A. S. Bickmore on the Ainos of Saghalien, 367 
The next account of this hairy people appears in a letter 
from the Jesuit, Pcre Hieronymts de Angelis, written in 
Japan in 1622, a year before he was burnt at Yedo.* In 
the year 1620 he reached Saghalien, according to Krusen- 
stern, and was probably the first European who had made his 
way so far through the Japanese empire. As he not only saw 
the Ainos, but lived among them, his descriptions are authori- 
tative. 
“* As for the appearance of the inhabitants, they are coarse 
and of larger stature than men generally are: more inclining 
in color to white than to brown. They wear long beards, 
sometimes down to the middle. They shave the hair of the 
small. Their stuffs are of silk, cotton or linen, For arms 
separate and independent tribes.) “The lord of Matsmay as- 
sured me that the inhabitants of Yesso went to three islands 
. 
not far distant from their country, the inhabitants of © 
from those 
which had no beards and a very different language 
of Yesso, to purchase fish-skins, which they call raccoon. 
But he did not know whether those islands were to the south 
or north of Yesso.” (These people who had “no beard” and 
had “fish-skins” to sell, were without doubt some of the 
Tungusic tribes, on the shores of the continent, or perhaps 
the Gilyaks, who at that time certainly inhabited the islands 
in Tugur Gulf north of the mouth of the Amoor, and who 
chiefly dress themselves in fish-skins now. The Tungus on 
the middle Amoor had probably been supplied with cotton 
stuffs from China for centuries before that date, A. D, 1565.) _ 
*“ As to their knowledge of another world and of a future 
* Witsen’s “‘Noord-oost Tartarye,” and Siebold’s De Vries, p. 99. 
