Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/137

 for we are told that when Smith visited the Emperor at Werowocomoco in 1608, in attempting to embark, his boat stuck in the mud a stone&#8217;s throw from the land and he was compelled to wait for the turn of the tide. It was a curious fact, which excited comment in after times, that in spite of the great extent of marshland in Virginia, the ignis fatuus was rarely observed.

As might have been expected of a country so interspersed with fresh water streams and with arms of the sea, aboriginal Virginia was found to teem with innumerable varieties of fish; it is reported that their abundance was so vast when the first colonists arrived, that the Indians were in the habit of killing them in the brooks and creeks with ordinary sticks. The colonists themselves asserted that in the spring when the migration from the ocean took place, the small streams were so full of fish as to render it hardly possible to ride a horse through the waters without treading on them, and the freshes of the river fairly stank in the breeding season with those that had died from exhaustion or starvation before they were able to return to the sea. The probability of this statement seems to be confirmed by the account given in the present century by members of the expeditions sent to explore the waters of the Columbia and its branches, the same phenomenon of the air tainted in the spring by the dead fish that had crowded into these streams to breed, being observed there. In their voyage of discovery in the Chesapeake, Smith and his companions found at different points schools of fish agitating the surface of the water, and so thickly did they swarm that the Englishmen were prompted to catch them simply by scooping them up in