RE: another question

[Niven Sinclair <niven@niven.co.uk>]

At 17:04 31/05/00 +1200, you wrote:

changes in climate?

> ----------
> From:         Spirit One Email[SMTP:laurel@spiritone.com]
> Reply To:     sinclair@matrix.net
> Sent:         Wednesday, 31 May 2000 11:31
> To:   Sinclair Discussion
> Subject:      another question
>
> Is the  "corn" that is mentioned in the story about Donald the Sailor
> really
> maize or is it probably another grain like oats or millet?   I would be
> surprised that there were a variet of corn in 1760 that could produce very
> well that far north.
> Laurel
>

        

        

        

        

        

        

CORN

From "Beyond Any Shadow of Doubt" by Niven
Sinclair

Long before Europeans ever sailed to the New World, Maize or corn was
being grown over a vast area 
stretching from Chile in the South, through Brazil and north to Southern
Canada.  It helped to sustain
the Aztec, Maya and Inca civilisations.  Native North Americans
cultivated  it with beans (thus feeding
the roots of the maize with nitrates) and squash.  Together these
three plants fulfilled all their nutritional
needs.

Nothing from the plant (maize) was wasted. It provided paper and fibres,
bedding, fuel and fabric.  It also
provided alcoholic.  (In Africa, where maize was introduced, the
baboons fill their chowks with maize cobs
which they deposit in any convenient water-logged bole of a tree where it
quickly fermented.  The baboons
got gloriously drunk from this highly nutritional brew). 

Pollen from maize-like plants has been found and identified as being more
than 60,000 years old.  Small
cobs have ben found in Mexico that are 7,000 years old and the evidence
shows that different kinds of corn
were clearly definable by the time Europeans reached America - indeed the
survival of those early Europeans
has been attributed to the corn offered by the native peoples which,
eventually, allowed them to cultivate corn
for themselves.

They celebrated this abundant harvest with "Thankgiving" which
is still a major American festival to this day.

Today, the diversity of maize, in all its hybrid forms, tastes and
colours, allows it to be grown around the World.
It also finds itself at the forefront of most arguments on GM 
foods.

Six hundred years ago, Henry Sinclair,  realising the importance of
'maize', returned to Scotland with samples of 
this versatile plant which his grandson, Earl William Sinclair, had his
stone-masons carve in Rosslyn Chapel as  
evidence of his grandfather's historic voyage to the New World in
1398  - before Columbus was born!! 

Niven Sinclair

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