts and their forest community after the disastrous British loss before Ticonderoga. He is pure Dutch, uneducated, wild, yet good-hearted and a great pet of ladies young and old. Dirck reminds at times of the brave but doomed Achilles. At others he seems the fun loving, roistering Prince Hal in Shakespeare's HENRY IV.

Dirck Ten Eyck loves Anneke Mordaunt's closest girl friend, the beautiful 19 year old orphan of Albany, Mary Wallace. He proposes marriage to Mary dozens of times in the course of a few months. For her part, Mary tries to civilize Dirck, improve his raw manners and lift his mind. Duerck is putty in her hands. They are so different from one another that, though she loves him passionately, Mary never says so until he lies dying in her arms from his wound. Cooper seems to say that the English-Dutch social void is not easily bridged. Mary will spend the rest of her life regretting that she delayed telling Dirck of her love when timely knowledge of it might have made him risk his life less recklessly. By contrast, Corny Littlepage and Anneke Mordaunt are Anglo-Dutch, from two inter-connected families respected in both components of white New York.

This is a great novel that deserves to be far better known. Read SATANSTOE to absorb the world of THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS The Last of the Mohicans (Dover Thrift Editions), which plays out in the same time period. Sense why easy-going New Yorkers resent self-righteous New Englanders. See Indians trying to live and let live first with the Dutch, then the French and English. Enter a complex colonial world when American colonials are beginning to think for themselves. -OOO-