The large chesnuts are not to be met with but at the distance of one hundred leagues from the sea, and far from rivers in the heart of the woods, between the country of the Chactaws and that of the Chicasaws. The common chesnuts succeed best upon high declivities, and their fruit is like the chesnuts that grow in our woods. There is another kind of chesnuts, which are called the Acorn chesnuts, as they are shaped like an acorn, and grow in such a cup. But they have the colour and taste of a chesnut; and I have often thought that those were the acorns which the first of men were said to have lived upon.
The Sweet-Gum, or Liquid-Ambar (Copalm) is not only extremely common, but it affords a balm, the virtues of which are infinite. Its bark is black and hard, and its wood so tender and supple, that when the tree is felled you may draw from the middle of it rods of five or six feet in length. It cannot be employed in building or furniture, as it warps continually; nor is it fit for burning on account of its strong smell; but a little of it in a fire yields an agreeable perfume. Its leaf is indented with five points like a star.
I shall not undertake to particularize all the virtues of this Sweet-Gum or Liquid-Ambar, not having learned all of them from the natives of the country, who would be no less surprised to find that we used it only as a varnish, than they were to see our surgeons bleed their patients. This balm, according to them, is an excellent febrifuge; they take ten or a dozen drops of it in gruel fasting, and before their meals; and if they should take a little more, they have no reason to apprehend any danger. The physicians among the natives purge their patients before they give it them. It cures wounds in two days without any bad consequences: it is equally sovereign for all kinds of ulcers, after having applied to them for some days a plaster of bruised ground-ivy. It cures consumptions, opens obstructions; it affords relief in the colic and all internal diseases; it comforts the heart; in short, it contains so many virtues, that they are every day discovering some new property that it has.
[CHAPTER III.]
Of Forest Trees.
Having described the most remarkable of their fruit trees, I shall now proceed to give an account of their forest trees. White and red cedars are very common upon the coast. The incorruptibility of the wood, and many other excellent properties which are well known, induced the first French settlers to build their houses of it; which were but very low.
Next to the cedar the cypress-tree is the most valuable wood. Some reckon it incorruptible; and if it be not, it is at least a great many years in rotting. The tree that was found twenty feet deep in the earth near New Orleans was a cypress, and was uncorrupted. Now if the lands of Lower Louisiana are augmented two leagues every century, this tree must have been buried at least twelve centuries. The cypress grows very straight and tall, with a proportionable thickness. They commonly make their pettyaugres of a single trunk of this tree, which will carry three or four thousand weight, and sometimes more. Of one of those trees a carpenter offered to make two pettyaugres, one of which carried sixteen ton, and the other fourteen. There is a cypress at Baton Rouge, a French settlement twenty-six leagues above New Orleans, which measures twelve yards round, and is of a prodigious height. The cypress has few branches, and its leaf is long and narrow. The trunk close by the ground sometimes sends off two or three stems, which enter the earth obliquely, and serve for buttresses to the tree. Its wood is of a beautiful colour, somewhat reddish; it is soft, light, and smooth; its grain is straight, and its pores very close. It is easily split by wedges, and though used green it never warps. It renews itself in a very extraordinary manner: a short time after it is cut down, a shoot is observed to grow from one of its roots exactly in the form of a sugar-loaf, and this sometimes rises ten feet high before any leaf appears: the branches at length arise from the head of this conical shoot.[51]