From Out of the Past - Part IV

     For the next part of our historical sojourn we’re going to leave Delaware Bay for a while and travel northward to Maine to climb aboard Samuel de Champlain’s boat.  As you may recall from your high school history course, Samuel (1567-1635) was a French navigator, cartographer, draughtsman, soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnologist, diplomat, and chronicler.  He began exploring North America in 1603 and was the first European to explore and describe the Great Lakes; eventually publishing several maps of his journeys and accounts.  Champlain is frequently memorialized as the "Father of New France" and many places, streets, and structures in northeastern North America bear his name, or have monuments established in his memory.  The most notable of these is, of course, Lake Champlain, which straddles the border between the United States and Canada (Please don’t confuse this with Lake Champagne, which only appears once each year – usually around New Year’s Eve.).
            During those early years in the New World – specifically along the Maine coast – Champlain noted that the native peoples used horseshoe crabs to manure their corn crops.  One or more crabs would be placed into the ground in and around corn stalks.  Apparently, the natives had discovered that the addition of these sea creatures to their plantings significantly increased their yield of corn – one of the first documented cases of fertilizer.  What made this discovery even more fascinating was that the natives of this region also constructed a rudimentary hoe from the carapace of horseshoe crabs.  While we don’t know for certain, there is considerable speculation that these practices eventually worked their way down the Atlantic seaboard and were eventually embraced by native peoples in and around Delaware Bay.  It also seems logical that the “horseshoe crab as fertilizer = good corn crop” connection was eventually passed on to the early colonists who settled in this region.
NATIVE:        Hey, looks like you got a lousy corn crop this year.
COLONIST:    Yeah, what a bummer.  I just can’t get the damn plant to grow.
NATIVE:        Well, you could do what I do.
COLONIST:    What’s that?
NATIVE:        Plant a dead horseshoe crab beside each corn stalk.
COLONIST:    Say what?
NATIVE:        No, really.  Just take a dead horseshoe crab and put it in the ground next to each one of your corn plants.  By harvest time, your corn stalks will be touching the sky.
COLONIST:    You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?
NATIVE:        No way, man!  Believe me, it’s the only way to go.
COLONIST:    O.K., I’ll try it – but I still think you’re pulling a fast one on me.
NATIVE:        No way, José!  You’ll see; years from now schoolchildren all over this land will be making paper hats and donning black and white costumes and celebrating these days in song, skits, and all kinds of Thanksgiving pageants.  We’ll both be famous!