Home Life in Colonial Days

by Alice Morse Earle

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:—

"The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as an article of food; but the women, who are mostly Parisians, have for this food a dogged aversion, which has not been subdued. They inveigh bitterly against His Grace, the Bishop of Quebec, who, they say, has enticed them away from home under pretext of sending them to enjoy the milk and honey of the land of promise."

This hatred of corn was shared by other races. An old writer says:—

"Peter Martyr could magnifie the Spaniards, of whom he reports they led a miserable life for three days together, with parched grain of maize onlie"—

which, when compared with the diet of New England settlers for weeks at a time, seems such a bagatelle as to be scarce worth the mention of Peter Martyr. By tradition, still commemorated at Forefathers' Dinners, the ration of Indian corn supplied to each person in the colony in time of famine was but five kernels.

The stores brought over by the Pilgrims were poor and inadequate enough; the beef and pork were tainted, the fish rotten, the butter and cheese corrupted. European wheat and seeds did not mature well. Soon, as Bradford says in his now famous Log-Book, in his picturesque and forcible English, "the grim and grizzled face of starvation stared" at them. The readiest supply to replenish the scanty larder was fish, but the English made surprisingly bungling work over fishing, and soon the most unfailing and valuable supply was the native Indian corn, or "Guinny wheat," or "Turkie wheat," as it was called by the colonists.

Famine and pestilence had left eastern Massachusetts comparatively bare of inhabitants at the time of the settlement of Plymouth; and the vacant cornfields of the dead Indian cultivators were taken and planted by the weak and emaciated Plymouth men, who never could have cleared new fields. From the teeming sea, in the April run of fish, was found the needed fertilizer. Says Governor Bradford:—

"In April of the first year they began to plant their corne, in which service Squanto stood them in great stead, showing them both ye manner how to set it, and after, how to dress and tend it."

From this planting sprang not only the most useful food, but the first and most pregnant industry of the colonists.