Starship Asterisk*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squanto wrote:

1911 illustration of Tisquantum or Squanto teaching the Plymouth Colonists to plant maize.

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<<Tisquantum (better known as Squanto) (c. 1580s – November 1622) was a Patuxet. He was the Native American who assisted the Pilgrims after their first winter in the New World and was integral to their survival. The Patuxet tribe was a tributary of the Wampanoag Confederacy.

On his way back to the Patuxet in 1614 Tisquantum was kidnapped by Englishman Thomas Hunt. Hunt was one of John Smith's lieutenants. Hunt was planning to sell fish, corn and captured natives in Málaga, Spain. There Hunt attempted to sell Tisquantum and a number of other Native Americans into slavery in Spain for £20 apiece.

Some local friars discovered what Hunt was attempting and took the remaining Native Americans — Tisquantum included — in order to instruct them in the Christian faith. Tisquantum convinced the friars to let him try to return home. He managed to get to London, where he lived with and worked for a few years with John Slany, a shipbuilder who apparently taught Tisquantum more English. Slany took Tisquantum with him when he sailed to Cuper's Cove, Newfoundland.

At last in 1619 Tisquantum returned to his homeland, having joined an exploratory expedition along the New England coast. He soon discovered that the Patuxet, as well as a majority of coastal New England tribes (mostly Wampanoag and Massachusett), had been decimated the year before by an epidemic plague, possibly smallpox. Tisquantum settled with Pilgrims at the site of his former village, which the English named Plymouth. He helped them recover from an extremely hard first winter by teaching them techniques to increase food production by fertilizing crops. He also showed them the best places to catch fish and eels. He was critical to their survival.

In 1621 Tisquantum was the guide and translator for settlers Stephen Hopkins and Edward Winslow as they traveled upland on a diplomatic mission to the Wampanoag sachem, known today as Massasoit. In a subsequent mission for Governor William Bradford that summer, Tisquantum was captured by Wampanoag while gathering intelligence on the renegade sagamore, Corbitant, at the village of Nemasket (site of present-day Middleborough, Massachusetts.) Myles Standish led a ten-man team of settlers from Plymouth to rescue Tisquantum if he were alive or, if he had been killed, to avenge him. Tisquantum was found alive and well.

Although he worked at alliances, Tisquantum ended up distrusted by both the English and the Wampanoag. Massasoit, the sachem who first appointed Tisquantum as liaison to the Pilgrims, nevertheless did not trust him in the tribe's dealings with the settlers. He assigned Hobamok ("mischievous"), to watch over Tisquantum and act as a second representative. On his way back from a meeting to repair damaged relations between the Wampanoag and Pilgrims, Tisquantum became sick with a fever. Tisquantum died a few days later in 1622 in Chatham, Massachusetts. He was buried with an unmarked grave, possibly in Plymouth's cemetery Burial Hill. Governor William Bradford, in Bradford's History of the English Settlement, wrote regarding Tisquantum's death:

Here [Manamoick Bay] Squanto fell ill of Indian fever, bleeding much at the nose, which the Indians take as a symptom of death, and within a few days he died. He begged the Governor to pray for him, that he might go to the Englishman's God in heaven, and bequeathed several of his things to his English friends, as remembrances. His death was a great loss.>>

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=47250 wrote:

Corn crop in 2000

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<<The first harvest that the Pilgrims celebrated in Massachusetts likely included a healthy crop of corn. Weak and sick after a lean winter onboard the Mayflower, William Bradford wrote, "They (as many as were able) began to plant ther corne, in which servise Squanto stood them in great stead, showing them both the maner how to set it, and after how to dress and tend it... Some English seed they sew, as wheat and pease, but it came not to good, eather by the badnes of the seed, or latenes of the season, of both, or some other defecte." The corn harvest, Bradford wrote later, was plentiful. Thus, though corn is not specifically mentioned in descriptions of the 1621 celebration around which Thanksgiving lore is built, it was almost certainly a part of the feast.

Maize (corn) is native to the Americas, but it has become a staple around the world, as shown in this map of the corn crop in 2000. The map was made with statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, as well as local and national governments. The statistics say how much land produced a corn harvest in each country or state. These statistics were then mapped regionally based on a general crop map made from satellite observations by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat instruments. The map estimates how much corn was grown as a percentage of the satellite-observed crop. Areas in which most of the crop was corn, such as the midwestern United States, are dark green (a maize area near 100 percent). Places where corn was a less important crop are paler in color. Corn is clearly a significant crop on every continent (except Antarctica). In 2010, 819 million tons of corn were produced around the world, and the U.S. Midwest produced more than 300 million tons, reported the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Corn, wheat, and rice provide 60 percent of the world’s energy intake. Corn is food for livestock, a sweetener, a fuel, and a thickener used in a wide range of products.

This versatile crop came from wild grass, teosinte, that Native Americans domesticated in Mexico nearly 9,000 years ago. Corn is not the only American crop than has worked its way into global cuisine. Many of the foods you see on your Thanksgiving table had their beginnings in the Americas, including turkey, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, vanilla, and chocolate.>>

neufer wrote:boob caddy

owlice wrote:

neufer wrote:boob caddy

I'm pretty sure they are called something different at Victoria's Secret and Nordstrom; where have you been shopping?!