Home Life in Colonial Days

It should be stated that the word porringer, as used by English collectors, usually refers to a deep cup with a cover and two handles, while what we call porringers are known to these collectors as bleeding-basins or tasters. Here we apply the term taster, or wine-taster, to a small, shallow silver cup with bosses in the bottom to reflect the light and show the color and quality of wine. I have often seen the item wine-taster in colonial inventories and wills, but never bleeding-basin; while porringers were almost universal on such lists. Some families had a dozen. I have found fifteen in one old New England farmhouse. The small porringers are sometimes called posnets, which is an old-time word that may originally have referred to a posset-cup.

"Spoons," says the learned archæologist, Laborde, "if not as old as the world, are as old as soup." All the colonists had spoons, and certainly all needed them, for at that time much of their food was in the form of soup and "spoon-meat," such as had to be eaten with spoons when there were no forks. Meat was usually made into hashes or ragouts; thick stews and soups with chopped vegetables and meats were common, as were hotch-pots. The cereal foods, which formed so large a part of English fare in the New World, were more frequently boiled in porridge than baked in loaves. Many of the spoons were of pewter. Worn-out pewter plates and dishes could be recast into new pewter spoons. The moulds were of wood or iron. The spoon mould of one of the first settlers of Greenfield, Massachusetts, named Martindale, is here shown with a pewter spoon. In this mould all his spoons and those of his neighbors were cast. It is now in the Deerfield Memorial Hall.

A still more universal spoon material was alchymy, also called occamy, alcamy, arkamy, etc., a metal never used now, which was made of a mixture of pan-brass and arsenicum. Wooden spoons, too, were always seen. In Pennsylvania and New York laurel was called spoonwood, because the Indians made pretty white spoons from that wood to sell to the colonists. Horn was an appropriate and available material for spoons. Many Indian tribes excelled as they do to-day in the making of horn spoons. The vulgar affirmation, "By the great horn spoon," has perpetuated their familiar use.

Every family of any considerable possessions or owning good household furnishings had a few silver spoons; nearly every person owned at least one. At the time America was settled the common form of silver spoon in England had what was known as a baluster stem and a seal head; the assay mark was in the inner part of the bowl. But the fashion was just changing, and a new and much altered form was introduced which was made in large numbers until the opening reign of George I. This shape was the very one without doubt in which many of the spoons of the first colonists were made; and wherever such spoons are found, if they are genuine antiques, they may safely be assigned a date earlier than 1714. The handle was flat and broad at the end, where it was cleft in three points which were turned up, that is, not toward the back of the spoon. This was known as the "hind's-foot handle." The bowl was a perfectly regular ellipse and was strengthened by continuing the handle in a narrow tongue or rat-tail, which ran down the back of the bowl. The succeeding fashion, in the early part of the eighteenth century, had a longer elliptical bowl. The end of the handle was rounded and turned up at the end, and it had a high sharp ridge down the middle. This was known as the old English shape, and was in common use for half a century. About the period of our Revolutionary War a shape nearly like the one in ordinary present use became the mode; the bowl became egg-shaped, and the end of the handle was turned down instead of up. The rat-tail, which extended down the back of the bowl, was shortened into a drop. Apostle spoons, and monkey spoons for extraordinary use were occasionally made, and a few are still preserved; examples of five types of spoons are shown from the collection of Edward Holbrook, Esq., of New York.

Families of consequence had usually a few pieces of silver besides their spoons and the silver salt. Some kind of a drinking-cup was the usual form. Persons of moderate means often owned a silver cup. I have seen in early inventories and lists the names of a large variety of silver vessels: tankards, beer-bowls, beakers, flagons, wine cups, wine bowls, wine cans, tasters, caudle-cups, posset-cups, dram-cups, punch-bowls, tumblers, mugs, dram bottles, two-eared cups, and flasks. Virginians and Marylanders in the seventeenth century had much more silver than New Englanders. Some Dutch merchants had ample amounts. It was deemed a good and safe investment for spare money. Bread-baskets, salvers, muffineers, chafing-dishes, casters, milk pitchers, sugar boxes, candlesticks, appear in inventories at the end of the century. A tankard or flagon, even if heavy and handsome, would be placed on the table for every-day use; the other pieces were usually set on the cupboard's head for ornament.

The handsome silver tankard owned by Sarah Jansen de Rapelje is here shown. She was the first child of European parents born in New Netherland. The tankard was a wedding gift from her husband, and a Dutch wedding scene is graven on the lid.

There was a great desire for glass, a rare novelty to many persons at the date of colonization. The English were less familiar with its use than settlers who came from Continental Europe. The establishment of glass factories was attempted in early days in several places, chiefly to manufacture sheet-glass, but with slight success. Little glass was owned in the shape of drinking-vessels, none used generally on the table, I think, during the first few years. Glass bottles were certainly a great rarity, and were bequeathed with special mention in wills, and they are the only form of glass vessel named. The earliest glass for table use was greenish in color, like coarse bottle glass, and poor in quality, sometimes decorated in crude designs in a few colors. Bristol glass, in the shape of mugs and plates, was next seen. It was opaque, a milky white color, and was coarsely decorated with vitrifiable colors in a few lines of red, green, yellow, or black, occasionally with initials, dates, or Scriptural references.

Though shapes were varied, and the number was generally plentiful, there was no attempt made to give separate drinking-cups of any kind to each individual at the table. Blissfully ignorant of the existence or presence of microbes, germs, and bacteria, our sturdy and unsqueamish forbears drank contentedly in succession from a single vessel, which was passed from hand to hand, and lip to lip, around the board. Even when tumbler-shaped glasses were seen in many houses,—flip-glasses, they were called,—they were of communal size,—some held a gallon,—and all drank from the same glass. The great punch-bowl, not a very handy vessel to handle when filled with punch, was passed up and down as freely as though it were a loving-cup, and all drank from its brim. At college tables, and even at tavern boards, where table neighbors might be strangers, the flowing bowl and foaming tankard was passed serenely from one to another, and replenished to pass again.

Leather was perhaps the most curious material used. Pitchers, bottles, and drinking-cups were made of it. Great jugs of heavy black leather, waxed and bound, and tipped with silver, were used to hold metheglin, ale, and beer, and were a very substantial, and at times a very handsome vessel. The finest examples I have ever seen are here represented. The stitches and waxed thread at the base and on the handles can plainly be perceived. They are bound with a rich silver band, and have a silver shield bearing a date of gift to Samuel Brenton in 1778; but they are probably a century older than that date. They are the property by inheritance of Miss Rebecca Shaw, aged ninety-six years, of Wickford, Rhode Island.

The use of these great leather jacks, in a clumsier form than here shown, led to the amusing mistake of a French traveller, that the English drank their ale out of their boots. These leather jugs were commonly called black jacks, and the larger ones were bombards. Giskin was still another and rarer name.

Drinking-cups were sometimes made of horn. A handsome one has been used since colonial days on Long Island for "quince drink," a potent mixture of hot rum, sugar, and quince marmalade, or preserves. It has a base of silver, a rim of silver, and a cover of horn tipped with silver. A stirrup-cup of horn, tipped with silver, was used to "speed the parting guest." Occasionally the whole horn, in true mediæval fashion, was used as a drinking-cup. Often they were carved with considerable skill, as the beautiful ones in the collection of Mr. A. G. Richmond, of Canajoharie, New York.

Gourds were plentiful on the farm, and gathered with care, that the hard-shelled fruit might be shaped into simple drinking-cups. In Elizabeth's time silver cups were made in the shape of these gourds. The ships that brought "lemmons and raysins of the sun" from the tropics to the colonists, also brought cocoanuts. Since the thirteenth century the shells of cocoanuts have been mounted with silver feet and "covercles" in a goblet shape, and been much sought after by Englishmen. Mounted in pewter, and sometimes in silver, or simply shaped with a wooden handle attached, the shell of the cocoanut was a favorite among the English settlers. To this day one of the cocoanut-shell cups, or dippers, is a favorite drinking-cup of many. A handsome cocoanut goblet, richly mounted in silver, is shown in the accompanying illustration. It was once the property of the Revolutionary patriot, John Hancock, and is now in the custody of the Bostonian Society, at the Old State House, in Boston, Massachusetts.

Popular drinking-mugs of the English, from which specially they drank their mead, metheglin, and ale, were the stoneware jugs which were made in Germany and England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in great numbers. An English writer in 1579, spoke of the English custom of drinking from "pots of earth, of sundry colors and moulds, whereof many are garnished with silver, or leastwise with pewter." Such a piece of stoneware is the oldest authenticated drinking-jug in this country, which was brought here and used by English colonists. It was the property of Governor John Winthrop, who came to Boston in 1630, and now belongs to the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts. It stands eight inches in height, is apparently of German Gresware, and is heavily mounted in silver. The lid is engraved with a quaint design of Adam and Eve and the tempting serpent in the apple-tree. It was a gift to John Winthrop's father from his sister, Lady Mildmay, in 1607, and was then, and is still now, labelled, "a stone Pot tipped and covered with a Silver Lydd." Many other Boston colonists had similar "stone juggs," "fflanders juggs," "tipt juggs." What were known as "Fulham juggs" were also much prized. The most interesting ones are the Georgius Rex jugs, those marked with a crown, the initials G. R., or a medallion head of the first of the English Georges. I know one of these jugs which has a Revolutionary bullet imbedded in its tough old side, and is not even cracked. Many of them had pewter or silver lids, which are now missing. Some have the curious hound handle which was so popular with English potters.

There was no china in common use on the table, and little owned even by persons of wealth throughout the seventeenth century, either in England or America. Delft ware was made in several factories in Holland at the time the Dutch settled in New Netherland; but even in the towns of its manufacture it was not used for table ware. The pieces were usually of large size, what were called state pieces, for cabinet and decorative purposes. The Dutch settlers, however, had "purslin cupps" and earthen dishes in considerable quantities toward the end of the century. The earthen was possibly Delft ware, and the "Purslin" India china, which by that time was largely imported to Holland. Some Portuguese and Spanish pottery was imported, but was not much desired, as it was ill fired and perishable. It was not until Revolutionary times that china was a common table furnishing; then it began to crowd out pewter. The sudden and enormous growth of East India commerce, and the vast cargoes of Chinese pottery and porcelain wares brought to American ports soon gave ample china to every housewife. In the Southern colonies beautiful isolated pieces of porcelain, such as vast punch-bowls, often were found in the homes of opulent planters; but there, as in the North, the first china for general table use was the handleless tea-cups, usually of some Canton ware, which crept with the fragrant herb into every woman's heart—both welcome Oriental waifs.

It may well be imagined that this long narrow table—with a high salt-cellar in the middle, with clumsy wooden trenchers for plates, with round pewter platters heaped high with the stew of meat and vegetables, with a great noggin or two of wood, a can of pewter, or a silver tankard to drink from, with leather jacks to hold beer or milk, with many wooden or pewter and some silver spoons, but no forks, no glass, no china, no covered dishes, no saucers—did not look much like our dinner tables to-day.

Even the seats were different; there were seldom chairs or stools for each person. A long narrow bench without a back, called a form, was placed on each side of the table. Children in many households were not allowed to sit, even on these uncomfortable forms, while eating. Many times they had to stand by the side of the table during the entire meal; in old-fashioned families that uncomfortable and ungracious custom lasted till this century. I know of children not fifty years ago standing thus at all meals at the table of one of the Judges of the Supreme Court. He had a bountiful table, was a hospitable entertainer and well-known epicure; but children sat not at his board. Each stood at his own place and had to behave with decorum and eat in entire silence. In some families children stood behind their parents and other grown persons, and food was handed back to them from the table—so we are told. This seems closely akin to throwing food to an animal, and must have been among people of very low station and social manners.

In other houses they stood at a side-table; and, trencher in hand, ran over to the great table to be helped to more food when their first supply was eaten.

The chief thought on the behavior of children at the table, which must be inferred from all the accounts we have of those times is that they were to eat in silence, as fast as possible (regardless of indigestion), and leave the table as speedily as might be. In a little book called A Pretty Little Pocket Book, printed in America about the time of the Revolution, I found a list of rules for the behavior of children at the table at that date. They were ordered never to seat themselves at the table until after the blessing had been asked, and their parents told them to be seated. They were never to ask for anything on the table; never to speak unless spoken to; always to break the bread, not to bite into a whole slice; never to take salt except with a clean knife; not to throw bones under the table. One rule read: "Hold not thy knife upright, but sloping; lay it down at right hand of the plate, with end of blade on the plate." Another, "Look not earnestly at any other person that is eating." When children had eaten all that had been given them, if they were "moderately satisfied," they were told to leave at once the table and room.

When the table-board described herein was set with snowy linen cloth and napkins, and ample fare, it had some compensations for what modern luxuries it lacked, some qualifications for inducing contentment superior even to our beautiful table-settings. There was nothing perishable in its entire furnishing: no frail and costly china or glass, whose injury and destruction by clumsy or heedless servants would make the heart of the housekeeper ache, and her anger nourish the germs of ptomaines within her. There was little of intrinsic value to watch and guard and worry about. There was little to make extra and difficult work,—no glass to wash with anxious care, no elaborate silver to clean,—only a few pieces of pewter to polish occasionally. It was all so easy and so simple when compared with the complex and varied paraphernalia and accompaniments of serving of meals to-day, that it was like Arcadian simplicity.

In Virginia the table furnishings were similar to those in New England; but there were greater contrasts in table appointments. There was more silver, and richer food; but the negro servants were so squalid, clumsy, and uncouth that the incongruity made the meals very surprising and, at times, repellent.

When dinners of some state were given in the larger towns, the table was not set or served like the formal dinner of to-day, for all the sweets, pastry, vegetables, and meats were placed on the table together, with a grand "conceit" for the ornament in the centre. At one period, when pudding was part of the dinner, it was served first. Thus an old-time saying is explained, which always seemed rather meaningless, "I came early—in pudding-time." There was considerable formality in portioning out the food, especially in carving, which was regarded as much more than a polite accomplishment, even as an art. I have seen a list of sixty or seventy different terms in carving to be applied with exactness to different fish, fowl, and meats. An old author says:—

It must have required good judgment and constant watchfulness never to say "spoil that Hen," when it was a chicken; or else be thought hopelessly ill-bred.

There were few state dinners, however, served in the American colonies, even in the large cities; there were few dinners, even, of many courses; not always were there many dishes. There were still seen in many homes more primitive forms of serving and eating meals, than were indicated by the lack of individual drinking-cups, the mutual use of a trencher, or even the utilization of the table top as a plate. In some homes an abundant dish, such as a vast bowl of suppawn and milk, a pumpkin stewed whole in its shell, or a savory and mammoth hotchpot was set, often smoking hot, on the table-board; and from this well-filled receptacle each hungry soul, armed with a long-handled pewter or wooden spoon, helped himself, sometimes ladling his great spoonfuls into a trencher or bowl, for more moderate and reserved after-consumption,—just as frequently eating directly from the bountiful dish with a spoon that came and went from dish to mouth without reproach, or thought of ill-manners. The accounts of travellers in all the colonies frequently tell of such repasts; some termed it eating in the fashion of the Dutch. The reports of old settlers often recall the general dish; and some very distinguished persons joined in the circle around it, and were glad to get it. Variety was of little account, compared to quantity and quality. A cheerful hospitality and grateful hearts filled the hollow place of formality and elegance.

By the time that newspapers began to have advertisements in them—about 1750—we find many more articles for use at the table; but often the names were different from those used to-day. Our sugar bowls were called sugar boxes and sugar pots; milk pitchers were milk jugs, milk ewers, and milk pots. Vegetable dishes were called basins, pudding dishes twifflers, small cups were called sneak cups.

We have still to-day a custom much like one of olden times, when we have the crumbs removed from our tables after a course at dinner. Then a voider was passed around the table near the close of the dinner, and into it the persons at the table placed their trenchers, napkins, and the crumbs from the table. The voider was a deep wicker, wooden, or metal basket. In the Boke of Nurture, written in 1577, are these lines:—

CHAPTER V
FOOD FROM FOREST AND SEA

Though all the early explorers and travellers came to America eager to find precious and useful metals, they did not discover wealth and prosperity underground in mines, but on the top of the earth, in the woods and fields. To the forests they turned for food, and they did not turn in vain. Deer were plentiful everywhere, and venison was offered by the Indians to the first who landed from the ships. Some families lived wholly on venison for nine months of the year. In Virginia were vast numbers of red and fallow deer, the latter like those of England, except in the smaller number of branches of the antlers. They were so devoid of fear as to remain undisturbed by the approach of men; a writer of that day says: "Hard by the Fort two hundred in one herd have been usually observed." They were destroyed ruthlessly by a system of fire-hunting, in which tracts of forests were burned over, by starting a continuous circle of fire miles around, which burnt in toward the centre of the circle; thus the deer were driven into the middle, and hundreds were killed. This miserable, wholesale slaughter was not for venison, but for the sake of the hides, which were very valuable. They were used to make the durable and suitable buckskin breeches and jackets so much worn by the settlers; and they were also exported to Europe in large numbers. A tax was placed on hides for the support of the beloved William and Mary College.

In Georgia, in 1735, the Indians sold a deer for sixpence. Deer were just as abundant in the more Northern colonies. At Albany a stag was sold readily by the Indians for a jack-knife or a few iron nails. The deer in winter came and fed from the hog-pens of Albany swine. Even in 1695, a quarter of venison could be bought in New York City for ninepence. At the first Massachusetts Thanksgiving, in 1621, the Indians brought in five deer to the colonists for their feast. That year there was also "great store of wild turkies." These beautiful birds of gold and purple bronze were at first plentiful everywhere, and were of great weight, far larger than our domestic turkeys to-day. They came in flocks of a hundred, Evelyn says of three hundred on the Chesapeake, and they weighed thirty or forty pounds each: Josselyn says he saw one weighing sixty pounds. William Penn wrote that turkeys weighing thirty pounds apiece sold in his day and colony for a shilling only. They were shy creatures and fled inland from the white man, and by 1690 were rarely shot near the coast of New England, though in Georgia, in 1733, they were plentiful enough and cheap enough to sell for fourpence apiece. Flights of pigeons darkened the sky, and broke down the limbs of trees on which they lighted. From Maine to Virginia these vast flocks were seen. Some years pigeons were so plentiful that they were sold for a penny a dozen in Boston. Pheasant, partridge, woodcock, and quail abounded, plover, snipe, and curlew were in the marsh-woods; in fact, in Virginia every bird familiar to Englishmen at home was found save peacock and domestic fowl.

Wild hare and squirrels were so many that they became pests, and so much grain was eaten by them that bounties were paid in many towns for the heads of squirrels. County treasuries were exhausted by these premiums. The Swedish traveller, Kalm, said that in Pennsylvania in one year, 1749, £8000 was paid out for heads of black and gray squirrels, at threepence a head, which would show that over six hundred thousand were killed.

From the woods came a sweet food-store, one specially grateful when sugar was so scarce and so high-priced,—wild honey, which the colonists eagerly gathered everywhere from hollow tree-trunks. Curiously enough, the traveller, Kalm, insisted that bees were not native in America, but were brought over by the English; that the Indians had no name for them and called them English flies.

Governor Berkeley of Virginia, writing in 1706, called the maple the sugar-tree; he said:—

The sugar-making season was ever hailed with delight by the boys of the household in colonial days, who found in this work in the woods a wonderful outlet for the love of wild life which was strong in them. It had in truth a touch of going a-gypsying, if any work as hard as sugaring-off could have anything common with gypsy life. The maple-trees were tapped as soon as the sap began to run in the trunk and showed at the end of the twigs; this was in late winter if mild, or in the earliest spring. A notch was cut in the trunk of the tree at a convenient height from the ground, usually four or five feet, and the running sap was guided by setting in the notch a semicircular basswood spout cut and set with a special tool called a tapping-gauge. In earlier days the trees were "boxed," that is, a great gash cut across the side and scooped out and down to gather the sap. This often proved fatal to the trees, and was abandoned. A trough, usually made of a butternut log about three feet long, was dug out, Indian fashion, and placed under the end of the spout. These troughs were made deep enough to hold about ten quarts. In later years a hole was bored in the tree with an augur; and sap-buckets were used instead of troughs.

Sometimes these troughs were left in distant sugar-camps from year to year, turned bottom side up, through the summer and winter. It was more thrifty and tidy, however, to carry them home and store them. When this was done, the men and boys began work by drawing the troughs and spouts and provisions to the woods on hand-sleds. Sometimes a mighty man took in a load on his back. It is told of John Alexander of Brattleboro, Vermont, that he once went into camp upon snowshoes carrying for three miles one five-pail iron kettle, two sap-buckets, an axe and trappings, a knapsack, four days' provisions, and a gun and ammunition.

The master of ceremonies—the owner of the camp—selected the trees and drove the spouts, while the boys placed the troughs. Then the snow had to be shovelled away on a level spot about eighteen or twenty feet square, in which strong forked sticks were set twelve feet apart. Or the ground was chosen so that two small low-spreading and strong trees could be trimmed and used as forks. A heavy green stick was placed across from fork to fork, and the sugaring-off kettles, sometimes five in number, hung on it. Then dry wood had to be gathered for the fires; hard work it was to keep them constantly supplied. It was often cut a year in advance. As the sap collected in the troughs it was gathered in pails or buckets which, hung on a sap-yoke across the neck, were brought to the kettles and the sap set a-boiling down. When there was a "good run of sap," it was usually necessary to stay in the camp over night. Many times the campers stayed several nights. As the "good run" meant milder weather, a night or two was not a bitter experience; indeed, I have never heard any one speak nor seen any account of a night spent in a sugar-camp except with keen expressions of delight. If possible, the time was chosen during a term of moonlight; the snow still covered the fields and its pure shining white light could be seen through the trees.

The great silence, broken only by steady dropping of the sap, the crackle of blazing brush, and the occasional hooting of startled owls; the stars seen singly overhead through the openings of the trees, shining down the dark tunnel as bright as though there were no moon; above all, the clearness and sweetness of the first atmosphere of spring,—gave an exaltation of the senses and spirit which the country boy felt without understanding, and indeed without any formulated consciousness.

If the camp were near enough to any group of farmhouses to have visitors, the last afternoon and evening in camp was made a country frolic. Great sled-loads of girls came out to taste the new sugar, to drop it into the snow to candy, and to have an evening of fun.

Long ere the full riches of the forests were tested the colonists turned to another food-supply,—the treasures of the sea.

The early voyagers and colonists came to the coasts of the New World to find gold and furs. The gold was not found by them nor their children's children in the land which is now the United States, till over two centuries had passed from the time of the settlement, and the gold-mines of California were opened. The furs were at first found and profitably gathered, but the timid fur-bearing animals were soon exterminated near the settlements. There was, however, a vast wealth ready for the colonists on the coast of the New World which was greater than gold, greater than furs; a wealth ever-obtainable, ever-replenished, ever-useful, ever-salable; it was fish. The sea, the rivers, the lakes, teemed with fish. Not only was there food for the settlers, but for the whole world, and all Europe desired fish to eat. The ships of the early discoverer, Gosnold, in 1602, were "pestered with cod." Captain John Smith, the acute explorer, famous in history as befriended by Pocahontas, went to New England, in 1614, to seek for whale, and instead he fished for cod. He secured sixty thousand in one month; and he wrote to his countrymen, "Let not the meanness of the word fish distaste you, for it will afford as good gold as the mines of Guiana or Potosi, with less hazard and charge, and more certainty and facility." This promise of wealth has proved true a thousandfold. Smith wrote home to England full accounts of the fisheries, of the proper equipment of a fishing-vessel, of the methods of fishing, the profits, all in a most enticing and familiar style. He said in his Description of New England:—

His accounts and similar ones were so much read in England that when the Puritans asked King James of England for permission to come to America, and the king asked what profit would be found by their emigration, he was at once answered, "Fishing." Whereupon he said in turn, "In truth 'tis an honest trade; 'twas the apostles' own calling." Yet in spite of their intent to fish, the first English ships came but poorly provided for fishing, and the settlers had little success at first even in getting fish for their own food. Elder Brewster of Plymouth, who had been a courtier in Queen Elizabeth's time, and had seen and eaten many rich feasts, had nothing to eat at one time but clams. Yet he could give thanks to God that he was "permitted to suck of the abundance of the seas and the treasures hid in the sand." The Indian Squanto showed the Pilgrims many practical methods of fishing, among them one of treading out eels from the brook with his feet and catching them with his hands. And every ship brought in either cod-hooks and lines, mackerel-hooks and lines, herring-nets, seines, shark-hooks, bass-nets, squid-lines, eel-pots, coils of rope and cable, "drails, barbels, pens, gaffs," or mussel-hooks.

Josselyn, in his New England's Rarities, written in 1672, enumerated over two hundred kinds of fish that were caught in New England waters.

Lobsters certainly were plentiful enough to prevent starvation. The minister Higginson, writing of lobsters at Salem, said that many of them weighed twenty-five pounds apiece, and that "the least boy in the plantation may catch and eat what he will of them." In 1623, when the ship Anne arrived from England, bringing many of the wives and children of the Pilgrims who had come in the first ships, the only feast of welcome that the poor husbands had to offer the newcomers was "a lobster or a piece of fish without bread or anything else but a cup of spring water."

Patriarchal lobsters five and six feet long were caught in New York Bay. The traveller, Van der Donck, says "those a foot long are better for serving at table." Truly a lobster six feet long would seem a little awkward to serve on a dinner table. Eddis, in his Letters from America, written in 1792, says these vast lobsters were caught in New York waters until Revolutionary days, when "since the incessant cannonading, they have entirely forsaken the coast; not one having been taken or seen since the commencement of hostilities." Beside these great shell-fish the giant lobster confined in our New York Aquarium in 1897 seems but a dwarf. In Virginia waters lobsters were caught, and vast crabs, often a foot in length and six inches broad, with a long tail and many legs. One of these crabs furnished a sufficient meal for four men.

From the gossiping pages of the Labadist missionaries who came to America in 1697 we find hints of good fare in oysters in Brooklyn.

Van der Donck corroborates the foot-long oysters seen by the Labadist travellers. He says the "large oysters roasted or stewed make a good bite,"—a very good bite, it would seem to us.

Strachey, in his Historie of Travaile into Virginia, says he saw oysters in Virginia that were thirteen inches long. Fortunately for the starving Virginians, oyster banks rose above the surface at ebb-tide at the mouth of the Elizabeth River, and in 1609 a large number of these famished Virginia colonists found in these oyster banks a means of preservation of life.

As might be expected of any country so intersected with arms of the sea and fresh-water streams, Virginia at the time of settlement teemed with fish. The Indians killed them in the brooks by striking them with sticks, and it is said the colonists scooped them up in frying-pans. Horses ridden into the rivers stepped on the fish and killed them. In one cast of a seine the governor, Sir Thomas Dale, caught five thousand sturgeon as large as cod. Some sturgeon were twelve feet long. The works of Captain John Smith, Rolfe's Relation, and other books of early travellers, all tell of the enormous amount of fish in Virginia.

The New York rivers were also full of fish, and the bays; their plenty in New Netherland inspired the first poet of that colony to rhyming enumeration of the various kinds of fish found there; among them were sturgeon—beloved of the Indians and despised of Christians; and terrapin—not despised by any one. "Some persons," wrote the Dutch traveller, Van der Donck, in 1656, "prepare delicious dishes from the water terrapin, which is luscious food." The Middle and Southern states paid equally warm but more tardy tribute to the terrapin's reputation as luscious food.

While other fish were used everywhere for food, cod was the great staple of the fishing industry. By the year 1633 Dorchester and Marblehead had started in the fisheries for trading purposes. Sturgeon also was caught at a little later date, and bass and alewives.

Morton, in his New England Canaan, written in 1636, says, "I myself at the turning of the tyde have seen such multitudes of sea bass that it seemed to me that one might goe over their backs dri-shod."

The regulation of fish-weirs soon became an important matter in all towns where streams let alewives up from the sea. The New England ministers took a hand in promoting and encouraging the fisheries, as they did all positive social movements and commercial benefits. Rev. Hugh Peter in Salem gave the fisheries a specially good turn. Fishermen were excused from military training, and portions of the common stock of corn were assigned to them. The General Court of Massachusetts exempted "vessels and stock" from "country charges" (which were taxes) for seven years. Seashore towns assigned free lands to each boat to be used for stays and flakes for drying. As early as 1640 three hundred thousand dried codfish were sent to market from New England.

Codfish consisted of three sorts, "marchantable, middling, and refuse." The first grade was sold chiefly to Roman Catholic Europe, to supply the constant demands of the fast-days of that religion, and also those of the Church of England; the second was consumed at home or in the merchant vessels of New England; the third went to the negroes of the West Indies, and was often called Jamaica fish. The dun-fish or dumb-fish, as the word was sometimes written, were the best; so called from the dun-color. Fish was always eaten in New England for a Saturday dinner; and Mr. Palfrey, the historian, says that until this century no New England dinner on Saturday, even a formal dinner party, was complete without dun-fish being served.

Of course the first fishing-vessels had to be built and sent from England. Some carried fifty men. They arrived on the coast in early spring, and by midsummer sailed home. The crew had for wages one-third share of the fish and oil; another third paid for the men's food, the salt, nets, hooks, lines, etc.; the other third went to the ship's owners for profit.

This system was not carried out in New England. There, each fisherman worked on "his own hook"—and it was literally his own hook; for a tally was kept of the fish caught by each man, and the proceeds of the trip were divided in proportion to the number of fish each caught. When there was a big run of fish, the men never stopped to eat or sleep, but when food was held to them gnawed it off while their hands were employed with the fish-lines. With every fishing-vessel that left Gloucester and Marblehead, the chief centres of the fishing industries, went a boy of ten or twelve to learn to be a skilled fisherman. He was called a "cut-tail," for he cut a wedge-shaped bit from the tail of every fish he caught, and when the fish were sorted out the cut-tails showed the boy's share of the profit.

For centuries, fish was plentiful and cheap in New England. The traveller Bennet wrote of Boston, in 1740:—

Two kinds of delicious fish, beloved, perhaps, above all others to-day,—salmon and shad,—seem to have been lightly regarded in colonial days. The price of salmon—less than a penny a pound—shows the low estimation in which it was held in the early years of the eighteenth century. It is told that farm-laborers in the vicinity of the Connecticut River when engaged to work stipulated that they should have salmon for dinner but once a week.

Shad were profoundly despised; it was even held to be somewhat disreputable to eat them; and the story is told of a family in Hadley, Massachusetts, who were about to dine on shad, that, hearing a knock at the door, they would not open it till the platter holding the obnoxious shad had been hidden. At first they were fed chiefly to hogs. Two shad for a penny was the ignoble price in 1733, and it was never much higher until after the Revolution. After shad and salmon acquired a better reputation as food, the falls of various rivers became great resorts for American fishermen as they had been for the Indians. Both kinds of fish were caught in scoop-nets and seines below the falls. Men came from a distance and loaded horses and carts with the fish to carry home. Every farmhouse near was filled with visitors. It was estimated that at the falls at South Hadley there were fifteen hundred horses in one day.

Salted fish was as carefully prepared and amiably regarded for home use in New England and New York as in England and Holland at the same date. The ling and herring of the old countries of Europe gave place in America to cod, shad, and mackerel. The greatest pains was taken in preparing, drying, and salting the plentiful fish. It is said that in New York towns, such as New York and Brooklyn, after shad became a popular fish, great heaps were left when purchased at each door, and that the necessary cleaning and preparation of the shad was done on the street. As all housewives purchased shad and salted and packed at about the same time, those public scavengers, the domestic hogs who roamed the town streets unchecked (and ever welcomed), must have been specially useful at shad-time.

Not in the waters, but of it, were the magnificent tribes of marine fowl that, undiminished by the feeble weapons and few numbers of the Indians, had peopled for centuries the waters of the New World. The Chesapeake and its tributaries furnished each autumn vast feeding-grounds of wild celery and other aquatic plants to millions of those creatures. The firearms of Captain John Smith and his two companions were poor things compared with the fowling-pieces of to-day, but with their three shots they killed a hundred and forty-eight ducks at one firing. The splendid wild swan wheeled and trumpeted in the clear autumn air; the wild geese flew there in their beautiful V-shaped flight; duck in all the varieties known to modern sportsmen—canvas-back, mallard, widgeon, redhead, oxeye, dottrel—rested on the Chesapeake waters in vast flocks a mile wide and seven miles long. Governor Berkeley named also brant, shell drake, teal, and blewings. The sound of their wings was said to be "like a great storm coming over the water." For centuries these ducks have been killed by the white man, and still they return each autumn to their old feeding-places.

CHAPTER VI
INDIAN CORN

A great field of tall Indian corn waving its stately and luxuriant green blades, its graceful spindles, and glossy silk under the hot August sun, should be not only a beautiful sight to every American, but a suggestive one; one to set us thinking of all that Indian corn means to us in our history. It was a native of American soil at the settlement of this country, and under full and thoroughly intelligent cultivation by the Indians, who were also native sons of the New World. Its abundance, adaptability, and nourishing qualities not only saved the colonists' lives, but altered many of their methods of living, especially their manner of cooking and their tastes in food.

One of the first things that every settler in a new land has to learn is that he must find food in that land; that he cannot trust long to any supplies of food which he has brought with him, or to any fresh supplies which he has ordered to be sent after him. He must turn at once to hunting, fishing, planting, to furnish him with food grown and found in the very place where he is.

This was quickly learned by the colonists in America, except in Virginia, where they had sad starving-times before all were convinced that corn was a better crop for settlers than silk or any of the many hoped-for productions which might be valuable in one sense but which could not be eaten. Powhatan, the father of the Indian princess Pocahontas, was one of the first to "send some of his People that they may teach the English how to sow the Grain of his Country." Captain John Smith, ever quick to learn of every one and ever practical, got two Indians, in the year 1608, to show him how to break up and plant forty acres of corn, which yielded him a good crop. A succeeding governor of Virginia, Sir Thomas Dale, equally practical, intelligent, and determined, assigned small farms to each colonist, and encouraged and enforced the growing of corn. Soon many thousand bushels were raised. There was a terrible Indian massacre in 1622, for the careless colonists, in order to be free to give their time to the raising of that new and exceedingly alluring and high-priced crop, tobacco, had given the Indians firearms to go hunting game for them; and the lesson of easy killing with powder and shot, when once learned, was turned with havoc upon the white men. The following year comparatively little corn was planted, as the luxuriant foliage made a perfect ambush for the close approach of the savages to the settlements. There was, of course, scarcity and famine as the result; and a bushel of corn-meal became worth twenty to thirty shillings, which sum had a value equal to twenty to thirty dollars to-day. The planters were each compelled by the magistrates the following year to raise an ample amount of corn to supply all the families; and to save a certain amount for seed as well. There has been no lack of corn since that time in Virginia.

The French colonists in Louisiana, perhaps because they were accustomed to more dainty food than the English, fiercely hated corn, as have the Irish in our own day. A band of French women settlers fairly raised a "petticoat rebellion" in revolt against its daily use. A despatch of the governor of Louisiana says of these rebels:—