We Judged That
They Used These Stratagems Thereby To Have Caught Some Of Us For The
Delivering Of The Man, Woman, And Child, Whom We Had Taken.
They are men of a large corporature, and good proportion; their
colour is not much unlike the sunburnt countryman, who laboureth
daily in sun for his living.
They wear their hair something long, and cut before either with
stone or knife, very disorderly. Their women wear their hair long,
knit up with two loops, showing forth on either side of their faces,
and the rest faltered upon a knot. Also, some of their women tint
their faces proportionally, as chin, cheeks, and forehead and the
wrists of their hands, whereupon they lay a colour which continueth
dark azurine.
They eat their meat all raw, both flesh, fish, and fowl, or
something parboiled with blood, and a little water, which they
drink. For lack of water, they will eat ice that is hard frozen as
pleasantly as we will do sugar-candy, or other sugar.
If they, for necessity's sake, stand in need of the premises, such
grass as the country yieldeth they pluck up and eat, not daintily,
or saladwise, to allure their stomachs to appetite, but for
necessity's sake, without either salt, oils, or washing, like brute
beasts devouring the same. They neither use table, stool, or table-
cloth for comeliness: but when they are imbrued with blood, knuckle
deep, and their knives in like sort, they use their tongues as apt
instruments to lick them clean; in doing whereof they are assured to
lose none of their victuals.
They keep certain dogs, not much unlike wolves, which they yoke
together, as we do oxen and horses, to a sled or trail, and so carry
their necessaries over the ice and snow, from place to place, as the
captain, whom we have, made perfect signs. And when those dogs are
not apt for the same use, or when with hunger they are constrained
for lack of other victuals, they eat them, so that they are as
needful for them, in respect of their bigness, as our oxen are for
us.
They apparel themselves in the skins of such beasts as they kill,
sewed together with the sinews of them. All the fowl which they
kill they skin, and make thereof one kind of garment or other to
defend them from the cold.
They make their apparel with hoods and tails, which tails they give,
when they think to gratify any friendship shown unto them; a great
sign of friendship with them. The men have them not so syde as the
women.
The men and women wear their hose close to their legs, from the
waist to the knee, without any open before, as well the one kind as
the other. Upon their legs they wear hose of leather, with the fur
side inward, two or three pair on at once, and especially the women.
In those hose they put their knives, needles, and other things
needful to bear about. They put a bone within their hose, which
reacheth from the foot to the knee, whereupon they draw their said
hose, and so in place of garters they are holden from falling down
about their feet.
They dress their skins very soft and supple with the hair on. In
cold weather or winter they wear the fur side inward, and in summer
outward. Other apparel they have none but the said skins.
Those beasts, fishes, and fowls which they kill are their meat,
drink, apparel, houses, bedding, hose, shoes, thread, and sails for
their boats, with many other necessaries, whereof they stand in
need, and almost all their riches.
The houses are tents made of seal skins, pitched up with four fir
quarters, four-square, meeting at the top, and the skins sewed
together with sinews, and laid thereupon; they are so pitched up,
that the entrance into them is always south, or against the sun.
They have other sort of houses, which we found not to be inhabited,
which are raised with stones and whalebones, and a skin laid over
them to withstand the rain, or other weather; the entrance of them
being not much unlike an oven's mouth, whereunto, I think, they
resort for a time to fish, hunt, and fowl, and so leave them until
the next time they come thither again.
Their weapons are bows, arrows, darts, and slings. Their bows are
of wood, of a yard long, sinewed on the back with firm sinews, not
glued to, but fast girded and tied on. Their bow strings are
likewise sinews. Their arrows are three pieces, nocked with bone
and ended with bone; with those two ends, and the wood in the midst,
they pass not in length half a yard, or little more. They are
feathered with two feathers, the pen end being cut away, and the
feathers laid upon the arrow with the broad side to the wood,
insomuch, that they seem, when they are tied on, to have four
feathers. They have likewise three sorts of heads to those arrows;
one sort of stone or iron, proportioned like to a heart; the second
sort of bone much like unto a stopt head, with a hook on the same,
the third sort of bone likewise, made sharp at both sides, and sharp
pointed. They are not made very fast, but lightly tied to, or else
set in a nocke, that, upon small occasion, the arrow leaveth these
heads behind them; they are of small force except they be very near
when they shoot.
Their darts are made of two sorts: the one with many forks of bones
in the fore end, and likewise in the midst; their proportions are
not much unlike our toasting-irons, but longer; these they cast out
of an instrument of wood very readily. The other sort is greater
than the first aforesaid, with a long bone made sharp on both sides,
not much unlike a rapier, which I take to be their most hurtful
weapon.
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