1770 ORNAMENTS, ETC. 235 



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 some- 

 times 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 ap- 

 pearance. 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 



