These winter habitations they begin to dwell in immediately after Michaelmas, and leave them again at the approach of the spring, which commonly is at the latter end of March; and then for the summer season lodge in tents, which are their summer habitations. These tents are made of rafts or long poles, set in a circular form, bending at the top, and resembling a sugar loaf, and covered with a double cover, of which the innermost is of seal or rein deer skins with the hairy side inward (if they be rich), and the outermost also of the same sort of skins, without hair, dressed with fat, that the rain may not pierce them. In these tents they have their beds, and lamps to dress their meat with; also a curtain made of the guts or bowels of seals sewed together, through which they receive the day light instead of windows. Every master of a family has got such a tent, and a great woman’s boat, to transport their tents and luggage from place to place, where their business calls them. CHAP. IX. _The Greenlanders’ Persons, Complexion, and Temperament._ The Greenlanders, as well man as womankind, are well shaped and proportioned, rather short than tall, and strong built, inclined to be fat and corpulent; their faces broad, thick lips, and flat nosed; their hair and eyes black, their complexion a very dark tawny; though I have seen some pretty fair. Their bodies are of a vigorous constitution. There are seldom found any sick or lame, and but few distempers are known among them, besides weakness of the eye-sight, which is caused by the sharp and piercing spring winds, as well as the snow and ice, that hurt the sight. I have met with some that seemed infected with a kind of leprosy; yet (what is surprising to me), though they converse with others, and lay with them in one bed, it is not catching. They that dwell in the most Northern parts are often miserably plagued with dysenteries or bloody fluxes, breast diseases, boils, and epilepsy, or falling sickness, &c. There were no epidemical or contagious diseases known among them, as plague, small-pox, and such like, till the year 1734, when one of the natives, who with several others were brought over to Denmark, and together with his companions had the small-pox at Copenhagen, coming home again to his native country brought the infection amongst them; of which there were swept away in and about the colony about two thousand persons. For as the natives as well as the animals of this climate are of a hot nature, they cannot bear the outward heat, much less the inward, caused by this burning distemper, which inflames the mass of blood to that degree, that it cannot, by any means, be quenched. They are very full of blood, which is observed by their frequent bleeding at the nose.