OF BEGINNINGS 
3 
the sea overflowed them. Of which we found such 
plenty, as well there as in all places else, both on the 
sand and on the green soil of the hills as in the plains, 
as well on every little shrub as also climbing toward 
the top of high cedars, that I think in all the world 
the like abundance is not to be found: and myself 
having seen those parts of Europe that most abound, 
find such difference as were incredible to be written.” 
Knowing as we do now that North America is in¬ 
deed richer in native representatives of the genus 
Vitis than perhaps any other part of the world, it is 
possible to conceive something of the astonishment 
which must have filled this sailor, when he stepped 
upon virgin shores so richly clothed in a natural mantle 
of earth’s most anciently cultivated fruit. Small won¬ 
der that he went on, with bursting enthusiasm, “The 
woods were not such as you find in Bohemia, Mos- 
covia or Hercynia, barren and fruitless, but the high¬ 
est and reddest cedars of the world, far bettering the 
cedars of the Azores, of the Indies, of Libanus; pines, 
cypresses, sassafras, the lentisk or the tree that beareth 
the mastic; the tree that beareth the rind of black 
cinnamon, of which Master Winter brought from the 
Straits of Magellan; and many other of excellent 
smell and quality.” 
The third way winds back to the little fur trading 
posts set up by the Dutch in 1614, at the southern 
