[263] There is not much to be said on the manufactures, utensils and trade of the New England aborigines. Gookin (I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 151) has a comprehensive paragraph on the subject, and there is a passage in Josselyn (Two Voyages, p. 143). See also Williams’s Key, ch. xxv.
[264] Josselyn also speaks of “baskets, bags and mats woven with Sparke.” (Two Voyages, p. 143.) “Spart,” Mr. Trumbull writes, “was a northern English name for the dwarf-rush, and (as ‘spart’ in the glossaries) for osiers, and I guess, Morton’s and Josselyn’s sparke is another form of that name.” Gookin says (I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 151): “Some of their baskets are made of rushes; some, of bents; others, of maize-husks; others, of a kind of silk grass; others, of a kind of wild hemp; and some, of barks of trees.”
[265] Wood says of the Indian women: “Their corn being ripe, they gather it, and drying it hard in the Sun, conveigh it to their barnes, which be great holes digged in the ground in forme of a brasse pot, seeled with rinds of trees, wherein they put their corne, covering it from the inquisitive search of their gurmundizing husbands, who would eate up both their allowed portion, and reserved seed, if they knew where to finde it. But our hogges having found a way to unhindge their barne doores, and robbe their garners, they are glad to implore their husbands helpe to roule the bodies of trees over their holes, to prevent these pioneers, whose theevery they as much hate as their flesh.” (Prospect, p. 81.) Mather also, in enumerating the points of resemblance between the Indians and the Israelites, (Magnalia, B. III. part iii.) says: “They have, too, a great unkindness for our swine; but I suppose that is because the hogs devour the clams, which are a dainty with them.”
[266] See Ellis’s Red Man and White Man, p. 148; also, infra, [175], n.
[267] This Sachem has already been sufficiently referred to (Supra, p. [11].) All that is known concerning him can be found in Drake’s Book of the Indians, (ed. 1851), pp. 107-9.
[268] Morton’s neighbors at Wessaguscus were William Jeffrey, John Bursley and such others of the Robert Gorges expedition of 1623 as still remained there. (Supra, [4], [24], [30].) See also Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. 1878, p. 198.
[270] “Frumenty, n. [Also furmenty and fumety; from Lat. frumentum]. Food made of wheat boiled in milk, and seasoned with sugar, cinnamon, &c.” Webster.
[271] Squanto. See infra, [*104].
[272] In reference to this passage, Mr. Francis Parkman writes: “I have searched my memory in vain for anything in the early French writers answering to Morton’s statement. I don’t think that Cartier, Champlain, Biard, Lescarbot or Le Jeune, the principal writers before 1635, make the extraordinary assertions in question. In fact, as there were no Spaniards in Canada, and likely to be none on French vessels going there, Indians of those parts would hardly have the opportunity of distinguishing between them by smell or otherwise. Indeed, they did not know the existence of such a nation.”