Writing North America in the Seventeenth Century by Catherine Armstrong

Author:Catherine Armstrong [Armstrong, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351870795
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

Animals as Food

Authors used several methods in attempting to catalogue the animals in North America and present them to an English reading public. One was to define them in terms of their danger to man and his domestic animals, either by emphasizing or denying the threat. However, far more common was the method employed by William Wood and Thomas Morton of commodifying the animals themselves, reducing them to mere products for man’s use or entertainment. When William Wood wrote his promotional tract describing the ‘state of that countrie’ of New England, settlers had only been resident in Massachusetts for five years and yet in four chapters Wood catalogued a huge number of animals, birds and fish that had already been used, or had the potential for use, by the settlers. Moose hides could be used to make clothing, or the animals could be kept for domestic labour; deer might be caught for sport or food; racoons made ‘as good meate as a lambe’ and for those unaware of what a racoon was, Wood helpfully advised that there was one to be seen in the Tower of London menagerie. Wood was most fascinated by the beaver, describing its behaviour and dams in great detail. He acknowledged the great wisdom of the beaver in always eluding the English who had to rely on native trappers to provide their valuable pelts.33 Thomas Morton categorized each animal according to its usefulness to man, including numerous species of bird, each of which was ascribed a quality of flavour. The turkeys were said to be ‘by many degrees sweeter than the tame Turkeis of England’ while swans were useful both for food and decoration, an idea that may have been influenced by seeing natives ceremonially wearing birds’ feathers. However, Morton also encountered one animal that he confessed was of no use whatsoever, the porcupine. ‘This country hath many porcupines, but I doe not finde the beast anyway usefull or hurtfull’, he wrote.34

While writers stressed the abundance and potential of animal wildlife for food, it is clear that in the early years, there were many times when the settlers went very hungry. Meat was in short supply and they were sometimes driven during times of great hunger to eat food not normally considered edible. Between 1607 and 1609, the ‘starving time’ in Virginia, settlers resorted to eating horses, dogs, rats and snakes, as well as shoe leather and even human corpses.35 Many of the accounts of these difficult times followed the tropes of previous descriptions of famine in France and Ireland.36 In 1609, Gabriel Archer confirmed the desperate conditions in his letter to Samuel Purchas, in which he said that he lived on nothing but oysters (ironically usually a luxury food) for eight weeks.37 In England during the same period, William Symonds, a preacher in the employ of the Virginia Company, was telling audiences in London that with ‘the plenty of fish and fowle our mistress cannot compare’, meaning that the variety and number of animals available for food in Virginia far surpassed those in England.

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