TouchingTradewith Indians.
If you barely designe a Home-trade with neighbour-Indians, for skins of Deer, Beaver, Otter, Wild-Cat, Fox, Racoon, &c. your best Truck is a sort of course Trading Cloth, of which a yard and a half makes a Matchcoat or Mantle fit for their wear; as also Axes, Hoes, Knives, Sizars, and all sorts of edg’d tools. Guns, Powder and Shot,&c.are Commodities they will greedily barter for: but to supply the Indians with Arms and Ammunition, is prohibited in all English Governments.
In dealing with the Indians, you must be positive and at a word: for if they perswade you to fall any thing in your price, they will spend time in higgling for further abatements, and seldom conclude any Bargain. Sometimes youmay with Brandy or Strong liquor dispose them to an humour of giving you ten times the value of your commodity; and at other times they are so hide-bound, that they will not offer half the Market-price, especially if they be aware that you have a designe to circumvent them with drink, or that they think you have a desire to their goods; which you must seem to slight and disparage.
To the remoter Indians you must carry other kinde of Truck, as small Looking-glasses, Pictures, Beads and Bracelets of glass, Knives, Sizars, and all manner of gaudy toys and knacks for children, which are light and portable. For they are apt to admire such trinkets, and will purchase them at any rate, either with their currant Coyn of small shells, which they callRoanoackorPeack, or perhaps with Pearl, Vermilion, pieces of Christal; and towardsUshery, with some odde pieces of Plate or Buillon, which they sometimes receive in Truck from theOestacks.
Could I have foreseen when I set out, the advantages to be made by a Trade with those remote Indians, I had gone better provided; though perhaps I might have run a great hazard of my life, had I purchased considerably amongst them, by carrying wealth unguarded through so many different Nations of barbarous people: therefore it is vain for any man to propose to himself, or undertake a Trade at that distance, unless he goes with strength to defend, as well as an Adventure to purchase such Commodities: for in such a designe many ought to joyn and go in company.
Some pieces of Silver unwrought I purchased my self of theUsheries, for no other end then to justifie this account I give of my Second Expedition, which had not determined atUshery, were I accompanied with half a score resolute youths that would have stuck to me in a further discovery towards the Spanish Mines.
FINIS.