In all there are eleven packages of bodies.  Only two or three have as yet been opened.  The body of the chief is inclosed in a large basket-like structure, about four feet in height.  Outside the wrappings are finely wrought sea-grass matting, exquisitely close in texture, and skins.  At the bottom is a broad hoop or basket of thinly cut wood, and adjoining the center portions are pieces of body armor composed of reeds bound together.  The body is covered with the fine skin of the sea-otter, always a mark of distinction in the interments of the Aleuts, and round the whole package are stretched the meshes of a fish-net, made of the sinews of the sea lion; also those of a bird-net.  There are evidently some bulky articles inclosed with the chief’s body, and the whole package differs very much from the others, which more resemble, in their brown-grass matting, consignments of crude sugar from the Sandwich Islands than the remains of human beings.  The bodies of a pappoose and of a very little child, which probably died at birth or soon after it, have sea-otter skins around them.  One of the feet of the latter projects, with a toe-nail visible.  The remaining mummies are of adults.

One of the packages has been opened, and it reveals a man’s body in tolerable preservation, but with a large portion of the face decomposed.  This and the other bodies were doubled up at death by severing some of the muscles at the hip and knee joints and bending the limbs downward horizontally upon the trunk.  Perhaps the most peculiar package, next to that of the chief, is one which incloses in a single matting, with sea-lion skins, the bodies of a man and woman.  The collection also embraces a couple of skulls, male and female, which have still the hair attached to the scalp.  The hair has changed its color to a brownish red.  The relics obtained with the bodies include a few wooden vessels scooped out smoothly:  a piece of dark, greenish, flat stone, harder than the emerald, which the Indians use to tan skins; a scalp-lock of jet-black hair; a small rude figure, which may have been a very ugly doll or an idol; two or three tiny carvings in ivory of the sea-lion, very neatly executed; a comb, a necklet made of bird’s claws inserted into one another, and several specimens of little bags, and a cap plaited out of sea-grass and almost water-tight.

In Cary’s translation of Herodotus (1853, p. 180) the following passage occurs which purports to describe the manner in which the Macrobrian Ethiopians preserved their dead.  It is added, simply as a matter of curious interest, nothing more, for no remains so preserved have ever been discovered.