Individual as well as national
obligations were similarly satisfied. Like the early German, the Indian
set a marketable value on human life, and a suitable present of wampum
on the part of the murderer, if accepted, freed him from the vengeance
of the dead man's friends, for the wampum belt washed away all traces of
the bloody stain.[24] Perhaps desire for another's wampum sometimes
prompted him to such foul deeds, as it did the white man,[25] though
happily the Indian seldom stooped to theft.

Thus in the rude civilization of the aborigine wampum filled a space
accorded to no one article in our own. Through life it faithfully met
all his varied wants, and when he came to die, his friends placed it
about his dead body,[26] that it might befriend him on his journey to
the spirit land, and on his arrival there gain for him admission to the
realms of the god Kiehtan, the abode of the blessed.

The shrewd commercial instinct of the Dutch colonists was quick to
profit by wampum in their dealings with the aborigines. Happily its most
extensive producers dwelt at their very doors. They obtained from the
Long Island tribes in return for knives, scissors, hatchets and the
like, great quantities of this novel coinage, and then exchanged it with
the Indians of the mainland for hides and furs, often plunging far into
the interior and drawing thence products which gold could never have won
from their possessors. Did common trifles fail, wampum was the unfailing
reserve whose charms the savage was powerless to resist. With such an
adjutant trade became doubly flourishing and lucrative. Posts sprang up
along the Hudson, in the valley of the Connecticut and as far south as
the Schuylkill, through all of which ceaseless revenues poured into the
coffers of the Dutch West India Company. Connecticut, alone, annually
furnished to her traders ten thousand beaver skins.[27] In all this
traffic wampum played a leading part, so much so in fact that fur trade
and wampum trade became synonymous terms.

Toward the close of September, 1627, Isaac de Rasieres was dispatched
from New Amsterdam on an embassy to the English colony at New Plymouth.
Being of a trading turn, he carried with him in his vessel among other
merchandise about L50 in wampum which he managed to dispose of
there.[28] Wampum was as yet comparatively unknown in Massachusetts Bay,
and the colonists were ignorant of its uses. This purchase made with
great reluctance, they sent to t