Volume 1

Himalayan journals, or, notes of a naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia mountains, &c / by Joseph Dalton Hooker.

Joseph Dalton Hooker

Date:: 1854

Credit: Himalayan journals, or, notes of a naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia mountains, &c / by Joseph Dalton Hooker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$Ciui'. V. partners, ivlio wear only one.^ When in full dress, the woman’s costume is extremely ornamental and ]iicturesque; besides the shirt and petticoat she wears a small sleeveless woollen cloak, of gay pattern, usually covered with crosses, and fastened in front by a girdle of silver chains. Her neck is loaded with silver chains, amber necklaces, &c., and her head adorned with a coronet of scarlet cloth, studded with seed-pearls, jewels, glass beads, &c. The common dress is a long robe of indi, a cloth of coarse silk, spun from the cocoon of a large caterpillar that is found wild at the foot of the hills, and is also cultivated: it feeds on many difterent leaves, Sal {Shorea), castor-oil, &c. In diet, they are gross feeders; f rice, however, forming their chief sustenance; it is grown without irrigation, and produces a large, flat, coarse grain, which becomes gelati- nous, and often pink, when cooked. Pork is a staple dish : and they also eat elephant, and all kinds of animal food. When travelling, they live on whatever they can And, whether animal or vegetable. Fern-tops, roots of ScitaminecB, and their flower-buds, various leaves (it is difficult to say what not), and fungi, are chopped up, fried with a little oil, and eaten. Their cooking is coarse and dirty. Salt is costly, but prized; pawn (Betel pepper) is never eaten. Tobacco they are too poor to buy, and too indolent to grow and cure. Spices, oil, &c. are rehshed. They drink out of little wooden cups, turned from knots of maple, or other woods ; these are very curious on several accounts; they are very pretty, often polished, and mounted with silver. Some are supposed to be antidotes against * Ermauu (Travels in Siberia, ii. p. 204) mentions the Bui-aet women as wearing two tails, and fillets with jewels, and the men as having one queue only. + Dr. Campbell’s definition of the Lepcha’s Flora cibaria, is, that he eats, or must have eaten, everything soft enough to chew ; foi', as he knows whatever is poisonous, he must have tried all; his knowledge being wholly empirical.$