Wow, I’ll tell you folks what… I was seriously considering pulling the plug on the Audio-Version of Practical Woodsman podcast because the last time I took a gander at the ratings, they were low, and the downloads weren’t great. (Plus, I have to pay a platform monthly to publish them.) But I ran over to check out the current rating, and you folks have really come through. You’ve all popped it up to a 4.0, which is about where I need it to be to maintain my enthusiasm. So thank you one and all who have contributed to this raised score - I really, really appreciate it, and I’ll keep coming up with practical stuff to talk about every couple of weeks involving love of the woods for the foreseeable future.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
