The Seeding of New England 79 



Beyond the owner's house, a row of cabins for the inden- 

 tured servants runs like an English village street toward the 

 farm buildings. Still there are few blacks; only twenty-two in 

 the entire colony. 



In the farmyards are pigs, cows, goats, chickens. Sheep graze 

 the lawns about the house. Oxen draw plows through the 

 fields. This in itself marks a great advance. In 1617 Ralph 

 Hamor sighed for "six or eight plows, now we have steers to 

 draw them." The first land in America to be broken by a share 

 was in Virginia in 1618. There are few horses; nor need of 

 them, for there are few roads. Travel and trade go by the 

 rivers. Away on both sides along the river stretch the tobacco 

 and cornfields. Tobacco is money for taxes and for export. But 

 corn is food. There is a little wheat grown, but not much of 

 that. The lands are still too fertile for wheat growing. And the 

 seed which Argall brought from Canada has proved disap- 

 pointing. Corn is easier to raise and more trustworthy. Corn 

 yields more per acre with less labor. Corn is ground at home 

 in a great stone mortar, without the difficulty of cartage to a 

 mill. 



Besides, these planters who have survived the Starving Time, 

 the Indian raids, and the successive changes of governors and 

 their policies have grown used to the taste of the rough, sweet, 

 yellow bread. Their bodies demand the energy it gives. A man 

 needs energy if he is to push the frontier back and still farther 

 back, and to drive out the redskins. Too, corn yields more 

 than meal for bread and hominy and "spoon meat." There is 

 the sweet syrup in the green stalks. There are the dried husks 

 to stuff mattresses for master and servants too. There are the 

 cobs for lighting fires, and a few of these to be fashioned into 

 pipes for smoking the homegrown tobacco. 



It is usual for the newly arrived servants, a rough lot some 

 of these, the scrapings of county jails and pothouses along the 

 Plymouth wharves, to grumble for fine white bread or at least 

 for moist rye loaves. But they learn soon enough that you 

 cannot feed servants on wheat bread, and make a profit on their 

 labor. In a month or two they are as active in the cornfields 



