AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS.
The first explorers of the Atlantic seaboard found many of the tribes cultivating the soil to a limited extent, corn being the chief product. The methods and appliances were exceedingly primitive, and the implements employed, whether wood, bone, stone, or shell, possess but little interest to art.
Unworked shells, lashed to rude handles, served all the purposes as well as if wrought out in the most fanciful manner. The large, firm valves of clam-shells were most frequently used, as the following extracts will show.
"Before the Indians learned of the English the use of a more convenient instrument, they tilled their corn with hoes made of these shells, to which purpose they are well adapted by their size."[42]
A further reference to this shell is found in Wood's New England Prospect: "The first plowman was counted little better than a Juggler: the Indians seeing the plow teare up more ground in a day, than their Clamme shels could scrape up in a month, desired to see the workemanship of it, and viewing well the coulter and share, perceiving it to be iron, told the plowman, hee was almost Abamocho, almost as cunning as the Devill."[43] And again the same author says: "An other work is their planting of corne, wherein they exceede our English husband-men, keeping it so cleare with their Clamme shell-hooes, as if it were a garden rather than a corne-field, not suffering a choking weede to advance his audacious head above their infant corne, or an undermining worme to spoile his spurnes."[44]
Other writers make but the most casual mention of this subject. De Bry gives, in Plate XXI, Vol. II, a picture in which a number of natives are engaged in cultivating their fields. In Fig. 3, Plate XXVII, I give an enlarged cut of one of the implements employed; the original drawing has probably been made from memory by the artist, and the cut serves no purpose except to give an idea of the general shape of the implement and to suggest the manner of hafting, if indeed the implement is not made wholly from a crooked stick.
PL. XXVII—SHELL IMPLEMENTS.
1. Shell implement, Tennessee.
2. Probable manner of hafting celt.
3. Implement illustrated in De Bry.
4. Shell club-head, Florida.
5. Shell implement, Peru.