Roger Williams (_Key_, ch. xxvi.) devotes considerable space to this subject, and says: “They [the Indians] hang these strings of money about their necks and wrists; as also upon the necks and wrists of their wives and children. They make [girdles] curiously of one, two, three, foure and five inches thickness and more, of this money which (sometimes to the value of ten pounds and more) they weare about their middle and as a scarfe about their shoulders and breasts. Yea, the Princes make rich Caps and Aprons (or small breeches) of these Beads thus curiously strung into many formes and figures: their blacke and white finely mixt together.” See also Trumbull’s notes in his edition of the _Key_, and Palfrey, vol. i. p. 31. Parkman (_Jesuits in North America_, pp. xxxi., lxi.) says of wampum: “This was at once their currency, their ornament, their pen, ink and parchment.” He describes the uses to which it was put among the Hurons and Iroquois, but adds: “The art [of working it] soon fell into disuse, however; for wampum better than their own was brought them by the traders, besides abundant imitations in glass and porcelain.”
[261] “How have foule hands (in smoakie houses) the first handling of these Furres which are often worne upon the hands of Queens and heads of Princes!” (Williams’s _Key_, p. 158.)
[262] There is obviously some corruption of the original manuscript here, but I have been unable to obtain any even plausible suggestion of what word may have been turned into “reles” through the compositor’s inability to decipher copy.
[263] There is not much to be said on the manufactures, utensils and trade of the New England aborigines. Gookin (I. _Mass. Hist. Coll._, vol. i. p. 151) has a comprehensive paragraph on the subject, and there is a passage in Josselyn (_Two Voyages_, p. 143). See also Williams’s _Key_, ch. xxv.
[264] Josselyn also speaks of “baskets, bags and mats woven with _Sparke_.” (_Two Voyages_, p. 143.) “Spart,” Mr. Trumbull writes, “was a northern English name for the dwarf-rush, and (as ‘spart’ in the glossaries) for osiers, and I _guess_, Morton’s and Josselyn’s _sparke_ is another form of that name.” Gookin says (I. _Mass. Hist. Coll._, vol. i. p. 151): “Some of their baskets are made of rushes; some, of bents; others, of maize-husks; others, of a kind of silk grass; others, of a kind of wild hemp; and some, of barks of trees.”