flocks, being drawn to the rivers and sounds by the heavy growth of wild celery and oats and other aquatic plants upon which they were in the habit of feeding. Some conception of their multitude may be obtained from the fact that Smith and two companions passing Kecoughtan on their way to Werowoconioco are said to have killed at three shots one hundred and forty-eight.[1] Robert Evelyn, writing forty years after the foundation of Jamestown, has recorded that flocks of marine fowl a mile square and seven miles long, were seen in the upper waters of the Chesapeake in the immediate neighborhood of the marshes lying along the shores;[2] this would seem well nigh incredible, but it should be remembered that in aboriginal Virginia there was no hostile influence whatever to diminish the number of wild fowl, the weapons of the Indians being too feeble to destroy them to any great extent. For countless ages they had been propagating without any hindrance. The Chesapeake and its tributaries furnished inexhaustible feeding grounds, and here they gathered in their annual migration from the North. There was the magnificent swan uttering its trumpet notes as it wheeled in the air; the wild goose coursing with its fellows in long lines or browsing upon the grasses of the shores and the duck in all those varieties so well known to modern sportsmen, the canvas-back, the red head, the mallard, the widgeon, the dottrell, the oxeye. Incalculable numbers of plover, snipe, woodcock, and curlew, some
- ↑ Works of Capt. John Smith, p. 449. This number seems incredible.
- ↑ New Albion, p. 27, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. II. “On the Bay and Rivers feed so many wild fowl as in winter time they do in some places cover the water two miles.” Glover, in Philo. Trans. Royl. Soc., 1676-1678, vols. XI-XII, p. 626. Whitaker, in his Good Newes from Virginia says, “the rivers and creekes bee overspread everywhere with water foule of the greatest and least sort.” Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 586.
