Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage by Richard Hakluyt
page 98 of 168 (58%)
page 98 of 168 (58%)
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The houses are tents made of seal skins, pitched up with four fir quarters, four-square, meeting at the top, and the skins sewed together with sinews, and laid thereupon; they are so pitched up, that the entrance into them is always south, or against the sun. They have other sort of houses, which we found not to be inhabited, which are raised with stones and whalebones, and a skin laid over them to withstand the rain, or other weather; the entrance of them being not much unlike an oven's mouth, whereunto, I think, they resort for a time to fish, hunt, and fowl, and so leave them until the next time they come thither again. Their weapons are bows, arrows, darts, and slings. Their bows are of wood, of a yard long, sinewed on the back with firm sinews, not glued to, but fast girded and tied on. Their bow strings are likewise sinews. Their arrows are three pieces, nocked with bone and ended with bone; with those two ends, and the wood in the midst, they pass not in length half a yard, or little more. They are feathered with two feathers, the pen end being cut away, and the feathers laid upon the arrow with the broad side to the wood, insomuch, that they seem, when they are tied on, to have four feathers. They have likewise three sorts of heads to those arrows; one sort of stone or iron, proportioned like to a heart; the second sort of bone much like unto a stopt head, with a hook on the same, the third sort of bone likewise, made sharp at both sides, and sharp pointed. They are not made very fast, but lightly tied to, or else set in a nocke, that, upon small occasion, the arrow leaveth these heads behind them; they are of small force except they be very near when they shoot. |
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