336 REVIEWS, 



and Barlow, in the first vessels sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to 

 the New World, landed on an island in Ocracoke Inlet (now 

 within Xorth Carolina) in 1584. While the vessels remained 

 there, and while they were at Koanoke Island near by, the 

 Indians entertained them kindly, and " sent them, commonly 

 every day, a brace of bucks, conies, etc., sometimes melons, 

 walnuts, cucumbers, pease, and divers roots " (J. Smith's 

 Gen. Hist. p. 3). 



What these "melons," or some of them, were, we learn 

 from later explorers and the first colonists of Virginia 

 (proper) . 



Captain John Smith says that the Indians of Virginia 

 (1606-8) " plant amongst their corn Pumpions, and a fruit 

 like unto a musk-melon, but less and worse, which they call 

 Macocks," etc. (Gen. Hist. p. 29). Strachey, who w^as in 

 Virginia in 1610, describes these " macock gourds " in nearly 

 the same words (Trav. into Virginia, p. 72) ; elsewdiere, he 

 says the " macokos is of the form of our pumpions — I must 

 confess, nothing so good, — 't is of a more waterish taste," and 

 he mentions also the "pumpions" planted by the Indians, 

 and "a kind of million" which they "seeth and put into 

 their walnut-milk, and so make a kind of toothsome meat " 

 (p. 119). " The Indian Pumpion, the Water-melon, Musk- 

 melon," etc., are named among fruits introduced into Ber- 

 muda, by the English, before 1623 (Smith's Gen. Hist. 



p. my 



1 L'Ecluse (Clusius) heard of these Macocks in 1591 or earlier. In 

 his "Exotica" (1605 ; lib. iii. c. 2) he describes a fruit — " Macocqwer 

 Virginiausium, forte " — which had been sent him from London by James 

 Garet, brought from " the province of Wingandecaow, which the English 

 call Virginia." He conjectured that this might be « the fruit which the 

 natives of that region call Macocqwer " — but his figure and description 

 do not favor this identification. The fruit, he says, is nearly orbicular ; 

 four inches in diameter ; with a hard rind, yellowish on the outside ; many 

 seeds, fiat and heart-shaped (" cordis, ut vulgo pingitur, formam referen- 

 tia"). L'Ecluse thought it might be one of the gourds which the natives 

 used for rattles, as the Brazilians used their Tamaraca, etc. His speci- 

 men was old and dried, the pulp blackened, the rind covered with a dark 

 membrane, "perquam sparsfe quaedam fibrae h pedicido ad summum." 

 This must have been a fruit of Crescentia cucurbitina, a calabash, which is 

 a native not only of the West Indies, but also of southern Florida. 



