Our
General Caused Some Calevers To Be Shot Off At Them, Whereby, Some
Being Hurt, They Might Hereafter Stand In More Fear Of Us.
This was all the answer for this time we could have of our men, or
of our general's letter.
Their crafty dealing at these three
several times being thus manifest unto us, may plainly show their
disposition in other things to be correspondent. 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.
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