USA > New York > Albany County > Albany > The annals of Albany, Vol IX > Part 10
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The 14th May, took my leave of the Commander at Fort Orange, and the same day reached Esoper's, where a creek runs in, and where there is some maize-land upon which some Indians live.
[ Annals, ix.]
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FATHER JOGUES'S ACCOUNT OF RENSSELAERSWYCK.
[The following brief notice of Rensselaerswyck is found in the narrative of the captivity of the Jesuit missionary, Isaac Jogues, among the Mohawks, which forms a very interesting paper contributed by J. G. Shea, Esq. to the New York Hist. Society's Collections, vol. 3, 2d Series.]
Ascending the river to the 43d degree, you meet the second Dutch settlement, which the tide reaches but does not pass. Ships of a hundred and a hundred and twenty tons can come up to it.
There are two things in this settlement (which is called Renselaerswick, as if to say, settlement of Renselaers, who is a rich Amsterdam merchant)-1st, a miserable little fort called Fort Orange, built of logs, with four or five pieces of Bretuil cannon, and as many swivels. This has been reserved, and is maintained by the West India Company. This fort was formerly on an island in the river; it is now on the mainland, towards the Hiroquois, a little above the said island. 2d, a colony sent here by this Renselaers, who is the patron. This colony is com- posed of about a hundred persons, who reside in some twenty-five or thirty houses built along the river, as each found most convenient. In the principal house lives the patron's agent; the minister has his apart, in which service is performed. There is also a kind of bailiff here whom they call the seneschal, who adminis- ters justice. Their houses are merely of boards and thatched with no mason work except the chimneys. The forest furnishing many large pines, they make boards by means of their mills, which they have here for the purpose.
They found some pieces of ground all ready, which the savages had formerly cleared, and in which they sow wheat and oats for beer, and for their horses, of which
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Father Jogues's Account of Rensselaerswyck.
they have great numbers. There is little land fit for tillage, being hemmed in by hills, which are poor soil. This obliges them to separate, and they already occupy two or three leagues of country.
Trade is free to all; this gives the Indians all things cheap, each of the Hollanders outbidding his neighbor, and being satisfied provided he can gain some little profit.
This settlement is not more than twenty leagues from the Agniehronons,* who can be reached by land or water, as the river on which the Iroquois lie, falls into that which passes by the Dutch, but there are many low rapids, and a fall of a short half league, where the canoe must be carried.
There are many nations between the two Dutch settle- ments, which are about thirty German leagues apart, that is, about fifty or sixty French leagues. The Loups, t whom the Iroquois call Agotsagenens, are the nearest to Rens- selaerswick and Fort Orange. War breaking out some years ago between the Iroquois and the Loups, the Dutch joined the latter against the former ; but four men having been taken and burnt, they made peace. Since then some nations near the sea have killed some Hollanders of the most distant settlement; the Hollanders killed one hundred and fifty Indians, men, women and children. They having then at intervals, killed forty Hollanders, burnt many houses, and committed ravages, estimated at the time that I was there at 200,000 liv. (two hundred thousand livres,) they raised troops in New England. Accordingly, in the beginning of winter, the grass being trampled down and some snow on the ground, they gave them chase with six hundred men, keeping two hundred always on the move and constantly relieving one another ; so that the Indians, shut up in a large island, and unable to flee easily, on account of their women and children, were cut to pieces to the number of sixteen hundred, including women and children. This obliged the rest of the Indians to make peace, which still continues. This occurred in 1643 and 1644.
* Mohawks.
t Mohegans.
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THE MOHAWK INDIANS.
BY REV. JOHANNES MEGAPOLENSIS.
Translated by J. R. BRODHEAD, Esq. for the New York Hist. Soc. Coll. -
[The Rev. Johannes Megapolensis was the first minis- ter of the gospel in Albany, an account of whom will be found in the first volume of these Annals. His pastorate extended over the Indians, and he was successful in his efforts for their conversion. His Korte Ontwerp is the most complete of the early accounts of those Indians.]
The land here is in general like that in Germany. It is good, and very well provided with all things needful for human life, except clothes, linen, woolen, stockings, shoes, &c., which are all dear here. The country is very mountainous, some land, some rocks, and so exceeding high that they appear to touch the clouds. Thercon grow the finest fir trees the eye ever saw. There are also in this country oaks, alders, beeches, elms, willows, &c. In the forests, and in the wilderness along the water side, and on the islands, there grows an abundance of chesnuts, plumbs, hazle nuts, large walnuts of several sorts, and of as good a taste as in the Netherlands, but they have a somewhat harder shell. The land on the hills is covered with thickets of bilberries or blueberries; the ground in the flat land near the rivers is covered with strawberries, which grow here so plentifully in the fields, that we go there and lie down and eat them. Vines also grow here naturally in great abundance along the roads, paths, and creeks, and you find them wherever you turn yourself. 1 have seen many pieces of land where vine stood by vine and grew very luxuriantly, climbing up above the largest and loftiest trees, and although they were not cultivated, the grapes were as good and sweet as in Holland. Here
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is also a sort of grapes which grow very large, each grape as big as the end of one's finger, or a middle sized plumb, and because they are somewhat filmy and have a thick skin we call them Speck Druyven. If we would cultivate the vines we might have as good wine here as they have in Germany or France. I had myself last harvest a boat load of grapes and pressed them. As long as the wine was new it tasted better than French or Rhenish Must, and the colour of the grape juice here is so high and red that with one wine glass full you can colour a whole pot of white wine. In the forests is great plenty of deer, which in harvest time and autumn are as fat as any Hol- land deer can be. I have had them with fat more than two fingers thick on the ribs, so that they were nothing else than clear fat, and could hardly be eaten. There are also many turkies, as large as in Holland, but in some years less than in others. The year before I came here, [1641] there were so many turkies and deer that they came to the houses and hog pens to feed, and were taken by the Indians with so little trouble. that a deer was sold to the Dutch for a loaf of bread, or a knife, or even for a tobacco pipe; but now we commonly give for a large deer six or seven guilders. In the forests here there are also many partridges, heath-hens and pigeons that fly in flocks of thousands, and sometimes 10, 20, 30 and even 40 and 50 are killed at one shot. We have here, too, a great number of all kinds of fowl, swans, geese, ducks, widgeons, teal, brant, which are taken by thousands upon the river in the spring of the year, and again in the au- tumn fly away in flocks, so that in the morning and even- ing, any one may stand ready with his gun before his house and shoot them as they fly past. I have also eaten here several times of elk, which were very fat and tasted something like venison; and besides these profitable beasts we have also in this country lions, bears, wolves, foxes, and particularly very many snakes, which are large and as long as 8, 10, and 12 feet. Among others, there is a sort of snake, which we call rattlesnake, from a cer- tain rattle which is in its tail, two or three fingers breadth
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long, and has ten or twelve joints, and with this rattle it makes a noise like the crickets. Its color is variegated like our large spotted dogs. These snakes have very sharp teeth in their mouth, and dare to bite dogs; they make way for neither man nor beast, but fall on and bite them, and their bite is very poisonous, and commonly even deadly too.
As to the soil of this country, that on the mountains is a reddish sand or rock, but in the low flat lands, and along the rivers, and even in the sides of the mountains for an hundred or two hundred paces up there is often clay ground. I have been on hills here, as high as a church, to examine the soil, and have found it to be clay. In this ground there appears to be a singular strength and capacity for bearing a crop, for a farmer here told me that he had clean wheat off one and the same piece of land, eleven years successively without ever breaking it up, or letting it lie fallow. The butter here is clean and yellow as in Holland. Through this land runs an excellent river, about 500 or 600 paces wide. This river comes out of the Mahakas country, about four miles north of us. There it flows between two high rocky banks, and falls from a height equal to that of a church, with such a noise that we can sometimes hear it with us. In the beginning of June twelve of us took a ride to see it. When we came there we saw not only the river fall- ing with such a noise that we could hardly hear one another, but the water boiling and dashing with such force in still weather, that it was all the time as if it were raining; and the trees on the hills there (which are as high as Schooler Duyn) had their leaves all the time wet exactly as if it rained. The water is as clear as crystal, and as fresh as milk. I and another with me saw there, in clear sunshine, when there was not a cloud in the sky, as we stood above upon the rocks, directly opposite where the river falls in the great abyss, the half of a rainbow, or a quarter of a circle, of the same color with the rainbow in the sky. And when we had gone about ten or twelve rods farther downwards from the fall,
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along the river, we saw a complete rainbow, or half a circle appearing clearly in the water just the same as if it had been in the clouds, and this is always to be seen by those who go there. In this river is great plenty of several kinds of fish,-pike, eels, perch, lampreys, suck- ers, cat fish, sun fish, shad, bass, &c. In the spring, in May, the perch are so plenty, that one man with a hook and line will catch in one hour as many as ten or twelve can eat. My boys have caught in less than an hour fifty, each a foot long. They have a three pronged instrument with which they fish, and draw up frequently two or three perch at once. There is also in the river a great plenty of sturgeon, which we Christians do not make use of, but the Indians eat them greedily. In this river too, are very beautiful islands, containing ten, twenty, thirty, fifty and seventy morgens of land. The soil is very good, but the worst of it is, that by the melting of the snow, or heavy rains, the river is very likely to overflow and cover that low land. This river ebbs and flows as far as this place, although it is thirty-six miles inland from the sea.
What relates to the climate of this country, and the seasons of the year, is this, that here the summers are pretty hot, so that for the most of the time we are obliged to go in our bare shirts, and the winters are very cold. The summer continues until All Saints' Day ; but then begins the winter, in the same manner as it com- monly does in December, and it freezes so hard in one night that the ice will bear a man. Even the river itself, in still weather and no strong current running, is frozen with a hard crust in one night, so that on the second day we can go over it. And this freezing con- tinues commonly three months ; for although we are situ- ated here in 42 degrees of latitude, yet it always freezes so. But sometimes there come warm and pleasant days. The thaw however does not continue, but it freezes again until March. Then, commonly the river first begins to open, but seldom in February. We have the greatest cold from the north west, as in Holland from the north
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east. The wind here is very seldom east, but almost always south, south west, north west, and north.
Our shortest winter days have nine hours sun; in the summer, our longest days are about fifteen hours. We lie so far west of Holland that I judge you are about four hours before us, so that when it is six o'clock in the morning with us it is ten with you; and when it is noon with us, it is four o'clock in the afternoon with you.
The inhabitants of this country are of two kinds,; 1st, Christians-certainly so called; 2d, Indians. Of the Christians I shall say nothing ; my design is to speak of the Indians only. These among us are again of two kinds; 1st, the Mahakinbas, or, as they call themselves, Kajingahaga; 2d, the Mahakans, otherwise called Agotza- gena. These two nations have different languages, which have no affinity with each other, as the Dutch and Latin. These people formerly carried on a great war against each other, but since the Mahakanders were subdued by the Mahakobaas, a peace has subsisted between them, and the conquered are obliged to bring a yearly contribution to the others. We live among both these kinds of In. dians; and, coming to us from their country, or we going to them, they do us every act of friendship. The prin- cipal nation of all the savages and Indians hereabouts with which we are connected, are the Mahakuaas, who have laid all the other Indians near us under contribu- tion. This nation has a very heavy language, and I find great difficulty in learning it, so as to speak and preach to them fluently. There is no Christian here who under- stands the language thoroughly ; those who have lived here long can hold a kind of conversation just sufficient to carry on trade with them, but they do not understand the idiom of the language. I am making a vocabulary of the Maha- kuaa language, and when I am among them I ask them how things are called ; but as they are very stupid, I can not sometimes get an explanation of what I want. Be- sides what I have just mentioned, one will tell me a word in the infinitive mood, another in the indicative ; one in the first, another in the second person; one in the
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present, another in the praeter perfect tense. So I stand oftentimes and look, but do not know how to put it down. And as they have their declensions and conjuga- tions, so they have their augments like the Greeks. Thus I am as if I was distracted, and frequently cannot. tell what to do, and there is no person to set me right; I must do all the studying myself in order to become in time an Indian grammarian. When I first observed that they pronounced their words so differently, I asked the commissary of the company what it meaned. He an- swered me that he did not know, but imagined they chang- ed their language every two or three years ; I told him in reply that it could never be that a whole nation should so generally change their language ;- and, though he has been connected with them here these twenty years, he can afford me no assistance.
The people and Indians here in this country are of much the same stature with us Dutchmen ; some of them have very good features, and their bodies and limbs are well proportioned ; they all have black hair and eyes, but their skin is yellow. In summer they go naked, hav- ing only their private parts covered with a patch. The children and young folks to 10, 12 and 14 years of age go mother naked. In winter they hang loosely about them an undressed deer's, or bear's, or panther's skin; or they take some beaver and otter skins, of wild cat's, raccoons, martins, otters, minks, squirrels, or several kinds of skins, which are plenty in this country, and sew some of them to the others, until it is a square piece, and that is then a garment for them ; or they buy of us Dutchmen two and an half ells of duffels ; and that they hang loosely on them, just as it was torn off, without any sewing, and as they go away they look very much at themselves, and think they are very fine. They make themselves stockings and shoes of deer skin, or they take leaves of their corn, and plat them together and use them for shoes. The women as well as the men, go naked about the head. The women let their hair grow very long, and tie it together a little, and let it hang down
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their backs. Some of the men wear their hair on one side of the head, and some on both sides, and a long lock of hair hanging down. On the top of their heads they have a streak of hair from the forehead to the neck, about the breath of three fingers, and this they shorten until it is about two or three fingers long, and it stands right on end like a cock's comb or hog's bristles ; on both sides of this cock's comb they cut the hair short off, except the aforesaid locks, and they also leave on the bare places here and there small locks, such as are in sweeping- brushes, and then they are very fine.
They likewise paint their faces red, blue, &c., and then they look like the devil himself. They smear their heads with bear's-grease, which they all carry with them for this purpose in a small basket ; they say they do it to make their hair grow better and prevent their having lice. When they travel, they take with them some of their maize, a kettle, a wooden bowl, and a spoon ; these they pack up and hang on their backs. Whenever they are hungry, they forthwith make a fire and cook ; they can get fire by rubbing pieces of wood against one another, and that very quickly.
They generally live without marriage; but if any of them have wives, the marriage continues no longer than they think proper, and then they separate, and each takes another partner. I have seen those who had parted, and afterwards lived a long time with others, seek their former partners, and again be one pair. And, though they have wives, yet they will not leave off going a whoring; and if they can sleep with another man's wife, they think it a brave thing. The women are exceedingly addicted to whoring; they will lie with a man for the value of one, two, or three shillings, and our Dutchmen run after them very much.
The women, when they have been delivered, go about immediately afterwards, and be it ever so cold it makes no difference, they wash themselves and the young child in the river or the snow. They will not lie down (for they say that if they did they should soon die), but keep going
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about. They are obliged to cut wood, to travel three or four miles with their child in a wood ; they go, they stand, they work, as if they had not lain in, and we cannot see that they suffer any injury by it ; and we sometimes try to persuade our wives to lay-in so, and that the way of lying-in in Holland is a mere fiddle-faddle. The men have great authority over their concubines, so that if they do anything which affronts them and raises their passion, they take an axe and knock them in the head, and there is an end of it. The women are obliged to prepare the land, to mow, to plant, and do everything ;- the men do nothing, except hunting, fishing, and going to war against their enemies. They are very cruel towards their enemies in the time of war; for they first bite off the nails of the fingers of their captives, and cut off some joints, and some, times the whole of the fingers; after that, the captives are forced to sing and dance before them stark naked; and finally, they roast their prisoners dead before a slow fire for some days, and then eat them up. The common people eat the arms, buttocks and trunk, but the chiefs eat the head and the heart.
Our Mahakas carry on great war against the Indians of Canada, on the river Saint Lawrence, and take many captives, and sometimes there are French Christians among them. Last year, our Indians got a great booty from the French on the river Saint Lawrence, and took three Frenchmen, one of whom was a Jesuit. They killed one, but the Jesuit (whose left thumb was cut off, and all the nails and pieces of his fingers were bitten,) we released, and sent him to France by a yacht which was going to Holland. They spare all the children from ten to twelve years old, and all the women whom they take in war, unless the women are very old, and then they kill them. Though they are so very cruel to their enemies, they are very friendly to us, and we have no dread of them. We go with them into the woods ; we meet with each other, sometimes at an hour or two's walk from any houses, and think no more about it than if we met with a Christian. They sleep by us, tooy, in our
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chambers before our beds. I have had eight at once who laid and slept upon the floor near my bed, for it is their custom to sleep only on the bare ground, and to have only a stone or a bit of wood under their heads. In the evening, they go to bed very soon after they have supped ; but they rise early in the morning, and are up before day begins to break. They are very slovenly and dirty ; they wash neither their face nor hands, but let all remain upon their yellow skin, and look as dirty as hogs. Their bread is Indian corn beaten to pieces between two stones, of which they make a cake and bake it in the ashes; their other victuals are venison, turkies, hares, bears, wild cats, their own dogs, &c. The fish they cook just as they get them out of the water without cleansing; also the entrails of deer with all their contents, which they cook a little; and if the entrails are then too tough, they take one end in their mouth, and the other in their hand, and between hand and mouth they separate and eat them. So they do commonly with the flesh, for they carve a little piece and lay it on the fire, as long as till one can go from house to church, and then it is done; and when they eat it, the blood runs down their chins. They can also take a piece of bear-grease as large as two fists, and eat it up so without bread or anything else. It is natural to them to have no beards; not one in an hundred has any hair about his mouth.
They have also naturally a great opinion of themselves; they say, I hy Otkon (I am the devil), by which they mean that they are superior folks. In order to praise themselves and their people, whenever we tell them they are very expert at catching deer, or doing this and that, they say. Tksocks ko, aguweechon Kajingahaga kouaane Jountuckcha Othkon ; that is, Really all the Mohawks are very cunning devils. They make their houses of the bark of trees, very close and warm, and kindle their fire in the middle of them. They also make of the peeling and bark of trees, canoes or small boats, which will carry four, five and six persons. In like manner they hollow out trees, and use them for boats, some of which are very large.
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I have several times sat and sailed with ten, twelve and fourteen persons in one of these hollowed logs. We have in our colony* a wooden canoe obtained from the Indians, which will easily carry two hundred schepelst of wheat. The arms used by them in war were formerly a bow and arrow, with a stone axe and clap hammer, or mallet ; but now they get from our people guns, swords, iron axes and mallets. Their money consists of certain little bones, made of the shells of cockles, which are found on the sea- beach; a hole is drilled through the middle of the little bones, and these they string upon thread, or they make of them belts as broad as a hand or broader, which they hang on their necks, or around their bodies; they have also several holes in their ears, and there they likewise hang some. They value these little bones as highly as many Christians do gold, silver and pearls ; but they have no idea of our money, and esteem it no better than iron. I once showed one of their chiefs a rix-dollar; he asked how much it was worth among the Christians; and when I told him, he laughed exceedingly at us, saying we were fools to value a piece of iron so highly; and if he had such money, he would throw it into the river. They place their dead upright in holes, and do not lay them down, and then they throw some trees and wood on the grave, or enclose it with palisades. They have their set times for going. to catch fish, bears, panthers, and beavers. In the spring, they catch vast quantities of shad and lam- preys, which are very large here: they lay them on the bark of trees in the sun, and dry them thoroughly hard, and then put them in "notasten," or bags, which they plait from hemp which grows wild here, and keep the fish till winter. When their corn is ripe, they take off the ears and put them in deep pits, and preserve them therein the whole winter. They can also make nets and seines, ten or twelve men will go together and help each other, all of whom own the seine in common.
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