swamtoh] EARL'S BISTORT OF THE CREEK INDIANS 355 
baskets with one handle like European baskets. 1 These last I 
believe to have been based on the imagination of the illustrator. In 
1562 one of the Florida chiefs presented Ribault with "a basket 
made of palm boughs, after the Indian fashion, and wrought very 
artificially." 2 Three years later one of his lieutenants received 
"little panniers skillfully made of palm leaves, full of gourds, red and 
blue." 3 Woven mats are also spoken of. 4 It appears from Pareja 
that shells were ordinarily used as drinking cups. 5 
Regarding skin dressing Le Moyne says : 
They know how to prepare deerskin, not with iron instruments, but with shells, 
in a surprisingly excellent manner; indeed I do not believe that any European could 
do it as well. 6 
Skins, painted and unpainted, were presented to the French; and 
one of those given to Ribault was "painted and drawn throughout 
with pictures of divers wild beasts; so lively drawn and portrayed 
that nothing lacked but life. 7 
Le Moyne mentions "green and blue stones, which some thought 
to be emeralds and sapphires, in the form of wedges, which they used, 
instead of axes, for cutting wood." 6 From this it appears that they 
probably felled trees, cleared their land, and manufactured canoes 
in the same manner as the other southern Indians, using stone axes 
and fire. At any rate they made their canoes out of single trunks 
of trees. Ribault says that these would hold 15 or 20 men, and he 
adds that they rowed, or rather paddled, standing up. 8 The canoes 
illustrated by Le Mope all have blunt bows, but those at present 
employed by the Florida Seminole are pointed, and the canoes 
recovered from time to time from the marshes also have pointed 
bows. The use of additional pieces for the bow and stern does not 
seem to have been known. Le Moyne represents their paddles 
with rather short, wide blades. 9 That they had means of cutting 
very hard substances is shown by the statement in Elvas that the 
Indians captured by De Soto's army would file through the irons at 
night with a splinter of stone. 10 As elsewhere in the Southeast, cane 
knives were extensively employed. 
The dog was the only domestic animal, and there is no evidence 
that it was used to assist in transportation; therefore land transporta- 
tion was all on foot, berdaches being employed to carry very heavy 
1 Le Moyne, Narrative, plates. 
» Laudonniere, La Floride, p. 17; French, Hist. Colls. La., 1869, p. 180. 
• Laudonniere, ibid., p. 75; French, ibid., p. 230. 
• Laudonniere, ibid., p. 168; French, ibid., p. 315. 
s See p. 384. 
• Le Moj-ne, op. cit., p. 8. 
7 Laudonniere, op. cit., p. 17; French, op. cit., p. i80 
8 French, op. cit., 1875, p. 178. 
' Lc Moyne, op. cit., plates. 
10 Bourne, Narr. of De Soto, I, p. 46. 
