Page:Early voyages to Terra Australis.djvu/316

 160 dampier's voyages.

was a young brisk man, not very tall, nor so personable as some of the rest, tho' more active and couragious : he was painted (which none of the rest were at all) with a circle of white paste or pigment (a sort of lime, as we thought) about his eyes, and a white streak down his nose from his fore- head to the tip of it. And his breast and some part of his arms were also made white with the same paint ; not for beauty or ornament one would think, but as some wild Indian warriors are said to do, he seem'd thereby to design the looking more terrible ; this his painting added very much to his natural deformity, for they all of them have the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people that ever I saw, tho' I have seen great variety of savages. These New Hollanders were probably the same sort of people as those I met with on this coast in my voyage round the world (see vol. i, p. 464, etc.) ; for the place I then touched at was not above forty or fifty leagues to the N.E. of this : and these were much the same blinking creatures (here being also abundance of the same kind of flesh-flies teizing them), a:id with the same black skins, and hair frizled, tall and thin, etc., as those were : but we had not the opportunity to see whether these, as the former, wanted two of their fore-teeth.

We saw a great many places where they had made fires, and where there were commonly three or four boughs stuck up to the windward of them ; for the wind (which is the sea breeze) in the daytime blows always one way with them, and the land breeze is but small. By their fireplaces we should always find great heaps of fish shells of several sorts ; and 'tis probable that these poor creatures here lived chiefly on the shell fish, as those I before describ'd did on small fish, which they caught in wires or holes in the sand at low water. These gather'd their shell fish on the rocks at low water, but had no wires (that we saw) whereby to get any other sorts of fish : as among the former I saw not any heaps