Exploring 400 years of American history on a cruise of Chesapeake Bay

“This is a noble sea…calm and hospitable, majestic in size.”

These are the imagined words of Captain John Smith, who led two expeditions on the Chesapeake in Southeast America in search of gold and silver back in the early 1600s.

He found neither, but he did discover the huge body of water that later inspired James Michener’s 1978 novel Chesapeake, 1,132 pages of historical fiction that take you on a roller-coaster ride through 400 years of American history.

Known as a bay or estuary in the US, the Chesapeake flows south from Havre de Grace, Maryland, just north of Baltimore, emptying 200 miles later into the Atlantic at Norfolk, Virginia.

It is so wide you could be at sea and has witnessed many momentous events in American history, yet is almost unknown in the UK.

Not to me, though. After reading the book over and over, the real-life estuary had become like a pen-friend I longed to meet – well-loved book in hand, like a water-based Portillo.

A voyage from Washington DC to Norfolk and back with American Cruise Lines was just the ticket – and came with the added bonus of going the whole history hog with an American Revolution theme.

The book opens in 1583 with Pentaquod, a Susquehanna Native American, escaping his tribe to find a new life on the Chesapeake. It then moves onto Captain Smith’s expeditions, before following the fortunes of three families – the Catholic plantation- and slave-owning Steeds, boat-building Paxmores and marsh-loving Turlocks – who made their home on the shores of the Choptank, a river that feeds into the Chesapeake.

Captain Smith, George Washington, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay did exist, as did a few others who pop up in the book – but Michener says most characters are fictional, as are many places. That may be so, but my suspicion is that they were based on real people and events.

Harriet Tubman, a slave who escaped and risked her life on the underground railway, getting other slaves to the north, clearly inspired Michener’s character Eden Cater. I also learned that men really did hire themselves out as slave-breakers, and watermen did die in oyster wars between the states – both issues which pop up in the book.

Likewise, Catholics who fled to the New World to escape religious persecution in England found they were not welcome in Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the US. In the book, Catholic Edmund leaves Jamestown and moves to an island in the more tolerant Maryland, which really was owned by Lord Baltimore.

How he became the proprietor of a faraway land he never set foot in was explained by my guide, John, as we walked around Annapolis. Lord Baltimore briefly wanted land in the New World, he said simply, and King Charles I gave it to him.

The colonial old town – small, with a very pretty harbour – was where George Washington, who was expected to rule the new United States after the war was won, resigned his army commission in 1783, establishing the power of civil authority over the military. “This is where our democracy was born,” John beamed.

Every day was a fascinating dip into history – even in Cambridge, a town across the Choptank from the fictional Patamoke, where I joined a bike ride into the Blackwater Refuge in search of the marshes where Michener’s cunning Turlocks lived with their many wives and children, hiding from authority and shooting geese. I found the marshes, and spotted wildlife, but also met Susan, a descendant of the Nanticoke tribe which came into contact with Europeans during Captain Smith’s expeditions.

This was pure gold for my quest, as was St Michaels, a town with grand clapboard houses that was surely the inspiration for Patamoke, the fictional settlement at the centre of Michener’s book.

Like Patamoke, it was surrounded by forest 300 years ago, the site of a major shipbuilding industry – and a prime target for the British during the War of Independence and War of 1812. Local legend has it that, one night in 1813, residents were told to switch off their lights and string lanterns along the treetops so attacking British gunships would aim too high. Apocryphal I’m sure, but it must have captured Michener’s imagination: in the book, Paxmore saves his shipyard by tricking the British into burning a “dummy” one.

And the connections kept coming. In the book, Julia, a descendant of the slave Cudjo, works at a crab-picking factory in Patamoke – so I was delighted when our guide Kathy told us we were docked by what was a crab-picking factory, one of the first Afro-American enterprises in the area.

The spot is now in a maritime museum in which I discovered an exhibition devoted to skipjacks, a sailboat with a shallow draft for “drudging arsters” – waterman speak for “dredging oysters”, used in Michener’s writing. It’s hard, cold work, but the molluscs and blue crabs are still hugely important to the economy of Chesapeake’s eastern shore.

Near the museum, I came across a replica of the shallop – essentially an oversized rowing boat – in which Captain Smith and 12 men explored the Chesapeake in June 1608. It was an eye-opening sight, particularly in the context of the bay’s choppy, white-tipped waves.

The same was true of replicas of the three boats in which the first English settlers set off across the Atlantic in 1606. On show in Jamestown – an open-air museum near Yorktown – the Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery looked wholly inadequate for sailing any ocean, let alone the Atlantic in winter. Yet somehow, they made it across.

It was downhill from there, however. Carrying 104 settlers between them, they arrived in May 1607, finding marches and mosquitoes. One year later, just 38 remained alive. More soon arrived from England – bolstering numbers to 500 – but when the settlement was besieged by Native Americans in 1609, a great starvation took hold, and by the time it was all over, just 60 settlers were left.

Of course, eventually, their fortunes changed – and just 173 years later, the descendants of these settlers were winning their independence from a country that hadn’t lost a war for 700 years. Just like the book, my voyage of discovery was a whirlwind tour through one of the most turbulent but fascinating periods of America’s history – and now, when I scan the long-loved words of this familiar friend, my mind will fill with images of their real-world inspiration.

Essentials

Jane Archer was a guest of American Cruise Lines and Fred Holidays.

American Cruise Lines has the 10-night American Revolution cruise, round-trip from Washington DC, calling at Annapolis, St Michaels, Cambridge, Norfolk and Yorktown.

Fred Holidays (0800 021 3172) is ACL’s preferred partner in the UK, and has prices from £6,299pp (aboard the traditional American Constitution, which holds 170 passengers) and £7,299pp (aboard American Glory, a 100-passenger catamaran), including flights, transfers, one-night pre-cruise in Washington, all meals, drinks, tips and selected excursions.