then taken out without any attempt to remove the fins, scales, or
entrails, and the whole of the boiled fish was pounded up and put back
into the porridge. Sometimes a great birch-bark "kettle" would be
filled with water, fish, and meat, and red-hot stones be dropped in
till it boiled. Then with a spoon they would collect from the surface
the fat and oil arising from the fish or meat. This they afterwards
mixed with the meal of roasted Indian corn, stirring it with this fat
till they had made a thick soup. Sometimes, however, they were content
to eat the young corn-cobs freshly roasted, which as a matter of fact
(with a little salt) is one of the most delicious things in the world.
Or they would take ears of Indian corn and bury them in wet mud,
leaving them thus for two or three months; then the cobs would be
removed and the rotted grain eaten with meat and fish, though it was
all muddy and smelt horribly. Cartier also noticed that these Huron
Indians had melons and pumpkins, and described their wampum or shell
money.[7]

[Footnote 7: Cartier, in Hakluyt's translation, is made to say (I
modernize the spelling): "They dig their grounds with certain pieces
of wood as big as half a sword, on which ground groweth their corn,
which they call 'offici'; it is as big as our small peason.... They
have also great store of musk melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers,
peas, and beans of every colour, yet differing from ours."

Wampum, or shell money (which recalls the shell money of the Pacific
Islands), consisted either of beads made from the interior parts of
sea shells or land shells, or of strings of perforated sea shells. The
most elaborate kind of wampum was that of the Amerindians of Canada
and the eastern United States, the shell beads of which were generally
white. The commoner wampum beads were black and violet. Wampum belts