A curious addition to the story was told the early Swedish settlers on the river Delaware by the Algonkin tribe which inhabited its shores.  These related that their various arts of domestic life and the chase were taught them long ago by a venerable and eloquent man who came to them from a distance, and having instructed them in what was desirable for them to know, he departed, not to another region or by the natural course of death, but by ascending into the sky.  They added that this ancient and beneficent teacher wore a long beard.[1] We might suspect that this last trait was thought of after the bearded Europeans had been seen, did it not occur so often in myths elsewhere on the continent, and in relics of art finished long before the discovery, that another explanation must be found for it.  What this is I shall discuss when I come to speak of the more Southern myths, whose heroes were often “white and bearded men from the East.”

[Footnote 1:  Thomas Campanius (Holm), Description of the Province of New Sweden, book iii, ch. xi.  Campanius does not give the name of the hero-god, but there can be no doubt that it was the “Great Hare.”]

Sec.2. The Iroquois Myth of Ioskeha.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The sources from which I draw the elements of the Iroquois hero-myth of Ioskeha are mainly the following:  Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, 1640, 1671, etc.  Sagard, Histoire du Canada, pp. 451, 452 (Paris, 1636); David Cusick, Ancient History of the Six Nations, and manuscript material kindly furnished me by Horatio Hale, Esq., who has made a thorough study of the Iroquois history and dialects.]

The most ancient myth of the Iroquois represents this earth as covered with water, in which dwelt aquatic animals and monsters of the deep.  Far above it were the heavens, peopled by supernatural beings.  At a certain time one of these, a woman, by name Ataensic, threw herself through a rift in the sky and fell toward the earth.  What led her to this act was variously recorded.  Some said that it was to recover her dog which had fallen through while chasing a bear.  Others related that those who dwelt in the world above lived off the fruit of a certain tree; that the husband of Ataensic, being sick, dreamed that to restore him this tree must be cut down; and that when Ataensic dealt it a blow with her stone axe, the tree suddenly sank through the floor of the sky, and she precipitated herself after it.

However the event occurred, she fell from heaven down to the primeval waters.  There a turtle offered her his broad back as a resting-place until, from a little mud which was brought her, either by a frog, a beaver or some other animal, she, by magic power, formed dry land on which to reside.