Swan ION J INIDIAN'S OF THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATElS 339 



difference indicated here between the Powhatan people and the 

 Algonquians to the south and east of them. (Smith, Tyler ed., 1907, 

 p. 103; Strachey, 1849, p. 75.) 



According to these writers, Virginia Indians generally shot fish 

 with long arrows tied to lines (idem.). Lawson again mentions this 

 method in connection with torch or fire fishing, which he and Bever- 

 ley are the only ones to note. He says: 



The youth and Indian boys go in the night, and one holding a lightwood 

 torch, the other has a bow and arrows, and the fire directing him to see the 

 fish, he shoots them with the arrows; and thus they kill a great many of the 

 smaller fry, and sometimes pretty large ones. (Lawson, 1860, p. 341.) 



The Maryland Indians also used bows and arrows, and Adair lets 

 us know that in later times guns were substituted. 



If they shoot at fish not deep in the water, either with an arrow or bullet, 

 they aim at the lower part of the belly, if they are near; and lower, in like 

 manner, according to the distance, which seldom fails of killing. (Adair, 

 1775, p. 432.) 



The present Alabama Indians remember that spears were once 

 employed in this industry, and both they and the Creeks recall the 

 use of bows and arrows.^^ 



Aside from a somewhat doubtful intimation by Elvas that the Gulf 

 Indians used fishhooks, we have the clear testimony of archeology and 

 direct statements by Smith (Tyler ed., 1907, p. 103) and Strachey 

 (1849, p. 75). Manufacture of bark fishing lines by the Virginians 

 has already been described. Strachey continues : 



Theire angles are long small rodds, at the end whereof they have a clift to the 

 which the lyne is fastened, and at the lyne they hang a hooke, made eyther of a 

 bone grated (as they nock their arrowes) in the forme of a crooked pynne or 

 fis-hooke, or of the splinter of a bone, and with a threed of the lyne they tye on 

 bayte. (Strachey, 1849, p. 75.) 



One probable reason for our failure to find many references to the 

 use of hook and line is that the European colonists were so accustomed 

 to this method of fishing that they took it for granted. On arche- 

 ological sites in the section, bone fishhooks have been found in all 

 stages of manufacture. 



At Key Marco, Gushing 



found four or five fish-hooks. The shanks or stems of these were about three 

 inches long, shaped much like those of our own, but ma^^e from the conveniently 

 curved main branches of the foked twigs of some tough springy kind of wood. 

 These were cut off at the forks in such manner as to leave a portion of the stems 

 to serve as butts, which were girdled and notched in, so that the sharp, barbed 

 points of deer bone, which were about half as long as the shanks and leaned in 

 toward them, could be firmly attached with sinew and black rubber-gum cement. 



21 The Seminole preserved the custom until late times (MacCauley, 1887, p. 513) ; also 

 see Speck, 1909, p. 24, and 1907, p. 108. 



