Page:What cheer, or, Roger Williams in banishment (1896).pdf/199



STANZA XIII.

In a vast eagles's form embodied, He Did o'er the deep on outstretehed pinions spring.

It was the belief of the Chippewas, a tribe supposed to have descended from the same original stock (Lenni Lenape) with the Narragansets, that, before the earth appeared, all was one vast body of waters; that the Great Spirit, assuming the shape of a mighty eagle, whose eyes were as fire, and the sound of whose wings was as thunder, passed over the abyss, and that, upon his touching the water, the earth rose from the deep. It was a prevailing tradition among the Delawares and other tribes, according to Heckewelder, that the earth was an island, supported on the back of a huge tortoise, called in the text Unamis. It is the object of the author to embrace in the text a selection of their scattered traditions on the subject of creation, and to give them something like the consistency of a system. Waban, therefore, adopting their leading ideas, has drawn out his description into the appropriate sequency of events. Their Creator was a Manittoo, a mysteriously operating power, and of the same nature as that principle of causation which they felt in themselves, as constituting their own being. The term Cowwewonck, in the Narraganset dialect, signified the soul, and was derived from Cowwene, to sleep; because, said they, it operates when the body sleeps. Hence in the text, whilst the Great Spirit slept, he is represented as commencing the work of creation—operating on the immense of waters as a part of his own being, and imparting to it organic existences, (as the soul from itself creates its own conceptions,) thus giving a sort of dreamy existence to the earth and all living things, ere He assumed the shape of the eagle, and at his fiat imparted to them substantial form and vital energy. The idea, that the earth was raised out of the Ocean, seems to have been pretty general amongst the Aborigines.