Note 279 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.

“Yea, I saw with mine owne eyes that at my late comming forth of the Countrey, the chiefe and most aged peaceable Father of the countrey, Caunoŭnicus, having buried his sonne, he burned his owne Palace, and all his goods in it, (amongst them to a great value) in a sollemne remembrance of his sonne, and in a kind of humble Expiation to the Gods, who, (as they believe) had taken his sonne from him.” (Williams’s Key, ch. xxxii.) In the same passage Williams says: “Upon the Grave is spread the Mat that the party died on, the Dish he ate in, and, sometimes, a faire Coat of skin hung upon the next tree to the Grave, which none will touch, but suffer it there to rot with the dead.” See also Young’s Chron. of Pilg., pp. 142, 143, 154, 363; Strachey’s Historie, p. 90.

“In times of general Mortality they omit the Ceremonies of burying, exposing their dead Carkases to the Beasts of prey. But at other times they dig a Pit and set the diseased therein upon his breech upright, and, throwing in the earth, cover it with the sods and bind them down with sticks, driving in two stakes at each end; their mournings are somewhat like the howlings of the Irish, seldom at the grave but in the Wigwam where the party dyed, blaming the Devil for his hard-heartedness, and concluding with rude prayers to him to afflict them no further.” (Josselyn, Two Voyages, p. 132.) There is a highly characteristic passage to the same effect in Wood’s Prospect, p. 79.