Someone else's words

I don’t seem to have time to write my own thoughts here, so we’ll use everybody’s favorite substitute, someone else’s thoughts:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open the book to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the next few sentences in your journal.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

How did they survive?

In his history of Plymouth colony, Governor Bradford himself provides one answer: robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower hove to first at Cape Cod. An Armed company of Pilgrims staggered out. Eventually they found a deserted Indian habitation The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug open burial sites and ransacked homes, looking for underground stashes of food. After two days of nervous work the company hauled ten bushels of maize back to the Mayflower, carrying much of the booty in a big metal kettle the men had also stolen. “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn,” Winslow wrote, “for else we know not how we should have done.”

– 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (11th ed, paperback), Charles C. Mann.

(Concept via)