[A letter from Dr. John Trefusis to Dr. Matthias Fruhling of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was discovered in Virginia. It seems likely it never was sent.]

Gwynn’s Island, Virginia Colony

July 2^nd, 1776

My dear Fruhling —

My news is the most dire. I cannot express the like. I know not how I shall deliver this billet to you. Though coasters depart from our camp here daily, they do so with an eye not to stretching north, but for brigandage about the Bay; and in any event, did they arrive at some northern port, no letter they deposited should be received by you, ensconced as you are in the heart of lawless usurpation and rebellion. However, in times of tumult, oft expression supersedes — by God — no matter —

They are gone, Fruhling — my boys, they are gone.

Octavian, of whom I have written, and William Williams, another servant of the College of Lucidity in the days of our ascendancy, set forth seven days ago with a foraging detail navigating the Rappahannock River. The next day, the sloop-of-war upon which they sailed returned, and reported the melancholy news that they had met with resistance at a rebel farm, and that eight men were lost. Among the number who could not be accounted for were both Williams and Octavian.

’Twas said that at the farm, the rebels lay an ambush and divided the landing party; and having so done, fell upon the smaller of the parties, killing some and taking others captive. Did they survive, a fellow soldier explained to me without remorse, they shall by now certainly be hanged or brutally used in some other manner. I have gone to each officer of that Regiment demanding that they send a retributive expedition, but none evinces the slightest interest in the undertaking. Lord Dunmore himself will not admit me for an audience.

Here, all is in chaos: The Governor of Maryland is fled Annapolis, brought by the Fowey man-of-war to our camp. He hath been ousted from his seat. He joins Lord Dunmore here. All royal authority seems to have ceased on the land, and the governors preside only over their floating town and this sickly island. The rebels crowd so thick over the shore that they resemble the locust.

Shortly before he set forth on this final voyage, Octavian, my dear Octavian, spake to me of writing a treatise upon government. I inquired of him what should be its salient points, and he replied: “It is a fact easily discernible that governments are instituted to commit the crimes that their citizens require for gain, but cannot countenance committing privately.”

I intervened in this piece of charming youthful désespoir, countering that some philosophers say governments were instituted to protect the natural rights of the citizen; to which Octavian said that nature recognizes no rights. “Our rights are unnatural, or we should need no government to defend them.” I protested; he insisted. “Look abroad in the fields,” he said. “What may kill, kills; what may eat, eats. All things are born unequal, and there is no law but that inequality.”

I did not disagree, but I was uneasy at the savagery in his address. “You would say yourself,” I reminded him, “‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’”

“And you would say yourself,” he replied, “‘The world is the house of the strong.’” Thus ended our protreptic discourse.

And yet, the same day, as we fetched water, Octavian observed a small child of two or three summers, the child of one of our soldiers, wash her father’s face imperfectly and laugh; and as Octavian observed this fumbled cleansing and the father’s smile, I saw that he wept for the sweetness of it. This is the boy I know — soft-hearted and solemn — not he who speaks of natural rights being nonsense; not he who declaims there is no law but power and profit; not he who declares the inheritance of the meek to be void and entangled in probate.

What soured thee, my child? This I know — for I did.

Thou speakest like me.

The world is indeed the house of the strong; and we are indeed a terrible animal. We are granted gifts of intellect almost god-like, to raise ourselves out of the burrow and ditch; and yet cannot enjoy these excellences, for no sooner does one establish the work of his hands and plow the field, than some other, deranged with greed, sweeps in to plunder or to expand their own holdings through act of law or canny dealing.

Speak not to me comfortable words.

We are a foul animal poisoned in all its springs and motivations, a beast of snarling ferity that parades itself in silks and calleth itself an angel, while gnawing upon cattle, seizing upon fowls, ransacking the earth and the seas, clawing our neighbor to provide for ourselves small trinkets to lay in our nests where we curl in bloated slumber.

Do I possess hope for the future? I may reply, I do have hope, in that I do not believe our race shall perish. We shall, in two hundred years, in two thousand, yet be flourishing, the strong oppressing the weak, telling tales of why they must; we shall yet be starving each other, maiming, whipping, killing, raping, sacking, burning, scorning, despoiling, savaging, and congratulating ourselves on our superior nature.

Do not speak glibly of virtue. Nothing shall change — nothing — so long as each individual awaits preferment rather than embodying beneficence in himself; so long as we wait upon the edicts of a government ruled by invested and interested men looking to their private purses; so long as we idle in expectation that all shall be healed, and that we shall somehow be stopped in our career of plunder by an eighteen-hundred-year-old mummy, scarred with the wounds of torture, falling out of the sky or stumbling out of the desert, eyes filled with the tears that we should weep ourselves.

Send me my boys back. Send them back to me, safe and sound, and I shall grant anything. Do not permit me to wither and die alone. I ask only this one thing.

So do I await news of them. I sleep not in the night. In the day, I minister to the dying in the quarantine camp, which hath a sweet miasma so foul it can scarce be borne. Hundreds die now.

In my other hours, I have taken up again the pen of the naturalist; it being my purpose to supply an entry lacking in the System of the great Linnæus. It hath always struck me oddly, that the man categorized all of the animals and birds upon the globe, and yet provided no entry upon the creature which produced this plenitude; for which reason, it hath been my steady purpose in these last days to write an addendum to Dr. Linnæus’s monumental work, upon that first Mover and Progenitor of all the rest, which species I have given the Latin name Deus omnipotens. I have scoured the Testaments Old and New to determine its behaviors and diet; such scraps as I have gleaned according well with what we read described by the Hindoos and the authors of pagan antiquity.

The form (limbs, markings, fur) of Deus omnipotens is as yet unclear to me. Aristotle maintaineth that God hath no shape, being but the limit of heaven; Epicurus claimeth that it appeareth to be a man in shape, though one of such great blessedness and incorruption that it is uncomprehending and indifferent to the plight of mortals. Pythagoras taught that God is a number; Xenophanes that it is a sphere, passionless and consubstantial with all things; Parmenides that it is but the confluence of earth and fire.

In its habits: It appeareth that Deus omnipotens reproduceth not with a female of its own species, but by engendering young upon a female Homo sapiens of a tender age, viz. Europa, Leda, Semele, Alcmene, and the Nazarene girl, much as the cowbird, first in deception and violence, doth force the female of other species to hatch its young. The offspring thus produced from the conjunction of deity and damsel hath a nature intermixed, the two species commingled, and perhaps, like the mule, is incapable itself of generation.

Some several points remain to be determined: as to where the creature maketh its burrow; how many specimens yet subsist; whether it did, when numerous, hunt in packs; whether it is territorial, jealously favoring the desert wastes and snarling at any that approach, or keeping to the forests of the New World, the denizens of which now claim it as their own; whether it molt; whether it excrete; and most, of great consequence, whether, as some authors claim, it adoreth its children and guard them zealously; or whether, like the scorpion (Scorpiones Buthidæ), it awaits their fall, and then devoureth them.

Your humble & affectionate servant,

Dr. John Trefusis