A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2Cook, James
History
A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2
Cook, James
Antarctica; Oceania -- Discovery and exploration -- Early works to 1800; Voyages around the world -- Early works to 1800
serviceable than stone, bone, or shells, of which all their tools I have
seen are made. Their stone hatchets, at least all those I saw, are not in
the shape of adzes, as at the other islands, but more like an axe. In the
helve, which is pretty thick, is made a hole into which the stone is fixed.
These people, besides the cultivation of ground, have few other arts worth
mentioning. They know how to make a coarse kind of matting, and a coarse
cloth of the bark of a tree, which is used chiefly for belts. The
workmanship of their canoes, I have before observed, is very rude; and
their arms, with which they take the most pains in point of neatness, come
far short of some others we have seen. Their weapons are clubs, spears or
darts, bows and arrows, and stones. The clubs are of three or four kinds,
and from three to five feet long. They seem to place most dependence on the
darts, which are pointed with three bearded edges. In throwing them they
make use of a becket, that is, a piece of stiff plaited cord about six
inches long, with an eye in one end and a knot at the other. The eye is
fixed on the fore-finger of the right hand, and the other end is hitched
round the dart, where it is nearly on an equipoise. They hold the dart
between the thumb and remaining fingers, which serve only to give it
direction, the velocity being communicated by the becket and fore-finger.
The former flies off from the dart the instant its velocity becomes greater
than that of the hand. But it remains on the finger ready to be used again.
With darts they kill both birds and fish, and are sure of hitting a mark,
within the compass of the crown of a hat, at the distance of eight or ten
yards; but, at double that distance, it is chance if they hit a mark the
size of a man's body, though they will throw the weapon sixty or seventy
yards. They always throw with all their might, let the distance be what it
will. Darts, bows and arrows are to them what musquets are to us. The
arrows are made of reeds pointed with hard wood; some are bearded and some
not, and those for shooting birds have two, three, and sometimes four
points. The stones they use are, in general, the branches of coral rocks
from eight to fourteen inches long, and from an inch to an inch-and-half in
diameter. I know not if they employ them as missive weapons; almost every
one of them carries a club, and besides that, either darts, or a bow and
arrows, but never both; those who had stones kept them generally in their
belts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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