Voyages in Search of the North-West PassageHakluyt, Richard
History
Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage
Hakluyt, Richard
Arctic regions -- Discovery and exploration; Northwest Passage; Voyages and travels
They wear their hair something long, and cut before either with stone or
knife, very disorderly. Their women wear their hair long, knit up with
two loops, showing forth on either side of their faces, and the rest
faltered upon a knot. Also, some of their women tint their faces
proportionally, as chin, cheeks, and forehead and the wrists of their
hands, whereupon they lay a colour which continueth dark azurine.
They eat their meat all raw, both flesh, fish, and fowl, or something
parboiled with blood, and a little water, which they drink. For lack of
water, they will eat ice that is hard frozen as pleasantly as we will do
sugar-candy, or other sugar.
If they, for necessity's sake, stand in need of the premises, such grass
as the country yieldeth they pluck up and eat, not daintily, or
saladwise, to allure their stomachs to appetite, but for necessity's
sake, without either salt, oils, or washing, like brute beasts devouring
the same. They neither use table, stool, or table-cloth for comeliness:
but when they are imbrued with blood, knuckle deep, and their knives in
like sort, they use their tongues as apt instruments to lick them clean;
in doing whereof they are assured to lose none of their victuals.
They keep certain dogs, not much unlike wolves, which they yoke together,
as we do oxen and horses, to a sled or trail, and so carry their
necessaries over the ice and snow, from place to place, as the captain,
whom we have, made perfect signs. And when those dogs are not apt for
the same use, or when with hunger they are constrained for lack of other
victuals, they eat them, so that they are as needful for them, in respect
of their bigness, as our oxen are for us.
They apparel themselves in the skins of such beasts as they kill, sewed
together with the sinews of them. All the fowl which they kill they
skin, and make thereof one kind of garment or other to defend them from
the cold.
They make their apparel with hoods and tails, which tails they give, when
they think to gratify any friendship shown unto them; a great sign of
friendship with them. The men have them not so syde as the women.
The men and women wear their hose close to their legs, from the waist to
the knee, without any open before, as well the one kind as the other.
Upon their legs they wear hose of leather, with the fur side inward, two
or three pair on at once, and especially the women. In those hose they
put their knives, needles, and other things needful to bear about. They
put a bone within their hose, which reacheth from the foot to the knee,
whereupon they draw their said hose, and so in place of garters they are
holden from falling down about their feet.
They dress their skins very soft and supple with the hair on. In cold
weather or winter they wear the fur side inward, and in summer outward.
Other apparel they have none but the said skins.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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