that time, relates that he heard them hunting in the evening when they might easily have been mistaken for a pack of beagles.[1] For a century they continued to be a pest to the planters in the oldest communities of the Colony, and valuable rewards were offered by the authorities for their destruction. The dogs found in Virginia resembled a cross between a male wolf and the ordinary bitch. Like the common jackal, they were much given to depredations upon the remains of the dead.[2]
The Virginian bear was very small. At the time of the first settlement it was found in considerable numbers towards the coast in the modern county of Princess Anne, from which it gradually retired into the recesses of the Dismal Swamp, where it still lingers. In the direction of the mountains, bears were more frequently seen; there they were discovered by later travellers, feeding like swine upon the mast of the forests. Their flesh was thought to be excellent, reminding the colonists of the finest veal.[3] The woods were full of gray foxes, and it was remarked that the odor of their bodies was less rank than that of the English breed. The red fox was also found. There were beavers in all of the streams in which they were able to erect their dams, and to some extent it was not improbably owing to the presence of these animals that there were so many inland swamps in Virginia. The raccoons were as large as the English fox, and their flesh was pronounced by many of the early colonists to be equal to that of lamb. Their peculiar shape of head and their arboreal habits perhaps originated
- ↑ Clayton’s Virginia, p. 37, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. III.
- ↑ Strachey’s Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 124.
- ↑ See for these details, Lane’s Relation, Hakluyt’s Voyages, 1610, vol. III, p. 312; Strachey’s Historie of Travaile into Virginia, pp. 123, 124, Discoveries of Loederer, p. 14.
