Dampier writes more about the natives of Australia rather than its products or landscapes. He describes them as "the miserablest people in the world", beside whom the Hodmadods (Hottentots) of South Africa were gentlemen. These aboriginal Australians had no houses or skin garments, no domestic animals, and no cultivated forms of vegetable food. They had great bottle noses, pretty full lips and wide mouths, from which the two middle incisor teeth of the upper jaw were wanting, having been extracted from the people of both sexes whilst they were still children. Their faces were long and their heads disproportionately big, with very projecting brows. The eyelids were kept half-closed because of the pest of flies for ever trying to get into their eyes. The head-hair was black, short, and curled, like that of Negroes, and (curiously enough) they had no beards. (This is a strange remark on the part of Dampier, and almost suggests that at this time that broad portion of north-west Australia which he visited was inhabited by a Papuan race from New Guinea, for if there is one thing for which the typical Australian aborigine is noteworthy it is the abundance of the beard in the men. Even the women of middle age frequently grow short whiskers and a tuft of beard at the chin.) The colour of their skins was coal black, like that of the Negroes of Guinea. They were tall, slender people, with somewhat delicate limbs. They had no sort of clothing, but round the waist was tied a girdle of bark, and into this was thrust occasionally a handful of long grass or three or four small green boughs full of leaves. There were no signs of any houses, the people sleeping on the ground in the open air. But they generally slept round about a fire, and would sometimes stick a few branches in the ground as a shelter from the prevailing wind. From his description they evidently possessed the wooden boomerang and wooden lances or spears, the ends of which were hardened by heat. They seemed to have no boats or even rafts, but they were good swimmers, and were observed swimming from one island to another. Their food seemed to consist almost entirely of fish, which they caught by making weirs of stones across little inlets of the sea, in such a way that the high tides brought the fish up these inlets and left them stranded behind the weirs. They also sought diligently for shellfish along the shore. They were acquainted with the use of fire, and boiled the fish, the clams, the mussels, oysters, and periwinkles which they obtained from the seashore, carefully distributing all the food they thus acquired amongst the old people and the children as well as the able-bodied who procured it. After eating they would lie down and sleep until it was necessary to sally out again at low water and obtain fresh supplies of fish food. Their language seemed to be very guttural.