ows: they fill a pipe of tobacco, larger and bigger than any
common pipe, light it, and then the chief of them takes a whiff, gives it
to the stranger, and if he smoke of it, it is peace; if not, war; if
peace, the pipe is handed all round the company.

The diseases of the Indians are very few, and easy to be cured: they for
the most part arise from excessive heats and colds, which they get rid of
by sweating. As for aches, and settled pains in the joints or limbs,
they use caustics and scarifying. The priests are their physicians, and
from their childhood are taught the nature and use of simples, in which
their knowledge is excellent; but they will not communicate it,
pretending it is a gift of God; and by this mystery they make it the more
valuable.

Their riches consist of furs, peak, roenocke, and pearl. Their peak and
roenocke are made of shells; the peak is an English bugle, but the
roenocke is a piece of cockle, drilled through like a bead. Before the
English came among them, the peak and the roenocke were all their
treasure; but now they set a value on their fur and pearl, and are greedy
of keeping quantities of them together. The pearl is good, and formerly
was not so rare as it is at this time.

They had no iron tools till the English brought them over: their knives
were sharpened reeds or shells, their axes sharp stones. They rubbed
fire, by turning the end of a hard piece of wood upon the side of one
that is soft and dry, which at last would burn. They felled great trees
by burning them down at the root, having ways of keeping the fire from
ascending. They hollowed them with a gentle fire, and scraped the trunk
clean, and this made their canoes, of which some were thirty feet long.
They are very good handicraft men, and what they do is generally neat and
convenient.

Their kingdoms descended to the next heir, male or female, and they were
exact in preserving the succession in the right line. If, as it often
happened, one great prince subjected the other, those conquests commonly
were lost at his death, and the nation returned again to the obedience of
their natural princes. They have no written laws, neither can they have
any, having no letters.

Their lands are in common, and their Werowances, or judges, are all
lord-chancellors, deciding causes and inflicting punishments according as
they think fit. These Werowances and the Coucarouses are their terms to
distinguish the men of quality; the