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Yet, perhaps the Indians and the Kamtschadales will be gradually moulded into a hardy, civilized people: and here may be the scene of many a fierce conflict between your people and the Russians, whose numbers, now four times as great as yours, increase almost as rapidly."
In some respects the Kamtschadales differ from the rest, but the extreme debasement arising from their libidinous brutality must not be described, and can scarcely be credited. Among all the Slavon nations of Europe, wives and daughters have ever been kept in a state of exclusion. Brides are purchased, and instantly become slaves.
The women are sufficiently ugly; their colour, which is equally dark, their coal black hair combed over their faces, blue painted lips, and tattooed hands, added to no remarkable cleanliness in their clothing, do not give them any great pretensions to loveliness.... However, I must do them the justice to say, that they are modest in the highest degree, and in this point form the completest contrast with the women of Nukahiva and of Otaheite.... The characteristic quality of an Aino is goodness of heart, which is expressed in the strongest manner in his countenance; and so far as we were enabled to observe their actions, they fully answered this expression.... The dress of the Ainos consists chiefly of the skins of tame dogs and seals; but I have seen some in a very different attire, which resembled the Parkis of the Kamtschadales, and is, properly speaking a white shirt worn over their other clothes.
"Their figure," says Kruzenstern, "dress, appearance, and their language, prove that they are the same people, as those of Saghalien; and the captain of the Castricum, when he missed the Straits of La Pérouse, might imagine, as well in Aniwa as in Alkys, that he was but in one island.... The Ainos are rather below the middle stature, being at the most five feet two or four inches high, of a dark, nearly black complexion, with a thick bushy beard, black rough hair, hanging straight down; and excepting in the beard they have the appearance of the Kamtschadales, only that their countenance is much more regular.
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