The flocks of wild pigeons were at times so vast that they darkened the sky as they pursued their way on the wing, or broke down the limbs of the trees upon which they lighted in passing. Hamor asserted that their number surpassed the power of imagination to conceive, and that it frequently required three or four hours for the mighty cloud of these birds to pass a single point, although the rate of speed maintained by them was enormous.[1] The account of these phenomenal numbers was received in England with incredulity, but the testimony was confirmed by so many witnesses, that no doubt could remain as to its correctness. Similar flights of pigeons have been observed in more recent times, and in proportions leading to the belief that the witnesses of the seventeenth century undercalculated rather than overcalculated the number seen; in the period when Hamor recorded what he had followed with his own eyes, the wild pigeons had been propagating for countless ages without being diminished by those agencies which civilized man has in later times successfully brought tobear for their wholesale destruction.[2]
- ↑ Ralph Hamor’s True Discourse, p. 21.
- ↑ Strachey speaks of the flights of pigeons as resembling “thickned clowdes.” See Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 126. Devries describes as follows what he observed in 1633: “In April, while we were lying in the South Bay (Delaware), there came in hundreds of thousands of wild pigeons, flying from the land over the bay. Indeed, the light could hardly be discerned where they were. Sometimes they flew upon the ship pressed down by numbers as they came over the bay.” Devries’ Voyages from Holland to America, p. 55. One of the three great natural phenomena, that foreshadowed in the popular superstition the uprising of Bacon and his followers, was flight after flight of pigeons, “in breadth nigh a quarter of the mid-hemisphere; of their length was no visible end.” The same prodigy had been seen in 1640, just before the massacre of the settlers by the Indians took place. T. M.’s Account of Bacon’s Rebellion, p. 1, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. I.
