PORTER’S JOURNAL. 
121 
English hogs when he should kill the whole of them. When a 
marriage takes place they also have a feast, and in this consists 
the whole ceremony; the union is not binding, and the parties are 
at liberty to separate when they no longer like each other, pro¬ 
vided they have had no children. The girls are seldom married 
before they are nineteen or twenty years of age, and their licen¬ 
tious life prevents them from having children before that period; 
they therefore preserve their beauty to an advanced age. Before 
marriage they are at liberty to indulge themselves with whom 
they please, but after marriage the right of disposing of them re¬ 
mains with the husband. The women, different from those of 
almost every other Indian nation, are not subjected to any labo¬ 
rious work; their occupations are wholy domestic; to them belongs 
the manufacturing of cloth, the care of the house and children; 
the men cultivate the ground, catch fish, build canoes and houses, 
and protect their families; they are all artificers, and as they have 
but few wants they are perfect in the knowledge necessary to 
supply them. To be sure there are certain professional trades, 
which they are not all so perfect in, such as tattooing, and the 
manufacturing of ornaments for the ears; for those objects there 
are men who devote their whole attention to render themselves 
perfect; there are also professed barbers, and their doctors are, 
in some measure, professional men. Their furniture consists of 
matts of a superior workmanship, callabashes, baskets, kava cups, 
formed of the cocoa-nut, and cradles for their children hollowed out 
of a log and made with great neatness, some small chests also 
hollowed out of a solid piece with covers to them, wooden bowls and 
stands calculated to hang different objects on, so contrived that 
the rats cannot get on them. Their plumes and other articles of 
value, which would otherwise be injured by the rats, are suspend¬ 
ed in baskets from the roofs of their houses, by lines passing- 
through the bottom of an inverted callabash, to prevent those ani¬ 
mals from descending them. Agricultural implements consist 
only of sharp stakes for digging the ground; those for fishing con¬ 
sist of the net, bone and wooden harpoons, the rod and line, and 
fish hooks formed of the mother-of-peari, of which, as well as of 
the bone and wooden harpoons, partcuiar descriptions may be ne¬ 
cessary. 
