On these boards were laid either the dressed skins of deer or bear, or thick mattresses made of reeds or rushes.

The beds were large enough for several people to lie on.

Champlain describes the huts as being full of fleas, and likewise the persons of the nearly naked Indians, who carried these fleas out with them into the fields when they were working, so that the Frenchmen by stopping to talk to the natives became covered with fleas to such an extent that they were obliged to change their clothes.
In the fields were cultivated not only maize, but beans similar to the beans grown by the natives of Brazil, vegetable marrows or pumpkins, Jerusalem artichokes[15], radishes, and tobacco.

The woods were filled with oaks, walnut trees[16], and the red "cedar" of North America, really a very large juniper, the foliage of which in the summertime often assumes a reddish colour, together with the trunk.

This Virginian juniper or "red cedar" is now quite a common tree in England.