A Book of American ExplorersHigginson, Thomas Wentworth
History
A Book of American Explorers
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
America -- Discovery and exploration; United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
AS for their dancing, the sport seems unto them, and the use, almost as
frequent and necessary as their meat and drink, in which they consume
much time, and for which they appoint many and often meetings, and
have therefore, as it were, set orgies[315] or festivals for the same
pastime, as have yet at this day the merry Greeks.... At our colony’s
first sitting down amongst them, when any of our people repaired[316]
to their towns, the Indians would not think they had expressed their
welcome sufficiently enough, until they had showed them a dance, the
manner of which is thus. One of them standeth by, with some fur or
leather thing in his left hand, upon which he beats with his right
hand, and sings withal, as if he began the choir, and kept unto the
rest their just time; when upon a certain stroke or more,――as upon
his cue or time to come in,――one riseth up, and begins to dance. After
he hath danced a while, steps forth another, as if he came in just upon
his rest; and in this order all of them, so many as there be, one after
another, who then dance an equal distance from each other in ring,
shouting, howling, and stamping their feet against the ground with
such force and pain, that they sweat again, and with all varieties of
strange mimic tricks and distorted faces, making so confused a yell and
noise as so many frantic and disquieted bacchanals; and sure they will
keep stroke just with their feet to the time he gives, and just one
with another, but with the hands, head, face, and body, every one hath
a several gesture. And those who have seen the dervishes in their holy
dances, in their mosques, upon Wednesdays and Fridays in Turkey, may
resemble[317] these unto them. You shall find the manner expressed in
the figure.
VIII.――INDIAN CHILDREN IN VIRGINIA.
TO make the children hardy, in the coldest mornings they wash them in
the rivers, and by paintings and ointments so tan their skins, that,
after a year or two, no weather will hurt them. As also, to practise
their children in the use of their bows and arrows, the mothers do
not give them their breakfast in a morning before they have hit a mark
which she appoints them to shoot at; and commonly, so cunning they
will have them, as throwing up in the air a piece of moss, or some such
light thing, the boy must with his arrow meet it in the fall, and hit
it, or else he shall not have his breakfast.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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