Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/407

Rh indeed, we never saw any one man dressed the whole time we were there in anything more than his ordinary clothes. Some boys of twelve or fourteen years of age wore circles of thick brass wire, passed screw-fashion three or four times round their arms above the elbow: and some men wore convex rings of ivory, two inches in breadth, and above an inch in thickness, in the same manner above the joint of the elbow. These we were told were the sons of Radjas, who alone had the privilege of wearing these cumbersome badges of high birth.

Almost all the men had their names traced upon their arms in indelible characters of black; the women had a square ornament of flourished lines on the inner part of each arm, just under the bend of the elbow; on inquiring into the antiquity of this custom, so consonant with that of tattowing in the South Sea Islands, Mr. Lange told us that it had been among these people long before the Europeans came here, but was less used in this than in most islands in the neighbourhood, in some of which the people marked circles round their necks, breasts, etc.

Both sexes are continually employed in chewing betel and areca; the consequence is that their teeth, as long as they have any, are dyed of that filthy black colour which constantly attends the rottenness of a tooth, for it appears to me that from their first use of this custom, which they begin very young, their teeth are affected and continue by gradual degrees to waste away till they are quite worn to the stumps, which seems to happen before old age. I have seen men, in appearance between twenty and thirty, whose fore teeth were almost entirely gone, no two being of the same length or the same thickness, but every one eaten to unevenness as iron is by rust. This loss of the teeth is attributed by all whose writings on the subject I have read, to the tough and stringy coat of the areca nut, but in my opinion is much more easily accounted for by the well-known corrosive quality of the lime, which is a necessary ingredient in every mouthful, and that too in no very insignificant quantity. This opinion seems to me to be