6 14 Voyage of the Novara. 



invited us to be seated beside him on Nature's own soft 

 green carpet. 



The natives whom we met here were all tall handsome 

 men, with good features, decidedly of a European cast. The 

 hair was black, very crisp, but not the slightest appearance of 

 being woolly. Many had shaved it till there only remained 

 a long tail ; most of them had their arms and legs tattooed, 

 but wore no ear or nose ornaments like the Solomon Is- 

 landers. Eound the loins they wore a sort of girdle, four 

 or five inches wide, of strips of plants plaited by the women. 

 In addition to this, most of them wore some piece of Euro- 

 pean clothing ; drawers, old caps, but most commonly a sort 

 of jacket without sleeves made of calico, which only covered 

 the back and chest. Like the natives of the Nicobars, they 

 showed great curiosity to learn our names, and kept re- 

 peating them over and over, apparently to impress them 

 upon their memory. They had beyond a doubt taken 

 their own names from sailors and ship captains, with whom 

 they had once been in communication. 



Close to the shore, among some scattered palm-trees, stood 

 a few wretched huts, compared with which the bee-hive huts 

 of the Nicobar Islanders appear like palaces. They con- 

 sisted of a roofing woven of cocoa-nut palm-leaves, planted 

 upon the naked soil which serves as a floor, and closed in 

 front and rear with mats of similar texture. The interior 

 was no less poverty-stricken than the exterior. We could 

 see no articles of furniture beyond a few baskets and 



