The Seeding of New England 67 



decaying fish. Later, when the herring were not so plentiful, 

 the farmers used seaweed. Today, after a big storm has churned 

 the Atlantic and piled the rich-colored kelp on the inset 

 beaches of Rhode Island and the South Shore, you may see a 

 long line of blue painted carts of the "Portygees" going down 

 to the sea for loads of fertilizer. This, spread odoriferously on 

 the cornfields, insures next year's crop for johnnycakes, and 

 the roasting ears for the Republican Party's clambakes. 



Because they fertilized the soil, the New England tribes were 

 able to plant their maize year after year in the same hills with- 

 out rotating their fields, as the Indians living to the south 

 invariably did. The squaws kept the ground between the rows 

 clear and cleanly cultivated using their clamshell hoes, and 

 "not suffering a choaking weede to advance his audacious head 

 above their infant corne, or an undermining worme to spoil 

 his spumes." The same practice of clean cultivation obtained 

 among all the Indians of America. Strachey, writing of Vir- 

 ginia in 1610, comments that "the women sow their corne 

 well and cleane same as neat as we doe our garden bedds." 



The Indians scorned the colonists for their shiftlessness in 

 letting weeds grow between their hills of corn. As soon as the 

 first blades appeared, the squaws were in their fields, hoeing 

 and planting three or four "Turkic beanes" in every hill with 

 the sprouting maize. The two plants, they believed, had an 

 affinity for each other even before they met in succoquatash. 



If the Indian cornfields appeared like "garden bedds" to 

 English eyes this was because in England field crops were still 

 sown broadcast and there was no intertillage. The natives of 

 the Americas had kept weeded the space between their corn 

 rows and planted these with beans, squash, pumpkins "cover 

 crops" for generations before the English agriculturalist 

 Jethro Hull put forth his theory about "Horse-Hoeing Hus- 

 bandry." 



The corn which Squanto showed the whites how to plant 

 prospered well. Every ear it yielded was doubled in value by 

 the fact that the wheat which they had brought with them 



