Re: Talk about "Chewed".....
No.
Spanish sailors had stocked Bermuda with pigs back in 1515, expecting them to proliferate and supply fresh meat for subsequent transatlantic voyagers. The English happened upon this isolated larder by chance. In the summer of 1609, the Sea Venture, part of a relief fleet bringing provisions to starving Virginia colonists, was blown off course by a hurricane and ended up snagged in the treacherous shoals off Bermuda. When the 150 men, women, and children on board made it to shore, they were relieved to discover an abundance of hogs, creatures they had known in England, as well as strange fish and exotic plants they might also use for food. Admiral George Somers organized hunting parties that rounded up dozens of hogs at a time to feed passengers and crew while they constructed two new boats to carry them to Virginia. Somers eventually returned once more to Bermuda to collect pigs for Jamestown's settlers, but he succumbed to illness on the island before he could complete his mission.
The hogs that fed English settlers and appeared on Bermuda's coins bore little resemblance to the pigs that wandered around seventeenth-century English barnyards, let alone those that can be found on a modern farm. The animal depicted on the money has relatively long legs, a ridge of fur along the spine, and tusks that suggest a ferocious manner. It is clearly a feral hog, displaying morphological changes that resulted from generations of free ranging and indiscriminate breeding. Wild swine were also leaner than their domesticated counterparts-"so leane," one early visitor to Bermuda complained, that "wee could not eat them." This disparaging opinion was hardly shared by hundreds of other colonists who eagerIy converted the pigs into "flitches of Bacon" which they judged "very good."3
English colonists may have been pleased, but not particularly surprised, to discover that hogs thrived on the tiny island. Settlers who reached the mainland never doubted that livestock of all sorts would adapt to an American environment that, with its natural meadows and woodlands, seemed ideal for the beasts. Colonists likewise anticipated little trouble raising livestock in the New World much as they had in England. But it turned out that animals transferred more easily than animal husbandry. Confronted with a shortage of labor relative to the supply of land and to the amount of work that needed to be done in establishing new settlements, colonists from New England to the Chesapeake could not supervise their livestock anywhere nearly as thoroughly as English farmers did. Every available hand was required to clear fields, grow food, and build houses, roads, fences, and other necessities. As a result, livestock were left on their own for all or at least a good part of the year. Inevitably, this lackadaisical husbandry permitted some creatures to escape human control altogether and become wild.4
So far as the colonists were concerned, however, livestock that went wild did not cease to be English. Neither did they cease to be considered property-a category into which English settlers reflexively placed all livestock species. Yet identifying specific owners for feral livestock, a necessary task if the animals were indeed property, became a vexed issue, especially in places where the animals proliferated. This turned out to be the case in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where abundant food and a warm climate generated a substantial population of wild hogs and cattle. Colonists could not bringthemselves to regard feral livestock as free for the taking, like deer or other indigenous animals, because this amounted to a denial of their status as property. Lacking a clear alternative, colonists decided that the beasts belonged to the Crown, much as unclaimed strays in England did.
HH!!
