A kind of pinsen keeps their feet from cold,
Which after travels they put off, up-fold,
Themselves they warme, their ungirt limbes they rest
In straw, and houses, like to sties.”
I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 131.
Wood’s description of the Indian apparel is very like Morton’s. He says, however: “The chiefe reasons they render why they will not conforme to our English apparell are because their women cannot wash them when they be soyled, and their meanes will not reach to buy new when they have done with their old; and they confidently beleeve, the English will not be so liberall as to furnish them upon gifture: therefore they had rather goe naked than be lousie, and bring their bodies out of their old tune, making them more tender by a new acquired habit, which poverty would constrain them to leave.” (Prospect, p. 56).
The description given by Winslow (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 365) is very similar to Morell’s. See also Gookin’s Indians, I. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. i. p. 152; Josselyn’s Two Voyages, pp. 128-9, and Williams’s Key, ch. xx.
Smith (True Travels, vol. i. p. 129) says: “For their apparell, they are sometimes covered with the skinnes of wilde beasts, which in winter are dressed with the hayre, but in Sommer without. The better sort use large mantels of Deare skins, not much differing in fashion from the Irish mantels. Some imbrodered with white beads, some with copper, others painted after their manner. But the common sort have scarce to cover their nakednesse, but with grasse, the leaves of trees or such like. We have seene some use mantels made of Turkey feathers so prettily wrought and woven with threads that nothing could be discerned but the feathers.”
[248] Speaking of a ceremony common to the Algonquins and the Hurons, of propitiating their fishing-nets by formally marrying them every year to two young girls, Parkman says: “As it was indispensable that the brides should be virgins, mere children were chosen” (The Jesuits in North America, p. lxix. note). The subject of female chastity among the Indians has already been referred to (supra, p. [17]), and it is extremely questionable whether they had any conception of it. Winslow, in his Good News (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 364) says:—“When a maid is taken in marriage, she first cutteth her hair, and after weareth a covering on her head, till her hair be grown out. Their women are diversely disposed; some as modest, as they will scarce talk one with another in the company of men, being very chaste also; yet others seem light, lascivious, and wanton.... Some common strumpets there are, as well as in other places; but they are such as either never married, or widows, or put away for adultery; for no man will keep such an one to wife.” Strachey (Historie, p. 65), says of the Virginians: “Their younger women goe not shadowed [clothed] amongst their owne companie, until they be nigh eleaven or twelve returnes of the leafe old, nor are they much ashamed thereof, and therefore would the before remembered Pochahuntas, a well featured, but wanton yong girle, Powhatan’s daughter, sometymes resorting to our fort, of the age then of eleven or twelve yeares, get the boyes forth with her into the markett place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning up their heeles upwards, whome she would followe, and wheele so her self, naked as she was, all the fort over; but being over twelve yeares, they put on a kind of semecinctum lethern apron (as doe our artificers or handycrafts men) before their bellies, and are very shamefac’t to be seen bare.” Ellis, in his Red Man and White Man (p. 185), remarks on this point: “The obscenity of the savages is unchecked in its revolting and disgusting exhibitions. Sensuality seeks no covert.”