Tattowing, Or Puncturing The Skin, Is Much Used Here.
The men are
marked from head to foot, with figures all nearly alike; only some give
them one direction, and some another, as fancy leads.
The women are but
little punctured; red and white paint is an ornament with them, as
also with the men; the former is made of turmeric, but what composes the
latter I know not.
Their clothing is a piece or two of quilted cloth, about six feet by four,
or a mat. One piece wrapped round their loins, and another over their
shoulders, make a complete dress. But the men, for the most part, are in a
manner naked, wearing nothing but a slip of cloth betwixt their legs, each
end of which is fastened to a cord or belt they wear round the waist. Their
cloth is made of the same materials as at Otaheite, viz. of the bark of the
cloth-plant; but, as they have but little of it, our Otaheitean cloth, or
indeed any sort of it, came here to a good market.
Their hair in general is black; the women wear it long, and sometimes tied
up on the crown of the head; but the men wear it, and their beards, cropped
short. Their headdress is a round fillet adorned with feathers, and a straw
bonnet something like a Scotch one; the former, I believe, being chiefly
worn by the men, and the latter by the women. Both men and women have very
large holes, or rather slits, in their ears, extending to near three inches
in length. They sometimes turn this slit over the upper part, and then the
ear looks as if the flap was cut off. The chief ear-ornaments are the white
down of feathers, and rings, which they wear in the inside of the hole,
made of some elastic substance, rolled up like a watch-spring. I judged
this was to keep the hole at its utmost extension. I do not remember seeing
them wear any other ornaments, excepting amulets made of bone or shells.[2]
As harmless and friendly as these people seemed to be, they are not without
offensive weapons, such as short wooden clubs and spears; the latter of
which are crooked sticks about six feet long, armed at one end with pieces
of flint. They have also a weapon made of wood, like the Patoo patoo
of New Zealand.
Their houses are low miserable huts, constructed by setting sticks upright
in the ground, at six or eight feet distance, then bending them towards
each other, and tying them together at the top, forming thereby a kind of
Gothic arch. The longest sticks are placed in the middle, and shorter ones
each way, and a less distance asunder, by which means the building is
highest and broadest in the middle, and lower and narrower towards each
end. To these are tied others horizontally, and the whole is thatched over
with leaves of sugar-cane.
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