>>14422675In 1637, Thomas Morton, one of the founders of the settlement at Mount Wollaston (now Quincy, Mass.) gave a description of the Indians in New England that mentioned their admirable perfection in the use of the senses, and in particular, “their eyes":
“This is a thinge not only observed by me and divers of the Salvages of New England, but, also, by the French men in Nova Francia, and therefore I am the more encouraged to publish in this Treatice my observation of them in the use of theire senses: which is a thinge that I should not easily have been induced to believe, if I myself had not been an eye witnesse of what I shall relate.
“I have observed that the Salvages have the sence of seeing so farre beyond any of our Nation, that one would allmost believe they had intelligence of the Devill sometimes, when they have told us of a ship at Sea, which they have seen sooner by one hour, yea, two hours sail, then any English man that stood by of purpose to looke out, their sight is so excellent (Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, 1637)”
Edmund Shaftsbury, an early 1900s writer on health and human magnetism, writes about the early American Indians: “The American Indians are known to have the strongest eyes in the world. They have the closest thing to ‘telescopic vision.’ They can see objects in the far distance that the average person would need a telescope to see” (Gurki Doe, American Indian Telescopic Eye Vision, October 13, 2011).
