SEPT. 1770 DRESS AND HABITS 349 



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 Eadjas, 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 nourished 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 



