A Voyage to New Holland eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 137 pages of information about A Voyage to New Holland.

A Voyage to New Holland eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 137 pages of information about A Voyage to New Holland.
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 40 or 50 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 teasing them) and with the same black skins, and hair frizzled, tall and thin, etc., as those were:  but we had not the opportunity to see whether these, as the former, wanted two of their foreteeth.

We saw a great many places where they had made fires; and where there were commonly 3 or 4 boughs stuck up to windward of them; for the wind (which is the seabreeze) in the daytime blows always one way with them; and the land breeze is but small.  By their fireplaces 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 shellfish, as those I before described did on small fish, which they caught in wires or holes in the sand at low-water.  These gathered their shellfish on the rocks at low-water; but had no wires (that we saw) whereby to get any other sorts of fish:  as among the former I saw not any heaps of shells as here, though I know they also gathered some shellfish.  The lances also of those were such as these had; however they being upon an island, with their women and children, and all in our power, they did not there use them against us, as here on the continent, where we saw none but some of the men under head, who come out purposely to observe us.  We saw no houses at either place; and I believe they have none, since the former people on the island had none, though they had all their families with them.

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A Voyage to New Holland from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.