However much he may have admired the flora, fish, and vistas of the shore near Cape Small and Pemaquid Point, he disapproved of the natives. For their part, the Abnaki—having had previous experience of visitors “from away”—treated Verrazzano and his crew with scorn. Pierre Crignon’s fabulation of glorious Norumbega fraudulently named Verrazzano as the explorer so impressed with the native inhabitants’ docility and comeliness and goldsmithing skill. The facts of the encounter were otherwise: “Clothed in peltry of bear, lynx, ‘sea wolves’ and other beasts,” the Indians shot arrows at the Europeans as they tried to land. Nevertheless, some primitive trade was conducted between the visitors and the visited, by the expedient of exchanging goods placed in baskets lowered from the headland cliff to the beach below. The Europeans, surrendering fish hooks and knives and receiving in return a few root vegetables, got the worst of the deal, a shame emphatically commemorated by the Abnaki, who “showed all signs of discourtesy and disdain, as was possible for any brute creature to invent, such as exhibiting their bare behinds and laughing immoderately.”
