Early Corn Planters 11 



historic Pilgrims' Way to the shrine of St. James at Cam- 

 postella in Spanish Galicia stand old corncribs of lichened 

 stone built to receive the maize harvests of three centuries ago. 



For a century and more after Columbus's first recorded 

 mention of maize, the grain was brought to Europe in a dozen 

 different ways, and through a dozen different ports. 



Dominican friars, returning from the missions in Yucatan 

 to report in Salamanca and in Rome, brought handfuls of 

 yellow kernels to show what food nourished the obstinate 

 heathen. Dutch merchantmen, who had captured Portugal's 

 commercial empire in the East, sailed westward in search of 

 wider trade. They put in at the islands, where they bartered 

 beads and mirrors for sacks of maize. These, carried to the 

 trading posts on the Delaware and the Hudson, became money 

 with which to buy beaver. English slave traders, like Sebastian 

 Cabot, purchased cargoes of human flesh in the Congo for 

 maize grown on the plantations where the wretched blacks 

 were to labor under the overseers' whips. John Leo, who 

 visited Africa in 1535, tells of a tribe living two hundred miles 

 inland, on the Niger, who had "a great store of a round and 

 white kind of pulse, the like whereof I never saw in Europe." 

 The native name for it was manputo (Portuguese grain). Leo 

 explains in a footnote: "This is called maiz in the West 

 Indies." Barbary pirates, preying on the treasure ships coming 

 heavily laden from Mexico and Peru, seized the grain in their 

 holds only a little less greedily than they snatched the bars of 

 bullion. The Turks scattered maize across northern Africa. 

 They carried it to Constantinople and up the Danube into 

 the present-day Roumania and Hungary, then part of the Otto- 

 man Empire. The Balkan peasants grow maize today as their 

 Turkish masters taught them to do. And at harvest the husk- 

 ing ears are hung from the house eaves to dry in the sun, 

 exactly as the Iroquois hung them from the front of their 

 Long House; as the Aztecs hung them from their terraced 

 pueblos; as the Maya hung them in Chichen Itza and in 



