Flint corn (multicoloured corn)

To the English of 1620 “corn” meant any grain: wheat, rye, barley, oats, even peas. Plimoth Patuxet Museums says the colonists called the Wampanoag weatchimim “turkey wheat”, “flint corn” or “Indian corn” to tell it apart from their own “corns”, which did not grow as well in New England soils. Europeans also said “turkey corn”, according to the food historian Andrew F. Smith (NPR), because they put “turkey” on many foreign things. The name is in the first accounts. William Bradford, writing of the autumn of 1621, says the colonists had “about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion”, and William Hilton, who arrived on the Fortune that November, wrote home that “Better grain cannot be than the Indian corn”.

The colonists’ first seed corn was not given to them. Plimoth Patuxet says the English got it “by taking from a cache in a Native storage pit” during their first explorations of Cape Cod. Wamsutta Frank James, an Aquinnah Wampanoag, put it more bluntly in the speech he wrote in 1970 for the 350th anniversary of the landing, which the organisers told him was too inflammatory: “The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans.”

In the spring of 1621 Tisquantum, known to the English as Squanto, showed the colonists how to plant corn and fertilise the soil with herring, and Plimoth Patuxet thinks it likely that Wampanoag women, who did the planting in their own communities, helped. The English planted twenty acres of Native corn and six of barley and peas; the peas withered. The harvest celebration that autumn followed what the museum calls “a successful harvest of the multi-colored flint corn”.