A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 eBook

Robert Kerr (writer)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 768 pages of information about A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16.

A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 eBook

Robert Kerr (writer)
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 768 pages of information about A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16.

In general, they do not cover their legs or feet; but a few have a kind of skin-stockings, which reach half-way up the thigh; and scarcely any of them are without mittens for the hands, made of the skins of bears’ paws.  Those who wear any thing on their heads, resembled, in this respect, our friends at Nootka, having high truncated conic caps, made of straw, and sometimes of wood, resembling a seal’s head well painted.

The men commonly wear the hair cropt round the neck and forehead; but the women allow it to grow long, and most of them tie a small lock of it on the crown, or a few club it behind, after our manner.  Both sexes have the ears perforated with several holes, about the outer and lower part of the edge, in which they hang little bunches of beads, made of the same tubulous shelly substance used for this purpose by those of Nootka.  The septum of the nose is also perforated, through which they frequently thrust the quill-feathers of small birds, or little bending ornaments, made of the above shelly substance, strung on a stiff string or cord, three or four inches long, which give them a truly grotesque appearance.  But the most uncommon and unsightly ornamental fashion, adopted by some of both sexes, is their having the under-lip slit, or cut, quite through, in the direction of the mouth, a little below the swelling part.  This incision, which is made even in the sucking children, is often above two inches long, and either by its natural retraction, when the wound is fresh, or by the repetition of some artificial management, assumes the true shape of lips, and becomes so large as to admit the tongue through.  This happened to be the case, when the first person having this incision was seen by one of the seamen, who called out, that the man had two mouths, and, indeed, it does not look unlike it.  In this artificial mouth they stick a flat narrow ornament, made chiefly out of a solid shell or bone, cut into little narrow pieces, like small teeth, almost down to the base or thickest part, which has a small projecting bit at each end that supports it when put into the divided lip, the cut part then appearing outward.  Others have the lower lip only perforated into separate holes, and then the ornament consists of as many distinct shelly studs, whose points are pushed through these holes, and their heads appear within the lip, as another row of teeth immediately under their own.

These are their native ornaments.  But we found many beads of European manufacture among them, chiefly of a pale-blue colour, which they hang in their ears, about their caps, or join to their lip-ornaments, which have a small hole drilled in each point to which they are fastened, and others to them, till they hang sometimes as low as the point of the chin.  But, in this last case, they cannot remove them so easily; for, as to their own lip-ornaments, they can take them out with their tongue, or suck them in, at pleasure.  They also wear bracelets of the shelly-beads, or others of a cylindrical shape, made of a substance like amber, with such also as are used in their ears and noses.  And so fond are they, in general, of ornament, that they stick any thing in their perforated lip; one man appearing with two of our iron nails projecting from it like prongs; and another endeavouring to put a large brass button into it.

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A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.