Henry had chores to do too. He wrote that one of his duties was "stilling the king's young child, for none could quiet him so well as myselfe." This undoubtedly makes Henry Spelman the Neck's first white baby-sitter.
He perhaps had his turn with the Indian boys to sit in a little hut on a platform in the field and scare crows away from the newly planted corn.
We can be certain that Henry avoided the hideous priests and their temples and the houses where the bodies of the dead kings and statues of their god Okee were kept. These places were considered too holy for ordinary people to enter. Indians passed these houses quickly, and even when going up or down the river they would throw "some peece of copper, white beads or pocones into the river for feare their Okee should be offended and revenged of them."
Henry attended funerals of the common people where he saw the body wrapped in mats and placed on a scaffold ten or twelve feet high. The relatives mourned greatly and threw beads among the poor. After the funeral the relatives entertained with feasting, music and dancing.
The corpse stayed on the scaffold until the flesh had disappeared and then it was wrapped in a new mat and later buried.
In the Potomac country punishment for crime was swift and often final. Henry was an eye-witness to such punishment: "Then cam the officer to thos that should dye, and with a shell cutt off ther long locke, which they weare on the left side of ther heade, and hangeth that on a bowe before the kings house. Then thos for murther weare beaten with staves till ther bonns weare broken and beinge alive weare flounge into the fier, the other for robbinge was knockt on the heade and beinge deade his bodye was burnt."
The white boy saw many moons come and go there in the wilderness--the moon of stags, the corn moon, the first and second moon of cohonks. He was there at the budding of the spring, the earing of the corn, the highest sun, the fall of the leaf, and then again--cohonks.
He witnessed the solemn celebrations of the plentiful coming of the wild fowl to the river, the return of the hunting season and the ripening of certain fruits. He saw the greatest annual festival at the time of the corn gathering with its war dances, heroic songs, the music rattles and drums, and then the feasting.