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Interesting book - Changes In The Land
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That's a good read. Interestingly, when Verrazzano stayed in Narragansett Bsy for two weeks in 1524, he sent land exploration parties into the interior and described cleared land, not the dense forest we might assume to have been the case:
"We frequently went five to six leagues into the interior, and found it as pleasant as I can possibly describe, and suitable for every kind of cultivation grain, wine, or oil. For there the fields extend for XXV to XXX leagues; they are open and free of any obstacles or trees, and so fertile that any kind of seed would produce excellent crops. . . ."
I've seen the league as a unit of distance as being about 3 miles, so those would indeed be very large tracts of cleared land, seemingly impossibly large by the above description. They did practice slash and burn agriculture.
Rhode Island
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