AMERICAN ABORIGINAL PIPES AND SMOKING CUSTOMS. 643 



of the English fishermen, and coiikl name certain of them from whom 

 he learned his language.'" This occurrence is only an additional 

 instance of almost every account of the traveler's first contact with the 

 natives — that some one else of the same color or nationality was there, 

 or had been there before them. 



It is noteworthy that all references to the personal property of our 

 American Indians indicate that it was inconsiderable. Peter Ileylyn, 

 about 1082, referring to the natives of Virginia, especially that portiou 

 known as ''Novem Belgium or Nieu Nederlandt," says: "Their house- 

 hold stuff, a tobacco pipe, a wooden dish, and an hatchet made of a 

 broad fiint; their weapons, bows and arrows, their arrows headed with 

 the bones of fishes."^ 



According to Everard, Clusius says, referring to Windaconoa, in 

 1585, with whose natives numbers of the Ilaleigh expedition came in 

 contact, •' The English returning from thence brought the like i)ij)es 

 with them to drink the smoak of tobacco." ^ 



The native American arts and handiwork are beginning to be some- 

 what studied, and as a consequence a better untlerstanding is had of 

 limits to implements of native manufacture than was possible a decade 

 since. Among other writers on the subject Dr. Brinton has claimed to 

 find evidences of left-handedness in North American aboriginal art, 

 having noticed an appreciable percentage among arrowheads.^ If 

 these views are correct, they differ from the experience of one authority 

 herein quoted, who passed a considerable time among American sav- 

 ages living under primitive conditions, nor does it appear to the writer 

 that the mere scrutiny of an arrow would be reliable as to how it 

 would be held in process of manufacture, especially as blades in process 

 of chipping are of necessity constantly reversed as the formation of 

 the blade progresses. 



The Clioctaws, according to Dr. E. A. Barber, as well as the Mexi- 

 cans, mixed their tobacco with the leaves of liquid amber. 



As showing the wide areas over which specimens of catlinite have 

 been found, Mr. Charles C. Jones, in a letter to Dr. Barber, refers to a 

 l)ipe of this material found in an ancient relic bed about 25 miles from 

 Augusta, on the Savannah Kiver, in Georgia. 



There is in the Douglass collection, in Xew York City, a potteiy pipe 

 from Franklin, Xorth Carolina, which resembles a snake holding a vase 

 in its distended jaws. This pipe is of interest as related to the bird 

 pipes of Georgia (fig. 231), and possibly to those of northern New York 

 (fig. 115) as well. 



The Florida Indians during the first half of the sixteenth century, 

 according to Cabe^a de Vaca, built their cabins of nmts on oyster-shell 

 piles, on which they slept perfectly naked. They never, he says, build 



'Nath.auiel Mortou, New I^iigland's Memorial, p. 30, Boston, 1855. 

 ^Cosmo^Taiiliy, Chivo^rapliy, and History of tlio Whole \\orl(l. IV, ]>.!(»), London, 

 1682. 

 ='Dr. Everard, Panacea, or the Universal Medicine, p. 6o, London, 11)59, 

 •* I). G. ISrintou, American Anthropolonist, X, p. 17!l. 



