[397] Boll armoniack is the Bolus armeniaca of the old apothecaries. Bolus is the prefix to several old pharmacopial names, having lost its original special signification and come to be a given term for all lumpy substances. Here it means a sort of reddish clay, such as may be used for marking,—a clayey ochre such as may have come from about Providence, R. I.
[398] Vermilion oxide of mercury is not known to occur this side of the Rocky Mountains. It is likely that he mistook some brilliant ochre for true vermilion. It may be, however, that the aborigines traded for it with western tribes. Their copper implements probably came from Lake Superior. Many evidences of almost as wide a commerce could be adduced.
[399] Brimstone, or sulphur, does not exist in its metallic state this side of the Cordilleras. He may have seen some pyrite-bearing schists, such as occur in Maine, which in dumping give a sulphuric smell.
[400] Tin does not occur in this region. Some localities are known in Maine and elsewhere in New England, but they could hardly have been found by the Savages, or known to Morton.
[401] Copper in its metallic state, the only form in which he would have recognized it, does not occur about Massachusetts Bay. A very little of it has been found in Cumberland, R. I., in the valley of the Blackstone River.
[402] No silver, except when combined with lead and zinc ore, has ever been found in this district. Some occurs in the district from Woburn to Newburyport. Metallic silver could not have been known to the natives. The nearest localities for metallic gold are the streams of Vermont, New Hampshire, and western Maine, in which district placer gold occurs in considerable quantities, and some auriferous quartz veins are known.
Professor Shaler adds to his foregoing notes: “The general impression which I get from the writer is that he was a bad observer, but not more untruthful than most of the seventeenth century travellers. He does not say that gold or silver had been seen by him, and limits his hearsay evidence to a single mine. Except for the extraordinary stuff about the whetstones,—wherein we may perhaps see something of the Maypole humor,—it is, for its time, a rather sober and reasonable story.”
[403] This is the name by which Morton invariably designates John Endicott. For reasons which have been explained in the preliminary matter to this edition of the New Canaan (supra, pp. [38-42]), its author felt—and, as will be seen, never missed an opportunity to express—a peculiar bitterness towards Endicott.
[404] For the notes to this chapter I am indebted to Theodore Lyman, of the Massachusetts Fish Commission. Higginson, in his New England’s Plantation, has a passage on Fish (Young’s Chron. of Mass., pp. 248-51), and Williams, in his Key, devotes a chapter (xix.) to the same subject. Wood again, in his Prospect (pp. 27-31), deals with it in his peculiar manner, and Josselyn, both in his Voyages (pp. 104-15) and in his Rarities (pp. 22-37), devotes a good deal of space to the enumeration of the different kinds of New England fishes, their peculiarities, and the methods of taking them. In editing the Rarities, Mr. Tuckerman remarked that he had “little to offer in elucidation of the list [of fishes], which, indeed, in good part, appears sufficiently intelligible,”—a remark equally applicable to the present chapter of the New Canaan.