[32] Compare, as to the insulation of the tract understood by Josselyn as New England, Palfrey, Hist. N. E., vol. i. pp. 1, 2, and note, and the accompanying map.
[33] See the author’s larger account of the natives in his Voyages, pp. 123-150.
[34] There is a much fuller account—to be noticed again—of our birds, in the Voyages, pp. 95-103. Wood’s (N. E. Prospect, chap, viii.) is also curious. In the notes which immediately follow, on the birds, beasts, fishes, and reptiles, the oldest writers on our natural history will be found often to explain or illustrate each other.
[35] Chimney-swallow.
[36] “The pilhannaw is the king of birds of prey in New England. Some take him to be a kind of eagle; others for the Indian ruck,—the biggest bird that is, except the ostrich. One Mr. Hilton, living at Pascataway, had the hap to kill one of them. Being by the sea-side, he perceived a great shadow over his head, the sun shining out clear. Casting up his eyes, he saw a monstrous bird soaring aloft in the air; and, of a sudden, all the ducks and geese (there being then a great many) dived under water, nothing of them appearing but their heads. Mr. Hilton, having made readie his piece, shot and brought her down to the ground. How he disposed of her, I know not; but had he taken her alive, and sent her over into England, neither Bartholomew nor Sturbridge Fair could have produced such another sight.”—Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 95. These notices have been taken to be sufficient by some writers to show the probable existence of “a bird of prey, very large and bold, on the back of some of our American plantations.” But our author’s account indicates clearly a crested eagle, which we cannot explain by any thing nearer home than the yzquautli, or crested vulture of Mexico and the countries south of it (Falco Harpyja, Gmel.); two notices of which (cited by Linnæus) had been published some twenty years before Josselyn wrote, and may have been supposed by him to be applicable to a large bird which he had heard of as inhabiting mountains about Ossipee. The great heron—an inhabitant of the coast, and so uncommon inland that “one ... shot in the upper parts of New Hampshire was described to” Wilson “as a great curiosity” (Amer. Ornith., by Brewer, p. 555)—has the size and the crest of Josselyn’s bird; and, if this last was only (as is possible) the name of a confused conception made up from several accounts of large birds, the heron may well be thought to have had a share in it.
[37] “Of these, sometimes there will be forty, threescore and a hundred, of a flock; sometimes more, and sometimes less. Their feeding is acorns, hawes, and berries: some of them get a haunt to frequent English corn. In winter, when the snow covers the ground, they resort to the seashore to look for shrimps, and such small fishes, at low tides. Such as love turkey-hunting must follow it in winter, after a new-fallen snow, when he may follow them by their tracks. Some have killed ten or a dozen in half a day. If they can be found towards an evening, and watched where they perch,—if one come about ten or eleven of the clock,—he may shoot as often as he will: they will sit, unless they be slenderly wounded. These turkies remain all the year long. The price of a good turkey-cock is four shillings; and he is well worth it, for he may be in weight forty pounds; a hen, two shillings.”—Wood, N. Eng. Prospect, chap. viii. See also Josselyn’s Voyages, p. 99.
[38] “The geese of the country be of three sorts. First, a brant goose; which is a goose almost like the wild goose in England. The price of one of these is sixpence. The second kind is a white goose, almost as big as an English tame goose. These come in great flocks about Michaelmas: sometimes there will be two or three thousand in a flock. Those continue six weeks, and so fly to the southward; returning in March, and staying six weeks more, returning to the northward. The price of one of these is eightpence. The third kind of geese is a great grey goose, with a black neck, and a black and white head; strong of flight: and these be a great deal bigger than the ordinary geese of England; some very fat, and, in the spring, full of feathers, that the shot can scarce pierce them. Most of these geese remain with us from Michaelmas to April. They feed in the sea upon grass in the bays at low water, and gravel, and in the woods of acorns; having, as other fowl have, their pass and repass to the northward and southward. The accurate marksmen kill of these both flying and sitting. The price of a grey goose is eighteen-pence.”—Wood, N. E. Prospect, l. c. The white goose here mentioned is probably the snow-goose; upon which compare Nuttall, Mass. Ornith., Water-Birds, p. 344. Josselyn (Voyages, p. 100) says the brant and the gray goose “are best meat; the white are lean and tough, and live a long time; whereupon the proverb, ‘Older than a white goose:’” which is not supported by Wood or later writers. The snow-goose has become much less frequent with us since the settlement of the country. The great grey goose of Wood is our well-known Canada goose.
[39] This was the best that our author could say of the eagles of New England. Wood assists us once more here: “The eagles of the country be of two sorts,—one like the eagles that be in England; the other is something bigger, with a great white head and white tail. These be commonly called gripes.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. The first spoken of by Wood—and perhaps, also, what Josselyn names last—may be the common or ring-tailed eagle, now known to be the young of the golden eagle. The second of Wood, and first of our author, is without doubt, the bald eagle; the (so to say) tyrannical habits of which bird are sufficiently well known, at least in the vivid pages of Wilson. See the Voyages, p. 96; where we learn also that “hawkes there are of several kinds; as goshawks, falcons, laniers, sparrow-hawkes, and a little black hawke highly prized by the Indians, who wear them on their heads, and is accounted of worth sufficient to ransom a sagamour. They are so strangely couragious and hardie that nothing flyeth in the air that they will not bind with. I have seen them tower so high, that they have been so small that scarcely could they be taken by the eye” (p. 95-6). Wood makes like mention of this little black hawk (New-Eng. Prospect, l. c.); and R. Williams (Key into the Language of the Indians of N. E., in Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 220) calls it “sachim, a little bird about the bigness of a swallow, or less; to which the Indians give that name, because of its sachem or prince-like courage and command over greater birds: that a man shall often see this small bird pursue and vanquish and put to flight the crow and other birds far bigger than itself.” This was our well-known king-bird; and Josselyn, on the same page, tells us of “a small ash-colour bird that is shaped like a hawke, with talons and beak, that falleth upon crowes; mounting up into the air after them, and will beat them till they make them cry:” which was, perhaps, the king-bird’s half-cousin, as Wilson calls him,—the purple-martin.
[40] Nuttall (Manual, Water-Birds, p. 520) says that the young of the red-throated diver is called cobble in England. Our author elsewhere (Voyages, p. 101) makes mention of the “wobble” and the “wilmote” (that is, guillemot) as distinct; but his wilmot was “a kind of teal.”
[41] “He maketh a noise sometimes like a sow-gelder’s horn.”—N. Eng. Prospect, l. c.