Volume 181301

A general collection of voyages and travels, including the most interesting records of navigators and travellers, from the discovery of America by Columbus, in 1492, to the travels of Lord Valentia / [William Fordyce Mavor].

  • William Fordyce Mavor
Date:
1813
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A general collection of voyages and travels, including the most interesting records of navigators and travellers, from the discovery of America by Columbus, in 1492, to the travels of Lord Valentia / [William Fordyce Mavor]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    middle stature, and well-formed. Their hair was black, Jank, and thick, generally cropt above. the ears, though some.had it. done up like the tresses of wo- men, ‘Their countenances were open; and, except that their foreheads were too prominent, their fea- tures might be esteemed regular, Some of them were painted | black, white, and red; but males as well as females appe: ared in the simplest guise of nature, Being perfectly unacquainted with the properties of iron, they handled the edge of a naked sword, un- conscious of its power of harm. They had marks, however, of war, that pest of civilized as well as sa- vage life; and being interrogated by signs how they came by their scars, they answered in the same man- ner that they had received them in their-own de- fence, when repelling the aggressions of the inhabi- tants of other islands that wished to enslave them. Next morning, a great number of Indians came on board in their canoes. These are formed by excavat- ing the trank of a tree, and are rowed with paddles. Some were very small; others were capable of cons taining forty persons. The Indians wore neither jewels nor any kind of metal, except small platés of gold suspended from their nostrils, which frecious metal, as they signified by signs, came from tHe south and south-west, where there were great and populous countries. Every article of European produce or manufacture, however insignificant, was grasped at with avidity ; and some of them were happy to exchange a quantity of well-spun cotton, weighing twenty-five pounds, fog three smal] pieces of brass coin not worth a farthing. They did not indeed seem impressed with a belief that these articles were valuable in themselves ; but novelty gave them a charm; and they innocently and igno- rantly wished to possess some memorial of a race de+ scended from heaven, as they esteemed the whites. ‘he admiral, leaving the place where he first landed, coasted along the island in his beat to the north-west,