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Long after my return to Europe, I found in the Description of the East Indies by Laet, a Dutch traveller, a passage that seems to have some relation to the cow-tree. "There exist trees," says Laet,* "in the province of Cumana, the sap of which much resembles curdled milk, and affords a salubrious nourishment."
Laët easily shewed that Grotius's conjectures were ill founded, and that he had even advanced several facts which were not strictly true: he denied the existence of the city of Norembega, and maintained that Jucatan is too distant from Africa for the Ethiopians to penetrate into America, it being at least two months sail from Ethiopia to Jucatan.
Laet calls the tree totocke, and mentions the drupe of the size of the human head, which contains the almonds. The weight of these fruits, he says, is so enormous, that the savages dare not enter the forests without covering their heads and shoulders with a buckler of very hard wood.
William Grotius was no doubt astonished at his brother's vivacity, and probably gave him some check for it; for Grotius afterwards writes to him, "What I wrote to you, relating to my son and Blondius, I did it not because I approved of such things, but because that or something worse might happen." M. Huet is mistaken: it was not Rivetus whom Grotius meant by this verse of Catullus, but Laet.
Laët's answer vexed Grotius: he replied to it in a second Dissertation, entitled, Adversus obtrectatorem, opaca quem bonum facit barba. Printed at Paris by Cramoisi, in 1643. Laët answered in a piece, printed in 1644, by Lewis Elzevir, in which he inserts Grotius's second Dissertation.
Any one who has hammered at a Bertholletia fruit will be ready to believe the story that the Indians, fond as they are of the nuts, avoid the 'totocke' trees till the fruit has all fallen, for fear of fractured skulls; and the older story which Humboldt gives out of old Laet, that the Indians dared not enter the forests, when the trees were fruiting, without having their heads and shoulders covered with bucklers of hard wood.
Wassenaer speaks of the river as "called first Rio de Montagnes, now the River Mauritius." De Laet, in Nieuwe Wereldt , gives "Manhattes River" and "Rio de Montaigne," but says that "the Great River" is the usual designation. In his Latin version of 1633, and French of 1640, he adds a mention of the name Nassau River. As Dr.
In the following year, 1608, he penetrated down the Susquehanna to the mouth of it, where he met six or seven of their canoes, filled with warriors, about to attack their enemy in the rear. De Laet, in 1632, in his enumeration of the different tribes, on either side of the Delaware river, mentions the Shawanoes.
Nor shall I more than barely mention that Father Kircher ascribes the settlement of America to the Egyptians, Budbeck to the Scandinavians, Charron to the Gauls, Juffredus Petri to a skating party from Friesland, Milius to the Celtæ, Marinocus the Sicilian to the Romans, Le Comte to the Phoenicians, Postel to the Moors, Martin d'Angleria to the Abyssinians, together with the sage surmise of De Laet, that England, Ireland, and the Orcades may contend for that honor.
Benzoni* relates the adventure of one Luigi Lampagnano, to whom Charles the Fifth granted the privilege of proceeding with five caravels to the coasts of Cumana to fish for pearls. Laet Nova Orbis page 669. The pearl-bearing oyster is of a more delicate nature than most of the other acephalous mollusca.
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