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.
Those beasts, fishes, and fowls which they kill are their meat, drink, apparel, houses, bedding, hose, shoes, thread, and sails for their boats, with many other necessaries, whereof they stand in need, and almost all their riches.
The houses are tents made of seal skins, pitched up with four fir quarters, four-square, meeting at the top, and the skins sewed together with sinews, and laid thereupon; they are so pitched up, that the entrance into them is always south, or against the sun.
They have other sort of houses, which we found not to be inhabited, which are raised with stones and whalebones, and a skin laid over them to withstand the rain, or other weather; the entrance of them being not much unlike an oven's mouth, whereunto, I think, they resort for a time to fish, hunt, and fowl, and so leave them until the next time they come thither again.
Their weapons are bows, arrows, darts, and slings.Their bows are of wood, of a yard long, sinewed on the back with firm sinews, not glued to, but fast girded and tied on.Their bow strings are likewise sinews.Their arrows are three pieces, nocked with bone and ended with bone; with those two ends, and the wood in the midst, they pass not in length half a yard, or little more.They are feathered with two feathers, the pen end being cut away, and the feathers laid upon the arrow with the broad side to the wood, insomuch, that they seem, when they are tied on, to have four feathers.They have likewise three sorts of heads to those arrows;one sort of stone or iron, proportioned like to a heart; the second sort of bone much like unto a stopt head, with a hook on the same, the third sort of bone likewise, made sharp at both sides, and sharp pointed.They are not made very fast, but lightly tied to, or else set in a nocke, that, upon small occasion, the arrow leaveth these heads behind them; they are of small force except they be very near when they shoot.
Their darts are made of two sorts: the one with many forks of bones in the fore end, and likewise in the midst; their proportions are not much unlike our toasting-irons, but longer; these they cast out of an instrument of wood very readily.The other sort is greater than the first aforesaid, with a long bone made sharp on both sides, not much unlike a rapier, which I take to be their most hurtful weapon.
They have two sorts of boats made of leather, set out on the inner side with quarters of wood, artificially tied together with thongs of the same; the greater sort are not much unlike our wherries, wherein sixteen or twenty men may sit; they have for a sail dressed the guts of such beasts as they kill, very fine and thin, which they sew together; the other boat is but for one man to sit and row in, with one oar.
Their order of fishing, hunting, and fowling, are with these said weapons; but in what sort or how they use them we have no perfect knowledge as yet.
I can suppose their abode or habitation not to be here, for that neither their houses nor apparel are of such force to withstand the extremity of cold that the country seemeth to be infected withal;neither do I see any sign likely to perform the same.
