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to hear of one of their feminine majesties hard at work grinding corn for her husband’s dinner, and of another queen waiting upon the hungry white men at a state collation of hominy and oysters.
Mr William Wood has a good deal to say of Indian cookery and the contents of Indian larders. He deplores the improvidence of the natives, and their habits of living from hand to mouth, taking no sort of thought for the morrow. Nevertheless, although he condemns their gluttony, he seems to envy their capacity of stowage and phenomenal digestive powers. Borrowing the language of Rabelais, he invites his readers to “feast their eyes with their best belly timbers.”
“In winter time they have all manner of fowls of the water and of the land, and beasts of the land and water. In the summer they have all manner of sea-fish, with all kinds of berries. . . . Some of their scullery having dressed these homely cates, present it to their guests, dishing it up in a rude manner, placing it on the verdant carpet of the earth, without either trenchers, napkins, nor knives; upon which their hunger-starved stomachs, impatient of delays, fall aboard, without scrupling at unwashed hands, without bread, salt, or beer: lolling in the Turkish fashion, not ceasing till their full bellies leave nothing but empty platters. . . They be right infidels—neither caring for the morrow, nor providing for their own families; but as all are fellows at foot-ball, so they all meet at the kettle, saving their wives, that dance a spaniel-like attendance at their backs for their bony fragments.”
Those pictures of the lives of the Southern Indian tribes give us the clue to the impulse to steady emigration to the colonies, notwithstanding such sufferings as Norwood and his companions had to endure. They lived in a happy mean between the inhabitants of Canada and the bleaker Labrador, who had a hard and bitter struggle for existence, and the South Sea Islanders in their tropical natural gardens, with the cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit dropping into their mouths. The Indians of Virginia and Maryland lived in primitive luxury, with merely the enjoyable excitement of hunting and fishing, and the trouble of occasionally scraping the fertile soil to grow a patch of Indian corn. The English gentlemen and farmers found themselves at home there, and to the hard-working peasant or half-starved mechanic it was an earthly paradise. They had no need to carry matters with a high hand, or to fight their way to wealth or comfort like the soldiers of Cortez or Pizarro. The country was sparsely settled: there was ample elbow-room; and, not to put too fine a point upon it, they simply tricked or swindled the innocent aborigines. A handful of brass buttons, some strings of beads, or a glaring suit of raiment, purchased any amount of land-rights, and thereafter the new landowner had his vested rights in the soil. Society of some kind, with an importation of English law and custom, was speedily formed, with a governor and Crown officials at its head; and had it not been for home-sickness the settlers might have been perfectly happy. They had brought their tastes, their habits, and their prejudices along with them. They had their clergy, their liturgy, and their Church services as in the old country. They even indulged in gaiety of well-fancied apparel, although the fashions were a little out of date; and we are told, a very few years after the settlement, how the dames of the capital went abroad bravely rustling in their silks and brocades. Yet the cadets of old Cavalier families, and the sons