Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/465

1770 The language spoken among them is entirely Malay, or at least so called, for I believe it is a most corrupt dialect. Notwithstanding that Java has two or three languages, and almost every little island besides its own, distinct from the rest, yet none use, or I believe remember, their own language, so that this Lingua Franca Malay is the only one spoken in this neighbourhood, and, I have been told, over a very large part of the East Indies.

Their women, and in imitation of them the Dutch also, wear as much hair as ever they can nurse up on their heads, which by the use of oils, etc, is incredibly great. It is universally black, and they wear it in a kind of circular wreath upon the tops of their heads, fastened with a bodkin, in a taste inexpressibly elegant. I have often wished that one of our ladies could see a Malay woman's head dressed in this manner, with her wreath of flowers, commonly Arabian jasmine, round that of hair; for in that method of dress there is certainly an elegant simplicity and unaffected show of the beauties of nature incomparably superior to anything I have seen in the laboured head-dresses of my fair country-women. Both sexes bathe themselves in the river constantly at least once a day, a most necessary custom in hot climates. Their teeth also, disgustful as they must appear to a European from their blackness, occasioned by their continued chewing of betel, are a great object of attention: every one must have them filed into the fashionable form, which is done with whetstones by a most troublesome and painful operation. First, both the upper and under teeth are rubbed till they are perfectly even and quite blunt,so that the two jaws lose not less than half a line each in the operation. Then a deep groove is made in the middle of the upper teeth, crossing them all, and itself cutting through at least one-fourth of the whole thickness of the teeth, so that the enamel is cut quite through, a fact which we Europeans, who are taught by our dentifricators that any damage done to the enamel is mortal to the tooth, find it difficult to believe. Yet among these people, where this custom is universal, I have scarce seen even in old people