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 
