[350] Wesil, obsolete for weasand.
[351] The “third sort of Deere,” of which the author evidently had no personal knowledge, is doubtless a myth, as the Virginia Deer is the only species of small deer found in the United States, south of New England, east of the Mississippi River. The statement that it is “lesse then the other” (i. e. Virginian Deer), together with the southern habitat assigned it, preclude reference to the Caribou of northern New England, which the name “rayne deare” otherwise suggests.
[352] “They desire to be neare the Sea, so that they may swimme to the Islands when they are chased by the Woolves.” (New England’s Prospect, p. 18.) Deer Island is consequently a very common name along the New England coast; and of the island bearing that name in Boston harbor, now the site of the city reformatory institutions, Wood says: “This Iland is so called, because of the Deare which often swimme thither from the Maine, when they are chased by the woolves: some have killed sixteene Deere in a day upon this Iland.” Young’s Chron. of Mass., p. 405. See, also, Shurtleff’s Description of Boston, p. 464.
[353] The Beaver (Castor fiber). The account of the way “they draw the logg to the habitation appoynted” is a fanciful exaggeration, hardly less ridiculous than the preceding statement about the precaution the animal takes in winter to preserve his tail!
Cunny, mentioned in the first paragraph, is doubtless a seventeenth-century barbarism for cony, a name at this time commonly applied to the rabbit. The context, both here and in the account of the muskewashe, seems to imply this, although the word is correctly written cony in the paragraph relating to Hares. In some of the early accounts of Virginia, published in the first half of the seventeenth century, hares and cunnies are enumerated in the lists of animals, where the latter name evidently means cony or rabbit. Serat, in the same paragraph, is a term of much greater obscurity of application.
[354] “The tail, as I have said in another Treatise, is very fat and of a masculine vertue, as good as Eringo’s or Satyrion-Roots.” (Josselyn’s Two Voyages, p. 93.)
[355] Bradford, writing of the year 1636, gives the following prices: “The coat beaver usualy at 20s. per pound, and some at 24s.; the skin at 15 and sometimes 16. I doe not remember any under 14. It may be the last year might be something lower” (p. 346). In 1671 Josselyn says: “A black Bears Skin heretofore was worth forty shillings, now you may have one for ten.” (Rarities, p. 14.) The following prices were named as ruling in Virginia in 1650; (III. Force’s Tracts, No. 11, p. 52.)
“Sables, from 8s. the payre, to 20s. a payre.
“Otter skins, from 3s. to 5s. a piece.
“Luzernes, from 2s. to 10. a piece.