FOOD FROM FOREST AND SEA
Though all the early explorers and travellers came to America eager to
find precious and useful metals, they did not discover wealth and
prosperity underground in mines, but on the top of the earth, in the
woods and fields. To the forests they turned for food, and they did not
turn in vain. Deer were plentiful everywhere, and venison was offered by
the Indians to the first who landed from the ships. Some families lived
wholly on venison for nine months of the year. In Virginia were vast
numbers of red and fallow deer, the latter like those of England, except
in the smaller number of branches of the antlers. They were so devoid of
fear as to remain undisturbed by the approach of men; a writer of that
day says: "Hard by the Fort two hundred in one herd have been usually
observed." They were destroyed ruthlessly by a system of fire-hunting,
in which tracts of forests were burned over, by starting a continuous
circle of fire miles around, which burnt in toward the centre of the
circle; thus the deer were driven into the middle, and hundreds were
killed. This miserable, wholesale slaughter was not for venison, but for
the sake of the hides, which were very valuable. They were used to make
the durable and suitable buckskin breeches and jackets so much worn by
the settlers; and they were also exported to Europe in large numbers. A
tax was placed on hides for the support of the beloved William and Mary
College.
In Georgia, in 1735, the Indians sold a deer for sixpence. Deer were
just as abundant in the more Northern colonies. At Albany a stag was
sold readily by the Indians for a jack-knife or a few iron nails. The
deer in winter came and fed from the hog-pens of Albany swine. Even in
1695, a quarter of venison could be bought in New York City for
ninepence. At the first Massachusetts Thanksgiving, in 1621, the Indians
brought in five deer to the colonists for their feast. That year there
was also "great store of wild turkies." These beautiful birds of gold
and purple bronze were at first plentiful everywhere, and were of great
weight, far larger than our domestic turkeys to-day. They came in flocks
of a hundred, Evelyn says of three hundred on the Chesapeake, and they
weighed thirty or forty pounds each: Josselyn says he saw one weighing
sixty pounds. William Penn wrote that turkeys weighing thirty pounds
apiece sold in his day and colony for a shilling only. They were shy
creatures and fled inland from the white man, and by 1690 were rarely
shot near the coast of New England, though in Georgia, in 1733, they
were plentiful enough and cheap enough to sell for fourpence apiece.
Flights of pigeons darkened the sky, and broke down the limbs of trees
on which they lighted. From Maine to Virginia these vast flocks were
seen. Some years pigeons were so plentiful that they were sold for a
penny a dozen in Boston. Pheasant, partridge, woodcock, and quail
abounded, plover, snipe, and curlew were in the marsh-woods; in fact, in
Virginia every bird familiar to Englishmen at home was found save
peacock and domestic fowl.
Wild hare and squirrels were so many that they became pests, and so much
grain was eaten by them that bounties were paid in many towns for the
heads of squirrels. County treasuries were exhausted by these premiums.
The Swedish traveller, Kalm, said that in Pennsylvania in one year,
1749, L8000 was paid out for heads of black and gray squirrels, at
threepence a head, which would show that over six hundred thousand were
killed.
From the woods came a sweet food-store, one specially grateful when
sugar was so scarce and so high-priced,--wild honey, which the colonists
eagerly gathered everywhere from hollow tree-trunks. Curiously enough,
the traveller, Kalm, insisted that bees were not native in America, but
were brought over by the English; that the Indians had no name for them
and called them English flies.
Governor Berkeley of Virginia, writing in 1706, called the maple the
sugar-tree; he said:--
"The Sugar-Tree yields a kind of Sap or Juice which by boiling is
made into Sugar. This Juice is drawn out, by wounding the Trunk of
the Tree, and placing a Receiver under the Wound. It is said that
the Indians make one Pound of Sugar out of eight Pounds of the
Liquor. It is bright and moist with a full large Grain, the
Sweetness of it being like that of good Muscovada."
The sugar-making season was ever hailed with delight by the boys of the
household in colonial days, who found in this work in the woods a
wonderful outlet for the love of wild life which was strong in them. It
had in truth a touch of going a-gypsying, if any work as hard as
sugaring-off could have anything common with gypsy life. The maple-trees
were tapped as soon as the sap began to run in the trunk and showed at
the end of the twigs; this was in late winter if mild, or in the
earliest spring. A notch was cut in the trunk of the tree at a
convenient height from the ground, usually four or five feet, and the
running sap was guided by setting in the notch a semicircular basswood
spout cut and set with a special tool called a tapping-gauge. In earlier
days the trees were "boxed," that is, a great gash cut across the side
and scooped out and down to gather the sap. This often proved fatal to
the trees, and was abandoned. A trough, usually made of a butternut log
about three feet long, was dug out, Indian fashion, and placed under the
end of the spout. These troughs were made deep enough to hold about ten
quarts. In later years a hole was bored in the tree with an augur; and
sap-buckets were used instead of troughs.
Sometimes these troughs were left in distant sugar-camps from year to
year, turned bottom side up, through the summer and winter. It was more
thrifty and tidy, however, to carry them home and store them. When this
was done, the men and boys began work by drawing the troughs and spouts
and provisions to the woods on hand-sleds. Sometimes a mighty man took
in a load on his back. It is told of John Alexander of Brattleboro,
Vermont, that he once went into camp _upon snowshoes_ carrying for three
miles one five-pail iron kettle, two sap-buckets, an axe and trappings,
a knapsack, four days' provisions, and a gun and ammunition.
The master of ceremonies--the owner of the camp--selected the trees and
drove the spouts, while the boys placed the troughs. Then the snow had
to be shovelled away on a level spot about eighteen or twenty feet
square, in which strong forked sticks were set twelve feet apart. Or the
ground was chosen so that two small low-spreading and strong trees could
be trimmed and used as forks. A heavy green stick was placed across from
fork to fork, and the sugaring-off kettles, sometimes five in number,
hung on it. Then dry wood had to be gathered for the fires; hard work it
was to keep them constantly supplied. It was often cut a year in
advance. As the sap collected in the troughs it was gathered in pails or
buckets which, hung on a sap-yoke across the neck, were brought to the
kettles and the sap set a-boiling down. When there was a "good run of
sap," it was usually necessary to stay in the camp over night. Many
times the campers stayed several nights. As the "good run" meant milder
weather, a night or two was not a bitter experience; indeed, I have
never heard any one speak nor seen any account of a night spent in a
sugar-camp except with keen expressions of delight. If possible, the
time was chosen during a term of moonlight; the snow still covered the
fields and its pure shining white light could be seen through the trees.
"God makes sech nights, so white and still
Fer's you can look and listen.
Moonlight an' snow, on field and hill,
All silence and all glisten."
The great silence, broken only by steady dropping of the sap, the
crackle of blazing brush, and the occasional hooting of startled owls;
the stars seen singly overhead through the openings of the trees,
shining down the dark tunnel as bright as though there were no moon;
above all, the clearness and sweetness of the first atmosphere of
spring,--gave an exaltation of the senses and spirit which the country
boy felt without understanding, and indeed without any formulated
consciousness.
If the camp were near enough to any group of farmhouses to have
visitors, the last afternoon and evening in camp was made a country
frolic. Great sled-loads of girls came out to taste the new sugar, to
drop it into the snow to candy, and to have an evening of fun.
Long ere the full riches of the forests were tested the colonists turned
to another food-supply,--the treasures of the sea.
The early voyagers and colonists came to the coasts of the New World to
find gold and furs. The gold was not found by them nor their children's
children in the land which is now the United States, till over two
centuries had passed from the time of the settlement, and the gold-mines
of California were opened. The furs were at first found and profitably
gathered, but the timid fur-bearing animals were soon exterminated near
the settlements. There was, however, a vast wealth ready for the
colonists on the coast of the New World which was greater than gold,
greater than furs; a wealth ever-obtainable, ever-replenished,
ever-useful, ever-salable; it was _fish_. The sea, the rivers, the
lakes, teemed with fish. Not only was there food for the settlers, but
for the whole world, and all Europe desired fish to eat. The ships of
the early discoverer, Gosnold, in 1602, were "pestered with cod."
Captain John Smith, the acute explorer, famous in history as befriended
by Pocahontas, went to New England, in 1614, to seek for whale, and
instead he fished for cod. He secured sixty thousand in one month; and
he wrote to his countrymen, "Let not the meanness of the word _fish_
distaste you, for it will afford as good gold as the mines of Guiana or
Potosi, with less hazard and charge, and more certainty and facility."
This promise of wealth has proved true a thousandfold. Smith wrote home
to England full accounts of the fisheries, of the proper equipment of a
fishing-vessel, of the methods of fishing, the profits, all in a most
enticing and familiar style. He said in his _Description of New
England_:--
"What pleasure can be more than to recreate themselves before their
owne doores in their owne boates, upon the Sea, where man, woman,
and childe, with a small hooke and line by angling, may take
diverse sorts of excellent fish, at their pleasure? And is it not
pretty sport to pull up twopence, sixpence, or twelvepence, as fast
as you can hale and veare a line? If a man worke but three days in
seaven hee may get more than hee can spend unless hee will be
excessive.
"Young boyes and girles, salvages, or any other, be they never such
idlers may turne, carry, and returne fish without shame or either
great pain: hee is very idle that is past twelve years of age and
cannot doe so much: and shee is very old that cannot spin a thread
to catch them."
His accounts and similar ones were so much read in England that when the
Puritans asked King James of England for permission to come to America,
and the king asked what profit would be found by their emigration, he
was at once answered, "Fishing." Whereupon he said in turn, "In truth
'tis an honest trade; 'twas the apostles' own calling." Yet in spite of
their intent to fish, the first English ships came but poorly provided
for fishing, and the settlers had little success at first even in
getting fish for their own food. Elder Brewster of Plymouth, who had
been a courtier in Queen Elizabeth's time, and had seen and eaten many
rich feasts, had nothing to eat at one time but clams. Yet he could give
thanks to God that he was "permitted to suck of the abundance of the
seas and the treasures hid in the sand." The Indian Squanto showed the
Pilgrims many practical methods of fishing, among them one of treading
out eels from the brook with his feet and catching them with his hands.
And every ship brought in either cod-hooks and lines, mackerel-hooks and
lines, herring-nets, seines, shark-hooks, bass-nets, squid-lines,
eel-pots, coils of rope and cable, "drails, barbels, pens, gaffs," or
mussel-hooks.
Josselyn, in his _New England's Rarities_, written in 1672, enumerated
over two hundred kinds of fish that were caught in New England waters.
Lobsters certainly were plentiful enough to prevent starvation. The
minister Higginson, writing of lobsters at Salem, said that many of them
weighed twenty-five pounds apiece, and that "the least boy in the
plantation may catch and eat what he will of them." In 1623, when the
ship _Anne_ arrived from England, bringing many of the wives and
children of the Pilgrims who had come in the first ships, the only
feast of welcome that the poor husbands had to offer the newcomers was
"a lobster or a piece of fish without bread or anything else but a cup
of spring water."
Patriarchal lobsters five and six feet long were caught in New York Bay.
The traveller, Van der Donck, says "those a foot long are better for
serving at table." Truly a lobster six feet long would seem a little
awkward to serve on a dinner table. Eddis, in his _Letters from
America_, written in 1792, says these vast lobsters were caught in New
York waters until Revolutionary days, when "since the incessant
cannonading, they have entirely forsaken the coast; not one having been
taken or seen since the commencement of hostilities." Beside these great
shell-fish the giant lobster confined in our New York Aquarium in 1897
seems but a dwarf. In Virginia waters lobsters were caught, and vast
crabs, often a foot in length and six inches broad, with a long tail and
many legs. One of these crabs furnished a sufficient meal for four men.
From the gossiping pages of the Labadist missionaries who came to
America in 1697 we find hints of good fare in oysters in Brooklyn.
"Then was thrown upon the fire, to be roasted, a pail full of
Gowanes oysters which are the best in the country. They are fully
as good as those of England, better than those we eat at Falmouth.
I had to try some of them raw. They are large and full, some of
them not less than a foot long. Others are young and small. In
consequence of the great quantities of them everybody keeps the
shells for the burning of lime. They pickle the oysters in small
casks and send them to Barbados."
Van der Donck corroborates the foot-long oysters seen by the Labadist
travellers. He says the "large oysters roasted or stewed make a good
bite,"--a very good bite, it would seem to us.
Strachey, in his _Historie of Travaile into Virginia_, says he saw
oysters in Virginia that were thirteen inches long. Fortunately for the
starving Virginians, oyster banks rose above the surface at ebb-tide at
the mouth of the Elizabeth River, and in 1609 a large number of these
famished Virginia colonists found in these oyster banks a means of
preservation of life.
As might be expected of any country so intersected with arms of the sea
and fresh-water streams, Virginia at the time of settlement teemed with
fish. The Indians killed them in the brooks by striking them with
sticks, and it is said the colonists scooped them up in frying-pans.
Horses ridden into the rivers stepped on the fish and killed them. In
one cast of a seine the governor, Sir Thomas Dale, caught five thousand
sturgeon as large as cod. Some sturgeon were twelve feet long. The works
of Captain John Smith, Rolfe's _Relation_, and other books of early
travellers, all tell of the enormous amount of fish in Virginia.
The New York rivers were also full of fish, and the bays; their plenty
in New Netherland inspired the first poet of that colony to rhyming
enumeration of the various kinds of fish found there; among them were
sturgeon--beloved of the Indians and despised of Christians; and
terrapin--not despised by any one. "Some persons," wrote the Dutch
traveller, Van der Donck, in 1656, "prepare delicious dishes from the
water terrapin, which is luscious food." The Middle and Southern states
paid equally warm but more tardy tribute to the terrapin's reputation as
luscious food.
While other fish were used everywhere for food, cod was the great staple
of the fishing industry. By the year 1633 Dorchester and Marblehead had
started in the fisheries for trading purposes. Sturgeon also was caught
at a little later date, and bass and alewives.
Morton, in his _New England Canaan_, written in 1636, says, "I myself at
the turning of the tyde have seen such multitudes of sea bass that it
seemed to me that one might goe over their backs dri-shod."
The regulation of fish-weirs soon became an important matter in all
towns where streams let alewives up from the sea. The New England
ministers took a hand in promoting and encouraging the fisheries, as
they did all positive social movements and commercial benefits. Rev.
Hugh Peter in Salem gave the fisheries a specially good turn. Fishermen
were excused from military training, and portions of the common stock of
corn were assigned to them. The General Court of Massachusetts exempted
"vessels and stock" from "country charges" (which were taxes) for seven
years. Seashore towns assigned free lands to each boat to be used for
stays and flakes for drying. As early as 1640 three hundred thousand
dried codfish were sent to market from New England.
Codfish consisted of three sorts, "marchantable, middling, and refuse."
The first grade was sold chiefly to Roman Catholic Europe, to supply the
constant demands of the fast-days of that religion, and also those of
the Church of England; the second was consumed at home or in the
merchant vessels of New England; the third went to the negroes of the
West Indies, and was often called Jamaica fish. The dun-fish or
dumb-fish, as the word was sometimes written, were the best; so called
from the dun-color. Fish was always eaten in New England for a Saturday
dinner; and Mr. Palfrey, the historian, says that until this century no
New England dinner on Saturday, even a formal dinner party, was complete
without dun-fish being served.
Of course the first fishing-vessels had to be built and sent from
England. Some carried fifty men. They arrived on the coast in early
spring, and by midsummer sailed home. The crew had for wages one-third
share of the fish and oil; another third paid for the men's food, the
salt, nets, hooks, lines, etc.; the other third went to the ship's
owners for profit.
This system was not carried out in New England. There, each fisherman
worked on "his own hook"--and it was literally his own hook; for a tally
was kept of the fish caught by each man, and the proceeds of the trip
were divided in proportion to the number of fish each caught. When there
was a big run of fish, the men never stopped to eat or sleep, but when
food was held to them gnawed it off while their hands were employed with
the fish-lines. With every fishing-vessel that left Gloucester and
Marblehead, the chief centres of the fishing industries, went a boy of
ten or twelve to learn to be a skilled fisherman. He was called a
"cut-tail," for he cut a wedge-shaped bit from the tail of every fish he
caught, and when the fish were sorted out the cut-tails showed the boy's
share of the profit.
For centuries, fish was plentiful and cheap in New England. The
traveller Bennet wrote of Boston, in 1740:--
"Fish is exceedingly cheap. They sell a fine cod, will weigh a
dozen pounds or more, just taken out of the sea for about twopence
sterling. They have smelts, too, which they sell as cheap as sprats
in London. Salmon, too, they have in great plenty, and these they
sell for about a shilling apiece which will weigh fourteen or
fifteen pounds."
Two kinds of delicious fish, beloved, perhaps, above all others
to-day,--salmon and shad,--seem to have been lightly regarded in
colonial days. The price of salmon--less than a penny a pound--shows the
low estimation in which it was held in the early years of the eighteenth
century. It is told that farm-laborers in the vicinity of the
Connecticut River when engaged to work stipulated that they should have
salmon for dinner but once a week.
Shad were profoundly despised; it was even held to be somewhat
disreputable to eat them; and the story is told of a family in Hadley,
Massachusetts, who were about to dine on shad, that, hearing a knock at
the door, they would not open it till the platter holding the obnoxious
shad had been hidden. At first they were fed chiefly to hogs. Two shad
for a penny was the ignoble price in 1733, and it was never much higher
until after the Revolution. After shad and salmon acquired a better
reputation as food, the falls of various rivers became great resorts for
American fishermen as they had been for the Indians. Both kinds of fish
were caught in scoop-nets and seines below the falls. Men came from a
distance and loaded horses and carts with the fish to carry home. Every
farmhouse near was filled with visitors. It was estimated that at the
falls at South Hadley there were fifteen hundred horses in one day.
Salted fish was as carefully prepared and amiably regarded for home use
in New England and New York as in England and Holland at the same date.
The ling and herring of the old countries of Europe gave place in
America to cod, shad, and mackerel. The greatest pains was taken in
preparing, drying, and salting the plentiful fish. It is said that in
New York towns, such as New York and Brooklyn, after shad became a
popular fish, great heaps were left when purchased at each door, and
that the necessary cleaning and preparation of the shad was done on the
street. As all housewives purchased shad and salted and packed at about
the same time, those public scavengers, the domestic hogs who roamed
the town streets unchecked (and ever welcomed), must have been specially
useful at shad-time.
Not in the waters, but of it, were the magnificent tribes of marine fowl
that, undiminished by the feeble weapons and few numbers of the Indians,
had peopled for centuries the waters of the New World. The Chesapeake
and its tributaries furnished each autumn vast feeding-grounds of wild
celery and other aquatic plants to millions of those creatures. The
firearms of Captain John Smith and his two companions were poor things
compared with the fowling-pieces of to-day, but with their three shots
they killed a hundred and forty-eight ducks at one firing. The splendid
wild swan wheeled and trumpeted in the clear autumn air; the wild geese
flew there in their beautiful V-shaped flight; duck in all the varieties
known to modern sportsmen--canvas-back, mallard, widgeon, redhead,
oxeye, dottrel--rested on the Chesapeake waters in vast flocks a mile
wide and seven miles long. Governor Berkeley named also brant, shell
drake, teal, and blewings. The sound of their wings was said to be "like
a great storm coming over the water." For centuries these ducks have
been killed by the white man, and still they return each autumn to their
old feeding-places.