They have so much witchcraft, divination, sorcery, and wicked tricks that they can not be held in by any locks or bounds. They are as thievish and treacherous as they are tall, and in cruelty they are more inhuman than the people of Barbary and far exceed the Africans. 1 have written something concerning these things to several persons elsewhere, not doubting that Brother Crol will have written sufficient to your Bight Reverend, or to the Lords; as also of

ABORIGINAL

INHABITANTS

the base treachery and the murders which the Mohicans, at the upper part of this river, against Fort Orange, had committed. . . . I have as yet been able to discover hardly a good point, except that they do not speak so jeeringly and so scoffingly of the Godlike and glorious majesty of their Creator as the Africans dare to do; but it is because they have no certain knowledge of Him or scarcely any. If we speak to them of God it appears to them like a dream, and we are compelled to speak of Him not under the name of Manetto, whom they know and serve -- for that would be blasphemous-- but under that of some great person, yea of the chiefs Sackiema, by which name they -- living without a king -- call those who have command of many hundreds among them, In striking conand who, by our people, are called Saekemakers.7' trast with this stern but undoubtedly just view of the Indian, as a social individual, is the lofty and magnanimous tribute paid to his character in its broader aspect by Cadwallader Golden after more than a century of European occupation of the country and intercourse with him. In his " History of the Five Indian Nations," published in 1727, Golden says : " A poor, barbarous people, under the darkest ignorance, and yet a bright and noble genius shines through these dark clouds.