Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/293

1770 Both sexes bore their ears, and wear in them a great variety of ornaments; the holes are generally (as if to keep them upon the stretch) filled up with a plug of some sort or other, either cloth, feathers, bones of large birds, or sometimes only a stick of wood: into this hole they often also put nails or anything we gave them which could go there. The women also often wear bunches, nearly as large as a fist, of the down of the albatross, which is snow-white. This, though very odd, makes by no means an inelegant appearance. They hang from them by strings many very different things, often a chisel and bodkins made of a kind of green talc, which they value much; the nails and teeth also of their deceased relations, dogs' teeth, and, in short, anything which is either valuable or ornamental. Besides these the women sometimes wear bracelets and anklets made of the bones of birds, shells, etc., and the men often carry the figure of a distorted man made of the before-mentioned green talc, or the tooth of a whale cut slantwise, so as to resemble somewhat a tongue, and furnished with two eyes. These they wear about their necks and seem to value almost above everything else. I saw one instance also of a very extraordinary ornament, which was a feather stuck through the bridge of the nose, and projecting on each side of it over the cheeks; but this I only mention as a singular thing, having met with it only once among the many people I have seen, and never observed in any other even the marks of a hole which might occasionally serve for such a purpose.

Their houses are certainly the most unartificially made of anything among them, scarcely equal to a European dog's kennel, and resembling it, in the door at least, which is barely high or wide enough to admit a man crawling upon all fours. They are seldom more than sixteen or eighteen feet long, eight or ten broad, and five or six high from the ridge pole to the ground: they are built with a sloping roof like our European houses. The material of both walls and roof is dry grass or hay, and very tightly it is put together, so that they must necessarily be very warm; some are lined