bellowing of a bull, which has given it its name. Hardly less strange was the cry of the tree frog, which the early colonists found it as difficult to place as their descendants in the present age. There is no evidence that rattlesnakes were discovered in the country adjacent to Jamestown by the adventurers of 1607, although Clayton saw them there towards the end of the century. They were probably as numerous in the forests extending to the southwest on the opposite shore of the Powhatan as they were an hundred and twenty years later, when Colonel William Byrd was compelled to defer until autumn, on one occasion, the survey in running the boundary line, owing to the constant danger to which their presence exposed his men. Other varieties of snakes were common, such as the puff adder, the moccasin, the corn, the black, the water, and the horn.[1]
- ↑ Clayton’s Virginia, pp. 38, 43, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. III. Clayton states that during his visit to the Colony he killed four or five rattlesnakes, each of which had eleven, twelve, or thirteen joints. This was in 1688. The “Declaration of the Assembly,” passed in 1651, in opposition to the first Navigation Act, refers incidentally to “our rattlesnakes.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. I, p. 80. The only references to snakes which I find in the records written in the time of the Company are, first, in a letter from Sir George Somers to Salisbury, in 1610: “‘they (the Colonists at Jamestown in the Starving Time) had eaten all the quick things that weare there, and some of them had eaten snakes or adders” (State Papers, Colonial, James I, vol. I, No. 21; Brown’s Genesis of the United States, p. 401); secondly, in the “Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia during the first Twelve Years”: “Famine compelled us (that is, the English in the Starving Time) wholly to devoure those hogges, dogges and horses that weare then in the Collony, together with rats, mice, snakes, etc.” (British State Paper Office, Colonial, vol. III, No. 21, I; Colonial Records of Virginia, State Senate Doct., Extra, 1874, p. 71); thirdly, Captain Smith states in his account of the animals, etc., of the country, that the colonists had no reason to think “that either the flyes or serpents were anie waie pernitious,” from which it is to be inferred that the rattlesnake and moccasin were not observed until a later period, or, if observed
