The Rest, Seeing
Him Fall, Made A Stand Again, And My Young Man Took The Opportunity
To Disengage Himself And
Come off to me; my other man also was with
me, who had done nothing all this while, having come
Out unarmed,
and I returned back with my men, designing to attempt the natives no
farther, being very sorry for what had happened already. They took
up their wounded companion; and my young man, who had been struck
through the cheek by one of their lances, was afraid it had been
poisoned, but I did not think that likely. His wound was very
painful to him, being made with a blunt weapon; but he soon
recovered of it.
Among the New Hollanders, whom we were thus engaged with, there was
one who by his appearance and carriage, as well in the morning as
this afternoon, seemed to be the chief of them, and a kind of prince
or captain among them. He was a young brisk man, not very tall, nor
so personable as some of the rest, though more active and
courageous: he was painted (which none of the rest were at all)
with a circle of white paste or pigment (a sort of lime, as we
thought) about his eyes, and a white streak down his nose, from his
forehead to the tip of it: and his breast and some part of his arms
were also made white with the same paint; not for beauty or
ornament, one would think, but as some wild Indian warriors are said
to do, he seemed thereby to design the looking more terrible; this
his painting adding very much to his natural deformity; for they all
of them have the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any
people that ever I saw, though I have seen great variety of savages.
These New Hollanders were probably the same sort of people as those
I met with on this coast in my voyage round the world, for the place
I then touched at was not above forty or fifty leagues to the north-
east of this, and these were much the same blinking creatures (here
being also abundance of the same kind of flesh-flies teazing them,)
and with the same black skins, and hair frizzled, tall and thin, &c.
as those were: but we had not the opportunity to see whether these,
as the former, wanted two of their fore-teeth.
We saw a great many places where they had made fires, and where
there were commonly three or four boughs stuck up to windward of
them; for the wind, (which is the sea-breeze), in the day-time blows
always one way with them, and the land-breeze is but small. By
their fire-places we should always find great heaps of fish-shells
of several sorts; and it is probable that these poor creatures here
lived chiefly on the shell-fish, as those I before described did on
small fish, which they caught in wires or holes in the sand at low
water.
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