Among the early English settlers it soon came to be thought, says Mather, a religious act to kill an Indian. In the latter half of the seventeenth century both the French and English authorities adopted the custom of scalping and of offering rewards for the scalps of their Indian enemies. In 1690 the most healthy and vigorous Indians taken by the French ‘were sold in Canada, the weaker were sacrificed and scalped, and for every scalp they had a premium.’[225] Caleb Lyman, who afterwards became an elder of a church at Boston, left an account of the way in which he himself and five Indians surprised a wigwam, and scalped six of the seven persons inside, so that each might receive the promised reward. On their petition to the great and general court they received 30_l._ each, and Penhallow says not only that they probably expected eight times as much, but that at the time of writing the province would have readily paid a sum of 800_l._ for a similar service.[226] Captain Lovewell, says the same contemporary eulogist of the war that lasted from July 1722 to December 1725, ‘from Dunstable with thirty volunteers went northward, who marching several miles up country came on a wigwam where were two Indians, one of whom they killed and the other took, for which they received the promised bounty of 100_l._ a scalp, and two shillings and sixpence a day besides.’ (December 19, 1724.)[227] At the surprise of Norridjwock ‘the number of dead which we scalped were 26, besides Mr. Rasle the Jesuit, who was a bloody incendiary.’[228] It is evident that these very liberal rewards must have operated as a frequent cause of Indian wars, and made the colonists open-eared to tales of native outrages; indeed the whites sometimes disguised themselves like Indians, and robbed like Indians, in order, it would appear, the more effectually to raise the war-cry against them.[229] Since the Spaniards first trained bloodhounds in Cuba to hunt the Indians, the alliance between soldiers and dogs has been a favourite one in barbarian warfare. The Portuguese used them in Brazil when they hunted the natives for slaves.[230] And an English officer in a treatise he wrote in the last century as a sort of military guide to Indian warfare suggested coolly: ‘Every light horseman ought to be provided with a bloodhound, which would be useful to find out the enemy’s ambushes and to follow their tracks. They would seize the naked savages, and at least give time to the horsemen to come up with them.’[231] In the Molucca Islands the use of two bloodhounds against a native chief was the cause of a great confederacy between all the islands to shake off the Spanish and Portuguese yoke.[232] And even in the war waged by the United States in Florida from 1838 to 1840, General Taylor was authorised to send to Cuba for bloodhounds to scent out the Indians; nor, according to one account, was their aid resorted to in vain.[233]