§ 12. Their seats, like those in the eastern part of the world, are the ground itself; and as the people of distinction amongst those used carpets, so cleanliness has taught the better sort of these to spread match-coats and mats to sit on.
They take up their lodging in the sides of their cabins upon a couch made of boards, sticks, or reeds, which are raised from the ground upon forks, and covered with mats or skins. Sometimes they lie upon a bear skin, or other thick pelt dressed with the hair on, and laid upon the ground near a fire, covering themselves with their match-coats. In warm weather a single mat is their only bed, and another rolled up their pillow. In their travels, a grass plat under the covert of a shady tree, is all the lodging they require, and is as pleasant and refreshing to them as a down bed and fine Holland sheets are to us.
§ 13. Their fortifications consist only of a palisade, of about ten or twelve feet high; and when they would make themselves very safe, they treble the pale. They often encompass their whole town; but for the most part only their king's houses, and as many others as they judge sufficient to harbor all their people when an enemy comes against them. They never fail to secure within their palisade all their religious relics, and the remains of their princes. Within this inclosure, they likewise take care to have a supply of water, and to make a place for a fire, which they frequently dance round with great solemnity.
CHAPTER IV.
OF THEIR COOKERY AND FOOD.
§ 14. Their cookery has nothing commendable in it, but that it is performed with little trouble. They have no other sauce but a good stomach, which they seldom want. They boil, broil, or toast all the meat they eat, and it is very common with them to boil fish as well as flesh with their homony; this is Indian corn soaked, broken in a mortar, husked, and then boiled in water over a gentle fire for ten or twelve hours, to the consistence of frumenty: the thin of this is what my Lord Bacon calls cream of maise, and highly commends for an excellent sort of nutriment.
They have two ways of broiling, viz., one by laying the meat itself upon the coals, the other by laying it upon sticks raised upon forks at some distance above the live coals, which heats more gently, and dries up the gravy; this they, and we also from them, call barbecueing.