The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and DiscoveryHakluyt, Richard
History
The Boy's Hakluyt: English Voyages of Adventure and Discovery
Hakluyt, Richard
Discoveries in geography -- English -- Juvenile literature; Voyages and travels -- Juvenile literature
Fuller information about the natives and their customs was given in the
narratives of this voyage than of the first one. Settle describes the
men as “of a large corporature and of good proportion.” They wore their
hair “something long, and cut before either with stone or knife, very
disorderly.” The women also wore long hair, but theirs was “knit up with
two loupes, shewing forth on either side of their faces, and the rest
foltred upon a knot.” Their apparel was comprised of “skins of such
beasts as they kill, sewed together with the sinews of them.” These
garments were made with “hoods and tailes which tailes they give when
they thinke to gratifie any friendship shewed unto them: a great sign of
friendship with them.” Their legs were encased in “hose of leather with
the fur side inward, two or three pairs on at once.” These stockings
were held up by a bone placed inside them, reaching from the foot to the
knee, instead of by garters. In them they carried their “knives,
needles, and other things needful to beare about.” The beasts, fishes,
and fowls that they killed provided all their wants. They were their
“meat, drinke, apparell, houses, bedding, hose, shoes, thread, and sails
of their boates, with many other necessaries,” and “almost all their
riches.”
Their weapons comprised bows and arrows, darts, and slings. The bows
were of wood, “a yard long, sinewed at the back with strong sinews.” The
bow-strings were also sinews. The arrows were wooden, half a yard or a
little more in length, “nocked with bone and ended with bone,”
feathered, and of three styles of heads: one, of stone or iron,
“proportioned like to a heart”; another, of bone with a hooked tip; the
third, of bone sharp on both sides and sharp pointed. The darts were of
two kinds, one with “many forkes of bone in the fore end and likewise in
the midst,” the other with “a long bone made sharpe on both sides, not
much unlike a Rapier.” Their boats were of leather, “set out on the
inner side with quarters of wood artificially tyed together with thongs
of the same”; and they were of two sorts: one large, to carry sixteen or
twenty men, and provided with a sail made of the “guts of such beasts as
they kill very fine and thin, which they sew together”; the other, a
canoe, intended for one man only, with a single oar or paddle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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