Part 5 (1/2)
Whoe'er secures said John McKeogn, (Provided I should get my own), Shall have from me in cash paid down Five dollar bills, and half-a-crown.”
Mary Nelson is the owner and poet, or, in the fas.h.i.+on of the day, I should say poetess, and perhaps _owneress_, as I find it recorded of Mary G.o.ddard that she was postmistress of Baltimore and _Printress_ and _Editress_ of the _Baltimore Journal_.
The world moves. The auction-block, and the runaway slave, with his bundle on his back, have disappeared from among the pictures in the advertising column; the packet has given way to the ocean steamer; the horse to the bicycle; the stage coach to the railroad; the little provincial gazettes, with their coa.r.s.e gray paper and blurred type, to the great dailies, as large as the Bible and as doubtful as the Apocrypha. I wonder if another century will have such astounding tales to tell of progress in news, trade and travel!
His Friends and Foes
[Ill.u.s.tration: His Friendes and Foes.]
The early adventurers had never seen anything of savage life till they touched the sh.o.r.es of Virginia. Everything connected with the strange beings there was full of interest. They set down faithfully whatever they saw, and a good deal more besides.
The Susquehannocks impressed them most of all the Indian tribes. Their enormous height and fine proportions made them look like giants, and their attire was as impressive as their persons. One who saw them, writes home in those first pioneer days: ”Their attire is the skinnes of Beares and Woolves. Some have Ca.s.sacks made of Beares heads and skinnes that a mans head goes through the skinnes neck, and the eares of the Beare fastened to his shoulders, the nose and teeth hanging downe his breast, another Beares face split behind him, and at the end of the nose hung a Pawe. The half sleeves comming to the elbowes were the neckes of Beares and the armes through the mouth with pawes hanging at their noses. One had the head of a Wolfe hanging in a chaine for a Iewell.”
One of their chiefs specially impressed the English. He was a giant among giants. The calf of his leg was three-quarters of a yard round, and ”the rest of his limbs answerable to that proportion.” His arrows were five quarters long, and he wore a wolf's skin at his back for a quiver. The picture of this Indian Hercules accompanied the maps which Captain Smith sent home to enlighten the Company in England.
The stories of the different adventurers were gathered together and printed as ”The General History of Virginia.” The volume was adorned (I cannot say ill.u.s.trated) by a series of woodcuts, which make us laugh aloud by their inaccuracy. The Indians are simply gigantic Englishmen naked and beardless, with the hair standing in a stiff ridge on top of the head, like a c.o.c.k's comb. The wigwams look like haystacks, and the canoes like bathtubs. What a collection of pictures we might have had, if a kodak had been among the possessions of Captain Smith and his company! We should see King Pamaunche with ”the chaine of pearles round his necke thrice double, the third parte of them as bygg as pease,” and catch a view of his ”pallace” with its hundred-acre garden set with beans, pease, tobacco, gourdes, pompions, ”and other thinges unknowne to us in our tongue.” We should have the interiors of the smoky wigwams which Spelman and Archer visited, the forms of the squaws dimly outlined against the grimy mat, as they pounded corn, or dropped the bread into the kettle to boil.
Thanks to John Smith's graphic pen, we have a picture of Powhatan, that fierce old ancestor of so many first families of Virginia, almost as vivid as a photograph. Smith went to visit him, and found him proudly tying upon a bedstead a foot high, upon ten or twelve mats. ”At head sat a woman, at his feet another. On each side, sitting upon a mat upon the ground, were ranged his chief men, on each side the fire, five or ten in rank, and behind them as many young women, each a great chaine of white beads over their shoulders, their heads painted in red, and with such a grave and majestical countenance as drove us into admiration to see such state in a naked savage.”
We might suppose these last words applied to the women, instead of to Powhatan, did we not know how little state and majesty were allowed these copper-colored Griseldas. The Indian squaws were little more than slaves.
When the braves moved, it was the squaws who carried the wigwams and set them up in the new camp. When the men sat at meals, they spread the mats, waited upon their masters, and finally contented their appet.i.tes with the remnants of the feast. In the field, too, they bore the brunt of the toil: ”Let squaws and hedgehogs scratch the ground,” said an old warrior; ”man was made for war and the chase.”
Yet, wretched and abused as these women were, they seemed content with their lot, and when their husbands died, they not only mourned for them, but seemed quite ready to enter the same servitude with a new master. ”I once saw a young widow,” said Jefferson, ”whose husband, a warrior, had died about eight days before, hastening to finish her grief, and who, by tearing her hair, beating her breast, and drinking spirits, made the tears flow in great abundance in order that she might grieve much in a short s.p.a.ce of time, and be married that evening to another young warrior.”
Spelman, a Virginia adventurer who, in the course of one of his exploring trips, witnessed an Indian wedding, has left us an account of the ceremony. ”Ye man,” he says, ”goes not unto any place to be married, but ye woman is brought to him where he dwelleth. At her coming, her father or cheefe frend ioynes the hands togither, and then ye father, or cheefe frend of the man, bringeth a longe string of beades and, measuringe his armes leangth thereof, doth breake it over ye handes of those that ar to be married while their handes be ioyned together and gives it unto ye woman's father or him that brings hir. And so, with much mirth and feastinge they go togither.”
This ”longe string of beades” of which Spelman spoke, was probably made of the _peak_ and _roanoke_, which made the riches of the Indian, and served him at once for money and ornament. Both were made from sh.e.l.l--one dark, the other white. The darker was the more valuable, and was distinguished as _wampum_ peak. The English traders accepted it as coinage, and reckoned its value at eighteen pence a yard, while the white peak sold for ninepence. In the proceedings of the Maryland Council we find Thomas Cornwaleys licensed to trade with the Indians for corn, roanoke, and peak.
When the red men wished to make bargains with the English, before interpreters had been trained to speak both languages, the counting was done by dropping beans, one by one, amid total silence. Woe to the offender who interrupted an Indian during this critical operation, or indeed at any time! An interruption was looked upon as an unpardonable affront. Once, in the time of Bacon's Rebellion, an Indian chief, accompanied by several of his tribe, came to negotiate a treaty of peace with the English. In the course of the Werrowance's address, one of his attendants ventured to put in a word. Instantly, the chief s.n.a.t.c.hed a tomahawk from his girdle, split the poor fellow's skull, motioned to his companions to carry him out, and continued his speech as calmly as though nothing had happened.
The lack of ceremony in the white men's address, and the frequency with which they interrupted, struck the Indian as amazing and unpardonable.
There is a tradition that one of the early preachers strove to teach an old Indian brave the doctrine of the Trinity. The Indian heard him calmly to the end, and then began in his turn to tell of the Great Spirit who spoke in the thunder, and whose smile was the suns.h.i.+ne. In the midst of his discourse, the clergyman broke in, ”But all this is not true.” The Indian, turning to the circle around, remarked: ”What sort of man is this?
He has been talking for an hour of his three G.o.ds, and now he will not let me tell of my one.”
The character of the Indian was a strange mixture of apparent contradictions. He would hunt and fish for a season, and then feast and make merry night and day while his supplies lasted. When they were exhausted, he would gird up his loins, and fast for a period long enough to end the life of a white man. He had an inordinate love of finery, upon which the English traded from the first. He would barter away a whole Winter's provisions of corn for a scarlet blanket or a bunch of gay-colored beads. Yet he was not without a natural shrewdness which enlightened him when he was being cheated. The story runs that some of the early missionaries taught the savages that their salvation depended on catching for them shad, which they sold to the settlers. In the course of time the Indians discovered the trick, and drove out the deceivers. Years afterward, another mission was established, and the first priest took as his text, ”Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters!” The Indians gathered round the preacher when the sermon was ended, and one of the tribe said: ”White man, you speak in fine words of the waters of life; but before we decide on what we have heard, we would like to know _whether any shad swim in those waters_!”
It must be confessed that the Indians appear to better advantage than the English, in the early transactions. When Hamor went to visit King Powhatan, he was received with royal courtesy. The chief sent one of his attendants to bring what food he could find, though he explained that, as they were not expecting visitors, they had not kept anything ready.
”Presently,” Hamor recounts, ”the bread was brought in two great wodden bowls, the quant.i.ty of a bushel sod bread, made up round, of the bygnesse of a tenise-ball, whereof we eat some few.” After this repast, Hamor and his comrades were regaled with ”a great gla.s.se of sacke,” and then were ushered into the wigwam appropriated to them for the night. English and Indian ideas of comfort did not correspond, however, for Hamor complains: ”We had not bin halfe an hour in the house, before the fleas began so to torment us that we could not rest there, but went forth and under a broade oake, upon a mat, reposed ourselves that night.”
Hamor took with him on this visit, as an offering to the Indian chief, five strings of blue and white beads, two pieces of copper, five wooden combs, ten fishhooks, and a pair of knives. In return for these costly presents, this pious English gentleman asked Powhatan, who had already given Pocahontas to the whites, to send them another daughter, really as a hostage, but nominally as a wife to Sir Thomas Dale, the worthy governor of Virginia, regardless of the slight objection that there was already a Lady Dale in England. Pocahontas had good reason for saying to Smith when she met him in London, ”Your countrymen will lie much.”
To the early settlers the savage seemed a strange being, not more than half human, who happened to be in possession of the land they coveted.