Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/291

1770 patches of it mixed with oil, which consequently never dries. This latter is generally practised by the women, and was not universally condemned by us, for if any of us had unthinkingly ravished a kiss from one of these fair savages, our transgressions were written in most legible characters on our noses, which our companions could not fail to see on our first interview.

The common dress of these people is certainly to a stranger one of the most uncouth and extraordinary sights that can be imagined. It is made of the leaves of the flag described before, each being split into three or four slips; and these, as soon as they are dry, are woven into a kind of stuff between netting and cloth, out of the upper side of which all the ends, of eight or nine inches, are suffered to hang in the same manner as thrums out of a thrum mat. Of these pieces of cloth two serve for a complete dress: one is tied over the shoulders, and reaches to about their knees; the other is tied about the waist, and reaches to near the ground. But they seldom wear more than one of these, and when they have it on resemble not a little a thatched house. These dresses, however, ugly as they are, are well adapted for their convenience, as they often sleep in the open air, and live some time without the least shelter, even from rain, so that they must trust entirely to their clothes as the only chance they have of keeping themselves dry. For this they are certainly not ill adapted, as every strip of leaf becomes in that case a kind of gutter which serves to conduct the rain down, and hinder it from soaking through the cloth beneath.

Besides this they have several kinds of cloth which are smooth, and ingeniously worked; these are chiefly of two sorts, one coarse as our coarsest canvas, and ten times stronger, but much like it in the lying of the threads; the other is formed by many threads running lengthwise, and a few only crossing them to tie them together. This last sort is sometimes striped, and always very pretty; for the threads that compose it are prepared so as to shine almost as much as silk. To both these they work borders of different colours in fine