30 RELICS OF THE STONE AGE IN NOVA SCOTIA PIERS. 



place hath its particular fish, which come thither in certain 

 season) they have need of horses in their remove for to carry 

 their stuff. Those horses be canoes and small boats made of 

 barks of trees, which go as swiftly as may be without sails : 

 when they remove they put all that they have into them, wives, 

 children, dogs, kettles, hatches, matachias, bows, arrows, quivers, 

 skins, and the coverings of their houses. . . . They also make 

 some of willows very properly, which they cover with the . . . 

 gum of firr-trees ; a thing which witnesseth that they lack no 

 wit, where necessity presseth them." [Book II, chap, xvii.] 



Lescarbot says that anciently the Souriquois or Micrnacs 

 made earthen pots and also did till the ground ; " but since that 

 Frenchmen do bring unto them kettles, beans, pease, bisket and 

 other food, they are become slothful, and make no more account 

 of those exercises." [Book II, chap, xvii.] 



Elsewhere in the volume the writer also tells us that the 

 labour of grinding corn to make bread " is so great, that the 

 savages (although they be very poor) cannot bear it ; and had 

 rather to be without bread, than to take so much pains, as it hath 

 been tried, offering them half of the grinding they should do, 

 but they chused rather to have no corn." [Book I, chap, viii.] 



Writing of the women, he says, that " when the barks of 

 trees must be taken off in the spring-time, or in summer, there- 

 with to cover their houses, it is they which do that work; -as 

 likewise they labour in the making of canoes and small boats, 

 when they are to be made ; and as for the tilling of the ground 

 (in the countries where they use it) they take therein more pains 

 than the men, who do play the gentlemen, and have no care but 

 in hunting, or of wars. And notwithstanding all their labours, 

 yet commonly they love their husbands more than the women 

 of these our parts." [Book II, chap, xviii.] 



Once Lescarbot saw meat cooked by an Indian in the follow- 

 ing manner. The savage " did frame with his hatchet, a tubb or 

 trough of the body of a tree," in which he boiled the flesh by 

 putting " stones made red hot in the fire in the said trough," and 

 replacing them by others until the meat was cooked. [Book II, 

 chap, xxi.] 



