128 



"barley frequently degenerates into oats" — made two voyages to New 

 England, and lived here a number of years. He was in Boston in 

 1663. He thus discourses offish: "The sea-hare is as big as grampus 

 or herring-hog, and as white as a sheet. * * * I have seen sturgeon 

 sixteen loot in length; of their sounds they make isinglass, which, 

 melted in the mouth, is excellent to seal letters : * * * negroes or 

 sea-devils, a very ugly fish, having a black scale : * * * squids, a 

 soft fish somewhat like a cudgel, their horns like a snail's: * * * 

 the dolphin; the ashes of their teeth, mixed with honey, is good to 

 assuage the pain of breeding-teeth in children: * * * the alewife 

 is like a herring, but has a bigger belly, therefore called an alewife : 

 * * * the hass is a salt-water fish, too, but most an end taken in 

 rivers : one writes that the fat in the bone of bass's head is his brains, 

 which is a lie : * * * the salmon the first year is a salmon-smelt, the 

 second a mort, the third a spraid, the fourth a soar, the fifth a sorrel, the 

 sixth vi forket-tail, and the seventh year a salmon^ One kind oi turtle, 

 he says, if burned to ashes and mixed with oil and wine, "healeth sore 

 legs," while the burnt shell, if compounded with whites of eggs, 

 "healeth women's nipples;" and he avers that sea-muscles, if dried and 

 pulverized, "will perfectly cure the piles," and that '■'■ trouf s grease is 

 good for the piles and clifts." Of the inhabitants of the sea he enu- 

 merates sixty-four kinds, to some of which he aflSxes names sufficiently 

 barbarous to display his stock of learning; and concludes with the re- 

 mark, that "the fish are swum by, and the serpants are creeping on — 

 terrible creatures — carrying stings in their tails that will smart worse 

 than a satyr^s whip, though it were as big as Mr. Shepperd's, the mad 

 gentleman at Milton — Mowbrayes Constantinus Lasculus." 



We turn from Josselyn to an angry king. To supply a circulating 

 medium, Massachusetts, as early as 1652, commenced the coinage of 

 the "pine-tree" shilling-pieces, at which Charles the Second was much 

 displeased. The general court, in 1677, to appease him, ordered a 

 present of "ten barrels of cranberries, two hogsheads of samp, and 

 three thousand codfish."* During the same year about twenty fish- 

 ing vessels were captured by the Indians on the coast of Maine. Most 

 of them were owned in Salem ; and having from three to six men each, 

 could have made a successful resistance had they not been talven by 

 surprise; or, as says Hubbard, had they not been "a dull and heavy- 

 moulded sort of people," without "either skill or courage to kill any- 

 thing but fish." In fact, some vessels did make a manful defence, 

 lost a number of men killed, and earned home nineteen others wounded. 

 A large vessel was immediately equipped by the merchants of Salem, 

 and despatched to re-capture their vessels and punish the captors. 

 The Indians plundered the fishing-ketches, abandoned them, and eluded 

 their pursuers. 



In 1692 Salem lost by removals about a quarter part of its whole 

 population, in consequence of the trials for witchcraft. The world 

 rings with the enormities of this delusion. It should wonder, rather, 

 that witchcraft in America was so nearly confined to the fishing county 

 of Essex, at a period when all England was peopled with witches and 



* Hume sayg that the usual oath of Charles the Second was, " Cod's-Jish." 



