NARRATIVE OF THE CRUISE. 
709 
the perforation usually dragged down by the suspension of ornaments, so that in a profile 
view of the face the large aperture in the septum is looked through by the observer. 
Some of the natives (about one in every fifteen or twenty) have most remarkable 
long Jewish noses, as at Humboldt Bay. It was at first imagined that this form of nose 
was produced to some extent by long action of excessively heavy nose ornaments, but 
one youth of only sixteen or seventeen was seen with such a nose very fully developed, 
and more than one woman with a well-marked arched nose with dependent tip, and the 
women appear to wear no nose ornaments. 
The earlobes of all the men were enlarged, being slit and dragged down into long 
loops by the weight of suspended ornaments. 
The women wear as their only covering two bunches of grass, one in front, the other 
behind. The dress of the men, besides a white cowry shell ( Ovulum ovum), consists 
occasionally of a narrow strip of bark cloth about 5 feet long and 6 or 8 inches in 
breadth, which is almost white when new and clean (see PL XXIX.). The cloth is in 
the form of a long natural sac, open at both ends, being evidently loosened from the cut 
limb of the tree from which it is made by beating, and then drawn off entire. This cloth 
is sometimes reddened by being rubbed with a red earth also used by the natives for 
smearing their bodies. No better native cloth was seen ; and the natives apparently do 
not know the method of fusing the fibrous material from several pieces of bark together, 
so as to form tappa, like that of Fiji or Tonga. 
The hair in the women, young and old, is cut short all over the head, and worn in 
this simple fashion, without decoration of any kind. In the boys the hair is short, 
probably cut short, as in the women, and in the older men the hair is always short. 
Only the young men of apparently from eighteen to thirty or so wear the hair long and. 
combed out into a mop or bush. The mop of hair in the young' men, possibly the 
warriors (though numbers of adults still in full vigour, had their hair short), is carefully 
combed out, often reddened, and greased. A triangular comb is usually worn in it 
(see PI. I. fig. 4), also cocks’ feathers or plumes of the Nicobar Pigeon or the Night 
Heron, bound together in tufts and fastened on to the ends of short sticks of wood, are 
worn as hairpins. 
It must be remembered that the native ornaments of the Pacific Islands are all made 
to show on a dark skin. White shell or tusk ornaments look exceedingly w T ell against 
the dark skins of natives, although when removed and handled by whites they show to 
little advantage. The young girls at the Admiralty Islands sometimes wear a necklace or 
two, but they are never decorated to the same extent as are the men, who seem averse to 
part with any of their finery to the women. The old women have no ornaments. One 
girl was seen with only a necklace of the beads procured from the ship ; and another 
had one of small unshaped lumps of wood, worn apparently rather as a charm than an 
ornament. 
