“The natives I shall consider in their persons, language, manners, religion, and government, with my sense of their original. For their persons, they are generally tall, straight, well-built, and of singular proportion; they tread strong and clever, and mostly walk with a lofty chin. Of complexion, black, but by design, as the gypsies in England: they grease themselves with bear’s fat, clarified; and using no defence against sun or weather, their skins must needs be swarthy. Their eye is little and black, not unlike a straight-looked Jew. The thick lip and flat nose, so frequent with the East Indians and Blacks, are not common to them; many of them have fine Roman noses.
“Their language is lofty, yet narrow; but like the Hebrew, in signification full. Like short-hand in writing, one word serveth in the place of three, and the rest are supplied by the understanding of the hearer; imperfect in their tenses, wanting in their moods, participles, adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections.
“Of their customs and manners there is much to be said: I will begin with children. So soon as they are born, they wash them in water; and while very young, and in cold weather, they plunge them in the rivers, to harden and embolden them. The children will go very young—at nine months, commonly: if boys, they go a fishing till ripe for the woods, which is about fifteen; then they hunt, and after having given some proofs of their manhood by a good return of skins, they may marry; else it is a shame to think of a wife. The girls stay with their mothers, and help to hoe the ground, plant corn, and carry burdens: and they do well to use them to that young, which they must do when they are old; for the wives are the true servants of the husbands, otherwise the men are very affectionate to them.
“When the young women are fit for marriage, they wear something upon their heads for an advertisement, but so as their faces are hardly to be seen but when they please. The age they marry at, if women, is about thirteen and fourteen; if men, seventeen and eighteen; they are rarely elder.
“Their houses are mats, or barks of trees, set on poles, in the fashion of an English barn, but out of the power of the winds, for they are hardly higher than a man: they lie on reeds, or grass. In travel, they lodge in the woods, about a great fire, with the mantle of duffils they wear by day wrapt about them, and a few boughs stuck round them.
“Their diet is maize, or Indian corn, divers ways prepared; sometimes roasted in the ashes; sometimes beaten and boiled with water, which they call homine; they also make cakes not unpleasant to eat. They have likewise several sorts of beans and peas that are good nourishment; and the woods and rivers are their larder.”
BROCK’S MONUMENT
FROM THE AMERICAN SIDE.