James Adair was an Englishman, who lived 40 years among the Southern Indians (from 1735 to 1775), and whose “History of the American Indians” is invaluable to the antiquarian. It was published in London, A. D. 1775, and is a mine of valuable information. He thus describes the cassine:
There is a species of tea that grows spontaneously and in great plenty along the seacoast of the two Carolinas, Georgia, and east and west Florida, which we call yopon or casseena. The Indians transplant and are very fond of it. They drink it on certain occasions, and in the most religious ceremonies, with awful invocations; but the women and children and those who have not accompanied their holy ark, pro aris et focis, dare not even enter the sacred square when they are on their religious duty.
He says distinctly that the Indians “transplant” the shrub, which means that they cultivated it, and in another place he uses a phrase which implies that they had plantations near to their “temples,” or places of worship. Travelers in Paraguay assert that, though attempts have been made by Jesuits and others to cultivate plantations of maté, or Paraguay tea, it has never succeeded under cultivation. Adair is the only author who mentions this transplanting.
In another place Adair says:
The yopon, or casseena, is very plenty [in northwest Florida] as far as the salt air reaches over the lowlands. It is well tasted and very agreeable to those who accustom themselves to use it. Instead of having any noxious quality, according to what many have experienced of the East India insipid and costly tea, it is friendly to the human system, enters into and contests with the peccant humors, and expels them through the various channels of nature. It perfectly cures a tremor of the nerves.
At the time Adair wrote the above, Chinese tea was a rare and expensive luxury in England, and its use was opposed as intensely as was the use of tobacco when it was first introduced. The power ascribed to cassine of curing “tremors” is significant. Adair, in the same paragraph, mentions another leaf used as a beverage, but his description is so indefinite that I am not able to decide as to its botanical name. It is certainly not the Ceanothus (New Jersey tea). On referring to Rafinesque, I think this “North America tea” may be the Viburnum cassinoides, which, he says, is “also named cassine, and so used.” He also says that “V. levigatum and V. prunifolium are used for the tea in the South.”
Adair further says:
The North American tea has a pleasant aromatic taste and the same salubrious property as the casseena. It is an evergreen and grows on hills. The bushes are about a foot high, each of them containing in winter a small, aromatic, red berry in the middle of the stalk. Such I saw it about Christmas, when hunting among the mountains, opposite to the lower Mohawk Castle, in the time of deep snow. There is no visible decay of the leaf, and October seems the proper time to gather it.
He frequently refers to the “sacred uses” of the black drink, a decoction of the cassine. I quote his most important allusions:
There is a carved human statue of wood, to which, however, they pay no religious homage. It belongs to the head war town of the upper Muskogee country, and seems to have been originally designed to perpetuate the memory of some distinguished hero who deserved well of his country, for when this casseena, or bitter black drink, is about to be drank in the Synedrion they frequently on common occasions will bring it there and honor it with the first conch shell full, by the hand of the chief religious attendant, and then they return it to its former place. It is observable that the same beloved waiter, or holy attendant, and his coadjutant, equally observe the same ceremony to every person of reputed merit of that quadrangular place.