[This cut follows a photograph of the bas-relief which is given in the Hakluyt Society’s edition of the _Hawkins Voyages_. Another engraving of it is given in _Harper’s Magazine_, January, 1883, p. 221.—ED.]] His account of Florida is much more careful than what he gives of any of the West India Islands. From his own words it is clear that he thought it might be of use to England, and that he wanted to draw attention to it as a place open to colonization. Like so many other explorers, from Ponce de Leon down to our own times, he was surprised that a country, which is so attractive to the eye, should be left so nearly without inhabitants. It seems to have been more densely peopled when Ponce de Leon landed there in 1513 than it was at the beginning of this century. To such interest or enthusiasm of Hawkins do we owe an account of Florida, in its native condition, more full than we have of any other of our States, excepting New Mexico, at a period so early in our history. Besides tobacco, he specifies the abundance of sorrel,—which grew as abundantly as grass,—of maize, of mill, and of grapes, which “taste much like our English grapes.” He describes the community building of the southern tribes, as made “like a great barne, in strength not inferiour to ours,” with stanchions and rafters of whole trees, and covered with palmetto leaves. There was one small room for the king and queen, but no other subdivisions. In the midst of the great hall a fire was kept all night. The houses, indeed, were only used at night. In a country of such a climate and soil, with “marvellous store of deer and divers other beasts, and fowl and fish sufficient,” Hawkins naturally thought that “a man might live,” as he says quaintly. Maize, he says, “maketh good savory bread, and cakes as fine as flower.” The first account to be found in English literature of the “hasty pudding” of the American larder, the “mush” of the Pennsylvanians,[139] is in Hawkins’s narrative. “It maketh good meal, beaten, and sodden with water, and eateth like pap wherewith we feed children.” The Frenchmen, fond by nature of soup, had made another use of it, not wholly forgotten at this day. “It maketh also good beverage, sodden in water and nourishable; which the Frenchmen did use to drink of in the morning, and it assuaged their thirst so that they had no need to drink all the day after.” It was, he says, because the French had been too lazy to plant maize for themselves that their colony came to such wretched destitution. To obtain maize, they had made war against the so-called savages who had raised it, and this aggression had naturally reacted against them.