[217] “Eliot’s paskanontam, as above, which is well enough translated by ‘halfe starved.’”
[218] “I can make nothing of these words. They certainly do not mean ‘set it upright.’”
[219] “An island is munnoh (Eliot).”
[220] “Here Morton mistook the word. Cos is, probably, Koüs (Eliot), ‘sharp-pointed,’ or, from the same root, mukqs, (Eliot), mucks (R. Williams), ‘an awl,’ used for boring wampum, beads, &c.; cau-ompsk (R. Williams) was ‘a whetstone,’ i. e., a sharpening stone.”
[221] “Om (aum, Eliot), is fish-hook; aumau-i, ‘he is fishing’ (with hook and line,) R. Williams; whence omaën, (Eliot) ‘a fisherman.’”
[222] “Probably misprinted for Pantucket—the equivalent of Pautucket, meaning ‘at the fall’ of the river. (The n was not distinctly sounded, but represents the nasalization of the preceding vowel.)”
[223] “Mattapan means ‘sitting down’—or ‘a setting down’—and usually designates the end of a ‘carry’ or portage, where the canoes were put in water again.”
[224] Winslow, in his Relations, says of the Indians: “The people are very ingenious and observative; they keep account of time by the moon, and winters or summers; they know divers of the stars by name; in particular they know the north star, and call it maske, which is to say, the bear.” (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., pp. 365-6.) See also to the same effect, Roger Williams’s Key (Publications of the Narragansett Club, vol. i.) and Mr. Trumbull’s note (p. 105). Mr. Trumbull now further adds: “The name (maske) was given to Ursa Major or Charles’s Wain, not to the North Star; and by nearly all Algonkin tribes. An interesting note on this point can be found in Hopkins’s Hist. Memorials of the Housatonic Indians (p. 11), and another in Dawson’s Acadian Geology (2d ed. p. 675), showing that the Micmacs still know that constellation as Mooin, ‘the bear.’”
[225] Roger Williams, in the preface to his Key (p. 23), says: “Wise and judicious men, with whom I have discoursed, maintain their [the Indians] original to be northward from Tartaria.” The Asiatic origin of the North American Indians was a necessary part of the scriptural dogma of the origin and descent of man. It is safe, however, to assert that, first and last, every possible theory on this subject has been carefully elaborated. It is not necessary, in connection with the New Canaan, to enter into the discussion, as the views of those, from St. Gregory to Voltaire, who have taken part in it, have been laboriously collected by Drake in his Book of Indians (ch. ii.).