12 Singing Valleys 



Palenque and in Copan two, perhaps three, thousand years 

 ago. 



In the course of these European wanderings the grain was 

 called by a variety of names: Guinney wheat, Indian barley, 

 Turkic wheat (Everything strange and seemingly crude was 

 accredited to the Turks, it seemed even the national fowl of 

 Yucatan), and wherever Spanish was spoken, mahiz. 



Tobacco, potatoes, corn these three the Americas have 

 added to the world's store. All three have made political his- 

 tory. Sea captains and merchants took to smoking long- 

 stemmed pipes of the fragrant weed, and out of the smoke 

 rings they puffed the fetters of the African slave trade were 

 forged. Sir Walter Raleigh planted in his kitchen garden at 

 Youghal a bushel of the queer brown tubers brought to him 

 from Peru. Three months later he and his friends sat down to 

 dine off a platter of the food which was to nourish Sinn Fein. 

 The Spaniards who followed Pizarro and Coronado, the 

 Frenchmen who sailed with Champlain, Raleigh's Virginians, 

 Brewster's Puritans, Penn's Quakers, the Swedes on the Dela- 

 ware, the Dutch on the Hudson, all found in the red man's 

 maize a food which sustained them while they conquered 

 those who gave it them to eat. They rose up refreshed, and 

 built the cities of the new world on the cornfields. 



So the grain which had been called "Our Life," "Our 

 Mother," "She Who Sustains Us" kept faith with its name. 



The part the maize had played in the founding of the Amer- 

 ican colonies was well known to historians by the middle of 

 the eighteenth century when Linnaeus published his Species 

 Plantarum. Linnaeus had at his command numerous old 

 herbals like Gerarde's which contains a drawing of "Turkic 

 Wheat" scarcely to be distinguished from illustrations of 

 American corn in seedsmen's catalogues today. He had, too, 

 specimens and letters from botanists all over the world, in- 

 cluding his pupil Peter Kalm whom he had sent on a tour of 

 the American colonies. 



Linnaeus turned the maize kernels in his thin scholar's 



