Note 246 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN.
Reading edition
In his Latin poem on New England, which the Rev. William Morell wrote during his eighteen months’ residence at Wessagusset as the spiritual head of the Robert Gorges settlement of 1623, there is a description of the Indian and his garments. The following is the author’s English rendering of his more elegant Latin original:—
“Whose hayre is cut with greeces, yet a locke Is left; the left side bound up in a knott: Their males small labour but great pleasure know, Who nimbly and expertly draw the bow; Traind up to suffer cruell heat and cold, Or what attempt so ere may make them bold; Of body straight, tall, strong, mantled in skin Of deare or bever, with the hayre-side in; An otter skin their right armes doth keepe warme, To keepe them fit for use, and free from harme; A girdle set with formes of birds or beasts, Begirts their waste, which gentle gives them ease. Each one doth modestly bind up his shame, And deare-skin start-ups reach up to the same; 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.”