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:
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