It was a village or town of bark, on
the top of a hill. They had burned it a week before. We found nothing
in it but the graveyard and the graves, full of snakes and other
creatures; a great mask, with teeth and eyes of brass, and a bearskin
drawn over it, with which they performed their conjurations."
[Footnote: Belmont. A few words are added from Saint-Vallier.] The
fire had also spared a number of huge receptacles of bark, still
filled with the last season's corn; while the fields around were
covered with the growing crop, ripening in the July sun. There were
hogs, too, in great number; for the Iroquois did not share the
antipathy with which Indians are apt to regard that unsavory animal,
and from which certain philosophers have argued their descent from the
Jews.
The soldiers killed the hogs, burned the old corn, and hacked down the
new with their swords. Next they advanced to an abandoned Seneca fort
on a hill half a league distant, and burned it, with all that it
contained. Ten days were passed in the work of havoc. Three
neighboring villages were levelled, and all their fields laid waste.
The amount of corn destroyed was prodigious. Denonville reckons it at
the absurdly exaggerated amount of twelve hundred thousand bushels.
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