Note 196 — {41} Fifthly, Of Plants.

“They take their wuttammauog,—that is, a weak tobacco,—which the men plant themselves, very frequently. Yet I never see any take so excessively as I have seen men in Europe; and yet excess were more tolerable in them, because they want the refreshing of beer and wine, which God had vouchsafed Europe.”—R. Williams, Key, l. c., p. 213. And, in another place, the same writer says that tobacco is “commonly the only plant which men labour in” (he is speaking of the Indians); “the women managing all the rest” (p. 208). Wood, in his list of Indian words (New-Eng. Prospect, ad ult.), spells the Indian word, above given, ottommaocke,—(perhaps both are comparable with “wuttahimneash, strawberries” Williams, l. c., p. 220), and “weetimoquat, it smells sweet” (Vocab. of Narraganset Lang., in Hist. Coll., vol. v. p. 82); og, ock, and ash, being all plural terminations; between which and “the noun in the singular one or more consonants or vowels are frequently interspersed” (ibid., vol. iii. p. 222, note); and oquat, from the context, the verbal; and the root appearing possibly the same,—and also defines it as tobacco. There is much other testimony that the New-England savages were found using “tobacco” (as Mourt’s Relation, l. c., p. 230; and Winslow’s Relation, l. c., p. 253); but our author’s text, above, appears to distinguish the true herb, “not much planted,” from “a small kind called pooke,” which “the Indians make use of.” And again, more clearly, in his Voyages, we have to the same effect: “the Indians in New England use a small, round-leafed tobacco, called by them or the fishermen poke. It is odious to the English.... Of marchantable ... tobacco, ... there is little of it planted in New England; neither have they” (both clauses appear to refer to the English) “learned the right way of curing of it.” This “marchantable tobacco” was no doubt mainly Nicotiana tabacum, L.; but the other kind, the weak tobacco,—cultivated, as Williams tells us, by the Indians, and recognized as tobacco by the English,—was not, as Wood says (N. E. Prospect, l. c.), colt’s-foot, but Nicotiana rustica, L. (the yellow henbane of Gerard’s Herbal, p. 356), well known to have been long in cultivation among the American savages, and now a naturalized relic of that cultivation in various parts of the United States. The name, poke, or pooke,—if it be, as is supposable, the same with “puck, smoke,” of the Narraganset vocabulary of R. Williams (Hist. Coll., vol. v. p. 84),—was perhaps always indefinite, and, since Cutler’s day, has been applied in New England to the green hellebore (Veratrum viride, Ait.); but this was not, it is evident, the poke of the first settlers. The name is also given to Phytolacca decandra, L. (the skoke of Cutler), and the hellebore apparently distinguished from this as Indian poke; but the application of the name to the former, at least, probably had its origin among the whites.