The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30811, 24 July 1965, Page 5

The People's Songbag

Wonderful Corn

(Specially written for “The Presx” by

DERRICK ROONEY.)

r |'HE excessive wealth and brag talk of that stock cartoonist’s figure, the American tourist, had its origin in colonial times. The colonisation of America began not too long after a period when as respected a scientific figure as John Gerard, the great 16th-century English herbalist, firmly believed and per-; petuated the myth that geese grew from barnacles. Gerard went so far as to say he had actually seen geese hatching from barnacles on a rotten tree hauled from the sea on j the Dover coast: so it is not I surprising that the American | settlers really believed that I the com grew as high as an ! elephant’s eye and monsters j were born at Boston. The colonists arrived untrained in scientific observation and willing to believe almost anything about that great, fecund continent. One, Francis Higginson, wrote in Massachusetts Bay in 1630 that “of one corn there springeth four or five hundred. coloured red. blue and yellow.” He wrote also of 251 b lobsters, “great and fat and luscious,” and a part-1 ridge so heavy it could' scarcely tty.

Higginson was responsible for the much-quoted phrase that a sup of New England air was equal to a draught of old England's ale. Scrofula, the king's evil which only the royal touch could cure in England, dried up on his son (and Higginson’s own physic and melancholic humours had vanished, leaving him an iron constitution. For the first time for many years he threw away his double waistcoats and cap, and went “as thinclad as any.” He died a year ,later. i Many old wives tales about (bears originated in colonial times, such as that bears hibernating through the winter stayed alive by "sleeping and sucking their paws, which keepeth them as fat as (hey are in summer.” Because they sang as they sucked. Indians had no difficulty finding their lairs and killing them. This was reported by an early traveller, William Wood, in New England. Another traveller, Peter Kalm. was told by the Quaker botanist John Bartram that a bear would kill a cow by biting its hide and blowing air into the wound until the cow burst. William Byrd 11, the famous Virginia planter, also had something to say about bears: they devoured their prey from the rump forward, “till they come to the Vitals, the poor Animals crying all the while for several Minutes together.” Plants also fascinated the colonists. One Carolina historian wrote of a tulip tree so large that a man moved his bed and household furniture inside it; another described the Jamestown weed, which some soldiers ate in a salad and. as a consequence, played the fool for 11 days. But the most famous paean |to a New World plant was (John Josselyn’s hymn to ’ tobacco. Remarking that it (“hath more slaves than | Mahomet,” he continued: “It I helps digestion, the gout, the toothache, prevents infection i by scents; it heats the cold, j and cools them that sweat feedeth the hungry, spent spirits restoreth. purgeth the stomach, killeth nits and lice; the juice of the green leaf I healeth green wounds, jalthough poisoned; the syrup (for many diseases, the smoke i for the phthisic, cough of the jlungs. distillations of rheum, land all diseases of a cold and I moist cause: good for all bodies cold and moist taken upon ian empty stomach; taken iupon a full stomach it precipitates digestion.” But Josselyn also warned against excesses. “Immoderately taken it drieth the body, infiametli the blood, hurteth the brain, weakens i the eyes and the sinews.”