Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/182

 the area of land under cultivation. Dale, writing to Salisbury only four years after the foundation of the Colony, mentions incidentally, that in the stretch of country lying between Point Comfort and the Falls there was a spacious and fruitful soil, and that at all points, both upon the one and the other shore, grain grew in abundance. The Indians of Kecoughtan, who were pronounced by Strachey to be admirable husbandmen, had, when they were first visited, as many as three thousand acres of cleared land, a large part of which was planted in maize. In the excursion which the voyagers made, a few days after their arrival in the Chesapeake, to Rappahannock, situated not far from Kecoughtan, they had to pass through a series of the most luxuriant maizefields before they could reach the village. Captain Smith, in his expedition up the Chickahominy River, discovered the greatest area of cultivated ground that he had seen in Virginia, on a peninsula to which the Indians had given the name of Moysonicke. Very extensive fields of maize were also found by him on the Nansemond. In the first voyage to the Falls of the Powhatan, special note was made of the plain stretching from the palace of the werowance to the banks of the river, and planted for the greater part in maize. The queen of Appomattox, who resided near the stream of that name, also had many fields in the same grain, one of these fields, in which vegetables and tobacco were also planted, spreading over an area of one hundred acres, and a field covering an equal area was also observed at Opechancanough&#8217;s