20 Indians of the South (1618)
William Strachey (1572-1621) was a passenger aboard the Sea Venture which ran aground off the coast of Bermuda. He visited Jamestown for about a year and wrote a glossary of the Powhatan language and an account of his experiences.
Their habitations or towns are for the most part by the rivers or not far distant from fresh springs, commonly upon a rise of a hill, that they may overlook the river and take every small thing into view which stirs upon the same. Their houses are not many in one town and those that are stand dissite [separate] and scattered without form of a street, far and wide asunder.
As for their houses, who knows one of them knows them all, even the chief king’s house itself, for they are all alike built one to the other. They are like garden arbors, at best like our shepherds’ cottages. Made yet handsomely enough, though without strength or gayness of such young plants as they can pluck up, bow, and make the green tops meet together in fashion of a round roof which they thatch with mats thrown over. The walls are made of barks of trees, but then those are principal houses, for so many barks which go to the making up of a house are long time of purchasing. In the midst of the house there is a louver out of which the smoke issues, the fire being kept right under. Every house commonly has two doors, one before and a postern. The doors are hung with mats, never locked nor bolted but only those mats are to turn up or let fall at pleasure. And their houses are so commonly placed under cover of trees that the violence of foul weather, snow, or rain cannot assault them nor the sun in summer annoy them. And the roof being covered, as I say, the wind is easily kept out insomuch as they are as warm as stoves, albeit very smoky. Windows they have none, but the light comes in at the door and at the louver. For should they have broad and open windows in the quarters of their houses, they know not well how upon any occasion to make them close and let in the light too, for glass they know not.
By their houses they have sometimes a scaena or high stage, raised like a scaffold, of small spelts, reeds, or dried osiers [willow branches], covered with mats, which both gives a shadow and is a shelter and serves for such a covered place where men used in old time to sit and talk for recreation or pleasure. Which they called praestega and where, on a loft of hurdles, they lay forth their corn and fish to dry. They eat, sleep, and dress their meat all under one roof and in one chamber, as it were.
Round about the house on both sides are their bedsteads, which are thick short posts staked into the ground, a foot high and somewhat more, and for the sides small poles laid along with a hurdle of reeds cast over. Wherein they roll down a fine white mat or two (as for a bed) when they go to sleep, and the which they roll up again in the morning when they rise, as we do our pallets. And upon these round about the house they lie, heads and points, one by the other, especially making a fire before them in the midst of the house as they do usually every night and some one of them by agreement maintains the fire for all that night long.
About their houses they have commonly square plots of cleared ground which serve them for gardens. Some one hundred, some two hundred foot square wherein they sow their tobacco, pumpkins, and a fruit like unto a musk melon. It is strange to see how their bodies alter with their diet. Even as the deer and wild beasts they seem fat and lean, strong and weak. Powhatan and some others that are provident, roast their fish and flesh upon hurdles and reserve of the same until the scarce times. Their corn they eat in the ears green, roasted, and sometime braising it in a mortar of wood with a little pestle. They wrap it in rolls within the leaves of the corn and so boil it for a dainty. They also reserve that corn late planted that will not ripen, by roasting it in hot ashes. The which in winter (being boiled with beans) they esteem for a rare dish, calling it pausarawmena.
Their drink is, as the Turks, clear water. For albeit they have grapes and those good store, yet they have not fallen upon the use of them nor advised how to press them into wine. Pears and apples they have none to make cider or perry of, nor honey to make mead, nor licorice to seeth in their water. They call all things which have a spicy taste wassacan, which leaves a supposition that they may have some kind of spice trees, though not perhaps such as elsewhere.
The men bestow their times in fishing, hunting, wars, and such manlike exercises without the doors [outdoors], scorning to be seen in any effeminate labor, which is the cause that the women be very painful and the men often idle. A kind of exercise they have often amongst them much like that which boys call bandy in English. Likewise they have the exercise of football, in which they only forcibly encounter with the foot to carry the ball the one from the other and spurned it to the goal with a kind of dexterity and swift footmanship, which is the honor of it. But they never strike up one another’s heels, as we do, not accounting that praiseworthy to purchase a goal by such an advantage.
There is yet in Virginia no place discovered to be so savage and simple, in which the inhabitants have not a religion and the use of bow and arrows. All things they conceive able to do them hurt beyond their prevention, they adore with their kind of divine worship as the fire, water, lightning, thunder, our ordinance pieces, horses, etc. But their chief god they worship is no other indeed than the devil, whom they make presentments of and shadow under the form of an idol which they entitle Okeus and whom they worship as the Romans did their hurtful god Vejovis [Jove, Jupiter], more for fear of harm than for hope of any good.
Source: William Strachey, The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, in Hakluyt Society, Works (London, 1849), 70-82. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, 203-5. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.45493/page/n223/mode/2up
