They Readily Acquiesced In These And Other Things Concerning Our Faith, Calling Their Cudruaigni Agouiada, Or The Evil One, And Requested Our Captain That They Might Be Baptised; And Donnacona, Taignoagny, Domagaia, And All The People Of The Town Came To Us Hoping To Receive Baptism.

But as we could not thoroughly understand their meaning, and there was no one with us who was able

To teach them the doctrines of our holy religion, we desired Taignoagny and Domagaia to tell them that we should return to them at another time, bringing priests and the chrysm along with us, without which they could not be baptised. All of this was thoroughly understood by our two savages, as they had seen many children baptised when in Brittany, and the people were satisfied with these reasons, expressing their great satisfaction at our promise.

[Footnote 52: This seems a figurative expression, implying that he keeps them in ignorance of what is to happen when displeased. - E.]

These savages live together in common, as has been already mentioned respecting the inhabitants of Hochelega, and are tolerably well provided with those things which their country produces. They are clothed in the skins of wild beasts, but in a very imperfect and wretched manner. In winter they wear hose and shoes made of wild beasts skins, but go barefooted in summer. They observe the rules of matrimony, only that every man has two or three wives, who never marry again if their husbands happen to die, wearing all their lives after a kind of mourning dress, and smearing their faces with charcoal dust and grease, as thick as the back of a knife, by which they are known to be widows. They have a detestable custom with regard to their young women, who are all placed together in one house as soon as they are marriageable, where they remain as harlots for all who please to visit them, till such time as they may find a match. I assert this from experience, having seen many houses occupied in this manner, just as those houses in France where young persons are boarded for their education; and the conduct of the inhabitants of these houses is indecent and scandalous in the extreme. The men are not much given to labour, digging the ground in a superficial manner with a wooden implement, by which they cultivate their corn resembling that which grows in Brazil, and which they call effici. They have also plenty of melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers, and pease and beans of various colours, all different from ours. They have likewise a certain kind of herb of which they lay up a store every summer, having first dried it in the sun. This is only used by the men, who always carry some of this dried herb in a small skin bag hanging from their necks, in which they also carry a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe. When they use this herb, they bruise it to powder, which they put into one end of the before-mentioned pipe, and lay a small piece of live coal upon it, after which they suck so long at the other end that they fill their bodies full of smoke, till it comes out of their mouth and nostrils, as if from the chimney of a fire-place. They allege that this practice keeps them warm and is conducive to health, and they constantly carry some of this herb about with them for this purpose.

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