Indian Corn

Abstract

IN the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” vol. xv. p. 309, it is stated that no mention was ever made of maize by Eastern travellers in Africa or Asia prior to the 16th century A.D. Slight doubts about this statement have occurred to my mind lately, while I was reading the Hakluyt Society's “India in the Fifteenth Century.” There, in the English translation by the late Count Wielhorsky of the “Travels” of Athanacius Nikitin, the Russian, whose Eastern travels took place about 1470–1474, when the work was written by himself, we read concerning the Indians: “They live on Indian corn, carrots with oil, and different herbs” (p. 17). Has this mention of the cereal any weight to countenance the theories which seek to assert that maize was known in the East before the discovery of the Western Continent? Or, does what is meant or translated by the word Indian corn here differ materially from Zea Mays?