EARLY RECORDS OF GRAPES 3 



perilous." Governor's Island, in Boston Harbor, was 

 granted to Governor Winthrop in 1632, upon the 

 condition that he should plant a vineyard or orchard 

 upon it ; and in 1634 the yearly rent was a hogs- 

 head of wine. 



England, however, is not a wine -making country. 

 The vine is there grown laboriously upon walls and 

 under glass, to rescue it from the uncongenial cool- 

 ness of the summers. So the New Englanders ap- 

 pear not to have given great attention to wine -mak- 

 ing, either from the native grape or from plantations 

 of introduced vines. Then, the summers are too short 

 and the winters too severe to give much encourage- 

 ment to the growing of the vine for wine -making 

 in New England, and we must look farther south for 

 the early evolution of the American grape. 



The Spanish colonists in Florida were attracted 

 by the wild grapes. John Hawkins, an English cap- 

 tain, visited these settlements in 1565, and said that 

 twenty hogsheads of wine had been made in a single 

 season, and he speaks of the wild grapes, which 

 " taste much like our English grapes." The intrepid 

 French adventurers and colonists were everywhere 

 attracted by the abundance of grapes, and we find 

 accounts of their wine-making far in the interior 

 country. In 1769, the French settlers at Kaskaskia, 

 in southern Illinois, made 110 hogsheads of wine 

 from wild grapes. Even as far north as Michigan, 

 these voyageurs found the banks of the streams fes- 

 tooned with the vines and the purple fruits hanging 

 in wild abandon in the rich September sun. Over a 

 hundred* years ago, a party of these explorers pushed 

 up a river in southern Michigan and, noticing the 



