48 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
like manner melons raw, boiled roots, and fruits of divers kinds. Their 
drink is commonly water boiled with ginger, sometimes with sassafras, and 
wholesome herbs. * * * A more kind, loving people cannot be  Be- 
yond this isle is the main land, and the great river Occam, on which stand- 
eth a town called Pomeiok.” 
This is about the first, if not the first, English picture we have of 
Indian life and of English and Indian intercourse in America. It is highly 
creditable to both parties; to the Indians for their unaffected kindness and 
hospitality, and to the English for their appreciation of both, and for the 
absence of any act of injustice. At the same time it was simply an appli- 
cation by the natives of their rules of hospitality among themselves to their 
foreign visitors, and not a new thing in their experience. 
In the narrative of the expedition of Hernando de Soto to Florida in 
1539, by a gentleman of Elvas, there are references to the customs of the 
Indian tribes of South Carolina, the Cherokees, Choctas, and Chickasas, 
and of some of the tribes west of the Mississippi, whom the expedition 
visited one after another. They are brief and incomplete, but sufficiently 
indicate the point we are attempting to illustrate. It was a hostile rather 
than a friendly visitation, and the naturally free hospitality of the natives 
was frequently checked and turned into enemity, but many instances of 
friendly intercourse are mentioned in this narrative. ‘The fourth of April 
the governor passed by a town called Altamaca, and the tenth of the month 
he came to Ocute. The cacique sent him two thousand Indians with a 
present, to wit, many conies and partridges, bread of maize, two hens and 
many dogs.”” Again: ‘Two leagues before he came to Chiaha, there met 
him fifteen Indians loaded with maize which the cacique had sent; and 
they told him on his behalf that he waited his coming with twenty barns 
full of it.’ “At Coca the chief commanded his Indians to void their houses, 
wherein the governor and his men were lodged. ‘There was in the barns 
and in the fields great store of maize and French beans. The country was 
greatly inhabited with many great towns and many sown fields which 
1Smith’s History of Virginia, &c. Reprint from London edition of 1627. Richmond edition, 
1819, i, 83, 84. Amidas and Barlow’s account is also in Hakluyt’s Coll. of Voyages, iii, 301-7. 
2 Historical Collections of Louisiana, part ii. A Narrative of the Expedition of Hernando de 
Soto into llorida, by a Gentleman of Elvas, p. 139. 
IIb. p. 147. 
