ITINERARIES. 



185 



The country round about is an exact level for five miles 

 from the town every v\^ay, and they say may be overflowed, 

 by cutting the banks at full sea, and letting in the water, 

 so that the town is very strongly situate and fortified, 

 nature and art conspiring to make it impregnable. We 

 observed, in a close near the town called Granswick, 

 great store of carum \_C. Carui, Linn.] It grows in 

 many places about this town, and in some places of the 

 fens in Lincolnshh'e. In this town there is a foundation 

 called Trinity House, which is a society of merchants, 

 and to it belong good revenues. There are maintained 

 thirty poor women, called sisters, every one of whom 

 hath a little chamber or cell to live in. This building 

 consists of a chapel, two rows of chambers below stairs 

 for the sisters, and two rooms above stairs, one very fair, 

 where the brethren of the society meet, in which hang 

 many tables of orders for the society's government ; 

 another large chamber where they make sails, in the 

 middle whereof hangeth the effigies of a native of Groen- 

 land,^' with a coat of skins upon him, sitting in a very 

 small boat or canoe, covered with skins. He hath, in 

 his right hand, a pair of wooden oars, wherewith he rows 

 his boat ; in his left a dart, vdth which he strikes fish ; 

 on his forehead a thing like a trencher, which serves as a 

 honne-grace to fence his eyes from the sun, and it may be 

 too, from the dashing of the water. Behind him lies a 

 bladder or skin-bag, in which we suppose he bestowed 

 the fish he caught. (Some told us it was a bladder full 

 of oil, with which he used to allure the fish to him.) The 

 boat is covered over with the same it is made of, except- 

 ing one hole wherein he sits, just fitted to his body ; so 

 that when he sits in it, his legs, and lower part, are 

 under cover or deck; the boat is thus contrived, that 

 when it shall be plunged by a wave it may rise again, no 



* Mr. Ray, in p. 25 of his 'Foreign Travels/ takes notice of seeing a 

 Groenland man in Ids boat, hanging in tlie entry of the Chirurgical and 

 Anatomical Theatre in Delft ; and there mentions seeing the same in the 

 Trinity House in Hull. 



