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By Root 992 0

it was hoped, to marriage. Like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Honourable Company needed but feared the wilderness, and abhorred miscegenation. Hannah got to know the Lancashire women because, like them, she and Gabriel ate at the third mate’s table and grumbled about having to share the decks with livestock that were mainly there as the Captain’s and the richer passengers’ future provision. A schoolmaster sent out by the Company on the same ship mentions Hannah as being of the four women the only one with comeliness and delicacy. In a letter to his brother started on the Fortune and finished in the port town of Masulipatnam, he worried that Mistress Legge will not find any “towne of Moors, fackeers and Hindoos cleane after the manner in England,” for “hogs, filth, dirt and swine” clog the streets.

WHAT INTERESTS me about this letter is that the outbound schoolteacher clings to class-conscious perspectives and absorbs Hannah, the flower of the New World Zion, into the Old World hierarchy.

If status had mattered to Hannah, she would have stayed in Stepney. Her curiosity was robust. She wanted to earn, not inherit, dignity. She moved on. Without regrets.

Venn inputs data more boldly, more mischievously than I do. I watch my convoy of East Indiamen voyage across his computer screen, freed of space and time. He compresses by supercomputer Hannah, Gabriel, the schoolmaster, the maiden ladies from Lancashire, caulkers and coopers, soldiers and sail-makers, gunners, cabin boys, two two-headed freak dogs, horses, goats, hogs, sheep, geese, chickens, ducks, plum puddings, vats of pea soup, mutton pies, pork pies, chops, cutlets, potatoes, lemons, rum, beer, dysentery, scurvy, into a one-second-long video model.

Attaining Nirvana, for Venn, is attaining perfect design.

Together and separately we remember what happened to Hannah Easton Fitch Legge aka the Bibi from Salem so that we may predict what will happen to us within our lifetime.

Before you build another city on the hill, first fill in the potholes at your feet.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …

JOHN KEATS

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

PART TWO

1

THE GUIDE, an Indian Christian named Mr. Abraham—I don’t know if it’s a first name or not—takes me on a tour of the Fort St. Sebastian ruins. Fort St. George, Fort St. Sebastian and all their related remnants of English and Portuguese colonialism are now located in the northern outskirts of the modern city of Madras. This is the place, south of the sluggish Penner River on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal, where on a fetid January morning in 1695, from its anchorage on a sand reef half a mile off the shore of Fort St. George, the Fortune began its dangerous and laborious unloading of cargo and disembarked Gabriel and Hannah Legge.

The ruins hold no fascination for Mr. Abraham. He is a very thin, up-to-date young man, assiduously elegant in a leisure suit of pale-blue teri-cot, and recently the recipient of a master’s degree in commerce from the University of Madras. He listens to test-match cricket from New Zealand on a transistor radio. Free-lancing as a guide for English-speaking tourists is a stopgap. His deportment has in it a protective haughtiness; his dainty, solicitous way of holding a huge, threadbare black umbrella over my melanoma-prone pinkness reveals a man who has greater expectations from life than recycling the faded glories of his subcontinent. He doesn’t know it, but his casual graciousness has, in fact, profound historical antecedents. He lets me linger where I want, answers my questions with a shrugged yes and “so they say.” Rubble is rubble to him. He lives for development, a South Indian Silicon Valley. He belongs to the future.

I have with me a book of engravings of the original Sonapatnam, and from the fragments of a wall, the rubbled foundation of the customhouse, I can orient myself in time as well as space. I can imagine the customs master, Mir Ali, one of Haider Beg’s appointees, spyglass in hand, noting the names