A superstition very common among them is, to load themselves with amulets or _pomanders_ dangling about their necks and arms, which consist of some pieces of old wood, stones or bones, bills and claws of birds, or any thing else, which their fancy suggests to them; which amulets, according to their silly opinion, have a wonderful virtue to preserve those that wear them from diseases and other misfortunes, and gives them luck to good captures. To render barren women fertile or teeming, they take old pieces of the soles of our shoes to hang about them; for, as they take our nation to be more fertile, and of a stronger disposition of body than theirs, they fancy the virtue of our body communicates itself to our clothing. Concerning the creation and origin of all things, they have little to say, but they think all has been as it ever will be. Nevertheless they abound in fables in regard to these matters. Their tale of the origin of mankind runs thus: at the beginning one man, _viz._ a Greenlander, sprung out of the ground, who got a wife out of a little hillock[40]. From these are descended lineally the Greenlanders; which may pass for a remnant, though an adulteration from the true tradition of the origin of man. But as to us foreigners, whom they stile _Kablunæt_ (that is, of a strange extraction), they tell a most ridiculous story, importing our pedigree from a race of dogs; they say, that a Greenland woman once being in labour, brought forth at the same time both children and whelps: these last she put into an old shoe, and committed them to the mercy of the waves, with these words; Get ye gone from hence and grow up to be Kablunæts. This, they say, is the reason, why the Kablunæts always live upon the sea; and the ships, they say, have the very same shape as their shoes, being round before and behind.