Champlain describes the wigwams or native huts as being cone-shaped, heavily thatched with reeds, with an opening at the top of the roof for the smoke to escape.  Inside the huts was a low bed raised a foot from the ground and made of short posts driven into the ground, with a surface made of boards split from trees.  On these boards were laid either the dressed skins of deer or bear, or thick mattresses made of reeds or rushes.  The beds were large enough for several people to lie on.  Champlain describes the huts as being full of fleas, and likewise the persons of the nearly naked Indians, who carried these fleas out with them into the fields when they were working, so that the Frenchmen by stopping to talk to the natives became covered with fleas to such an extent that they were obliged to change their clothes.

In the fields were cultivated not only maize, but beans similar to the beans grown by the natives of Brazil, vegetable marrows or pumpkins, Jerusalem artichokes[15], radishes, and tobacco.  The woods were filled with oaks, walnut trees[16], and the red “cedar” of North America, really a very large juniper, the foliage of which in the summertime often assumes a reddish colour, together with the trunk.  This Virginian juniper or “red cedar” is now quite a common tree in England.  In warm weather it exhales a delicious aromatic scent.

[Footnote 15:  This tuber, which is a well-known and very useful vegetable in England, comes from the root of a species of sunflower (Helianthus tuberosus).  It has nothing to do with the real artichoke, which is a huge and gorgeous thistle, and it has equally nothing to do with Jerusalem.  The English people have always taken a special delight in mispronouncing and corrupting words in order to produce as much confusion as possible in their names for things.  Jerusalem is a corruption of Girasole, which is the Italian name given to this sunflower with the edible roots, because its flower is supposed always to turn towards the sun.  The Jerusalem artichoke was originally a native of North America.]

[Footnote 16:  These walnut trees were afterwards known in modern American speech as hickories, butter-nuts, and pig-nuts, all of which are allied to, but distinct from, the European walnut.]

All these natives of the Massachusetts coast were described by Champlain as being almost naked in the summertime, wearing at most a small piece of leather round the waist, and a short robe of spun hemp which hung down over the shoulders.  Their faces were painted red, black and yellow.  The men pulled out any hairs which might come on the chin, and thus were beardless.  They were armed with pikes, clubs, bows, and arrows.  The pikes were probably made of wood with the ends hardened by being burnt to a point in the fire, and the arrow tips were made of the sharp termination of the tail of the great king-crab[17].

[Footnote 17:  Limulus polyphemus.  This extraordinary crustacean is one of the oldest of living animals in its history, as it is closely related to the Xiphosura and even the Trilobites of the Primary Epoch, which existed millions of years ago.  In a rough way it is a kind of connecting link between the Crustacea, or crabs and lobsters, and the Scorpions and spiders.]