The disposition to cheat and defraud the Indians has been much exaggerated, at least as regards the English settlers. The early Spanish invaders made no pretence of buying one foot of land from the Indians, whereas the English often went through the form of purchase, and very commonly put in practice the reality. The Pilgrims, at the very beginning, took baskets of corn from an Indian grave to be used as seed, and paid for it afterward. The year after the Massachusetts colony was founded the court decreed: “It is ordered that Josias Plastowe shall (for stealing four baskets of corne from the Indians) returne them eight baskets againe, be fined five pounds, and hereafter called by the name of Josias, and not Mr., as formerly he used to be.” As a mere matter of policy, it was the general disposition of the English settlers to obtain lands by honest purchase; indeed, Governor Josiah Winslow, of Plymouth, declared, in reference to King Philip’s War, that “before these present troubles broke out the English did not possess one foot of land in this colony but what was fairly obtained by honest purchase of the Indian proprietors.” This policy was quite general. Captain West, in 1610, bought the site of what is now Richmond, Virginia, for some copper. The Dutch Governor Minuit bought the island of Manhattan, in 1626, for sixty gilders. Lord Baltimore’s company purchased land for cloth, tools, and trinkets; the Swedes obtained the site of Christiania for a kettle; Roger Williams bought the island of Rhode Island for forty fathoms of white beads; and New Haven was sold to the whites, in 1638, for “twelve coats of English cloth, twelve alchemy spoons, twelve hoes, twelve hatchets, twelve porringers, twenty-four knives, and twenty-four cases of French knives and spoons.” Many other such purchases will be found recorded by Doctor Ellis. And though the price paid might often seem ludicrously small, yet we must remember that a knife or a hatchet was really worth more to an Indian than many square miles of wild land; while even the beads were a substitute for wampum, or wompom, which was their circulating medium in dealing with each other and with the whites, and was worth, in 1660, five shillings a fathom.