Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/225

 Indian corn was much better adapted to the fertile loam of the newly cleared land than the imported seeds of English wheat. The grain could also be more easily and conveniently ground, and the meal was convertible into more forms of bread. Doubtless by this time those qualities which made it more nourishing than flour to men engaged in arduous labor had been observed. Smith had been exposing himself to serious peril in his efforts to obtain a large quantity of the native grain. This source of supply was necessarily an uncertain one. In the spring of 1608 two Indians fell into his hands, and he determined to make use of their knowledge of the proper manner of cultivating maize; he ordered that forty acres should be carefully broken up, and that in the different plats of these forty acres the grain of the country should be planted in strict conformity to the Indian rule; that is, in squares, and with an interval of four feet between the holes receiving the seeds. The entire operation was performed with the assistance and under the immediate superintendence of the Indian prisoners, who thus enjoyed the honor of being the first of their race to instruct for an immediate practical purpose the Englishmen at Jamestown in the art of cultivating a crop which was to enter so deeply into the economic life of the modern communities of North America. The yield of the forty acres, the first maize produced in any quantity in the boundaries of the United States by people of English blood of which we have any authentic record, was of as small importance as a single sand upon the shores of the sea, in comparison with the many thousand millions of bushels