340 COOK S VOYAGE TO MAY, 



ears, about their caps, or join to their lip-ornaments, 

 which have a small hole drilled in each point, to which 

 they are fastened, and others to them, till they hang 

 sometimes as low as the point of the chin. But, in 

 this last case, they cannot remove them so easily ; for 

 as to their own lip-ornaments, they can take them 

 out with their tongue, or suck within, at pleasure* 

 They also wear bracelets of the shelly beads, or 

 others of a cylindrical shape, made of a substance 

 like amber, with such also as are used in their ears 

 and noses. And so fond are they, in general, of 

 ornament, that they stick any thing in their per- 

 forated lip, one man appearing with two of our iron 

 nails projecting from it like prongs, and another en- 

 deavouring to put a large brass button into it. 



The men frequently paint their faces of a bright 

 red, and of a black colour, and sometimes of a 

 blue or leaden colour ; but not in any regular 

 figure ; and the women, in some measure, endea- 

 voured to imitate them, by puncturing or staining 

 the chin with black, that comes to a point in each 

 cheek ; a practice very similar to which is in fashion 

 amongst the females of Greenland, as we learn from 

 Crantz.* Their bodies are not painted, which may 

 be owing to the scarcity of proper materials, for all 

 the colours which they brought to sell in bladders 

 were in very small quantities. Upon the whole, I 

 have no where seen savages who take more pains than 

 these people do to ornament, or rather to disfigure 

 their persons. 



Their boats or canoes are of two sorts, the one 

 being large and open, and the other small and co- 

 vered. I mentioned already, that in one of the large 

 boats were twenty women and one man, besides chil- 

 dren. I attentively examined and compared the 

 construction of this with Crantz's description of 

 what he calls the great, or women's boat, in 

 Greenland, and found that they were built in the 



* Vol.!. p. 188. 



