perfumed and ornamented with flowers; they are in general large and wide over the shoulders; we were therefore disappointed in the judgment we had formed from the report of preceding visiters; and though here and there was to be seen a young person who might be esteemed comely, we saw few who, in fact, could be called beauties; yet they possess eminent feminine graces: their faces are never darkened with a scowl, or covered with a cloud of sullenness or suspicion. Their manners are affable and engaging; their step easy, firm, and graceful; their behaviour free and unguarded; always boundless in generosity to each other and to strangers; their tempers mild, gentle, and unaffected; slow to take offence, easily pacified, and seldom retaining resentment or revenge, whatever provocation they may have received. Their arms and hands are very delicately formed; and though they go barefoot, their feet are not coarse and spreading.

"As wives in private life, they are affectionate, tender, and obedient to their husbands, and uncommonly fond of their children: they nurse them with the utmost care, and are particularly attentive to keep the infant's limbs supple and straight. A cripple is hardly ever seen among them in early life. A rickety child is never known; any thing resembling it would reflect the highest disgrace on the mother. "The Otaheitans have no partitions in their houses; but it may be affirmed they have in many instances more refined ideas of decency than ourselves; and one long a resident scruples not to declare, that he never saw any appetite, hunger and thirst excepted, gratified in public. It is too true, that for the sake of gaining our extraordinary curiosities, and to please our brutes, they have appeared immodest in the extreme. Yet they lay this charge wholly at our door, and say that Englishmen are ashamed of nothing, and that we have led them to public acts of indecency never before practised among themselves.

Iron here, more precious than gold, bears down every barrier of restraint; honesty and modesty yield to the force of temptation."*

Such are the females and the mothers here described, whose interesting offspring are now peopling Pitcairn's Island, and who, while they inherit their mothers' virtues, have hitherto kept themselves free from their vices.

The greater part of the food of Otaheitans is vegetable. Hogs, dogs, and poultry are their only animals, and all of them serve for food. "We all agreed," says Cook, "that a South Sea dog was little inferior to an English lamb," which he ascribes to its being kept up and fed wholly on vegetables. Broiling and baking are the only two modes of applying fire to their cookery. Captain Wallis observes, that having no vessel in which water could be subjected to the action of fire, they had no more idea that it could be made hot, than that it could be made solid; and he mentions that one of the attendants of the supposed queen, having observed the surgeon fill the teapot from an urn, turned the cock himself, and received the water in his hand; and that as soon as he felt himself scalded, he roared out and began to dance about the cabin with the most extravagant and ridiculous expressions of pain and astonishment; his companions, unable to conceive what was the matter, staring at him in amaze, and not without some mixture of terror.

One of Oberea's peace-offerings to Mr. Banks, for the robbery of his clothes committed in her boat, was a fine fat dog, and the way in which it was prepared and baked was as follows. Tupei, the highpriest, undertook to perform the double office of butcher and cook. He first killed him by holding his hands close over his mouth and nose for the space of a quarter of an hour. A hole was then

*A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean, Appendix, p. 336, 342.

made in the ground about a foot deep, in which a fire was kindled, and some small stones placed in layers, alternately with the wood, to be heated. The dog was then singed, scraped with a shell, and the hair taken off as clean as if he had been scalded in hot water. He was then cut up with the same instrument, and his entrails carefully washed. When the hole was sufficiently heated, the fire was taken out, and some of the stones, being placed at the bottom, were covered with green leaves. The dog, with the entrails, was then placed upon the leaves, and other leaves being laid upon them, the whole was covered with the rest of the hot stones, and the mouth of the hole close stopped with mould. In somewhat less than four hours, it was again opened, and the dog taken out excellently baked, and the party all agreed that he made a very good dish. These dogs, it seems, are bred to be eaten, and live wholly on bread-fruit, cocoanuts, yams, and other vegetables of the like kind.

The food of the natives, being chiefly vegetable, consists of the various preparations of the breadfruit, of cocoanuts, bananas, plantains, and a great variety of other fruit, the spontaneous products of a rich soil and genial climate. The bread-fruit, when baked in the same manner as the dog was, is rendered soft, and not unlike a boiled potato; not quite so farinaceous as a good one, but more so than those of the middling sort. Much of this fruit is gathered before it is ripe, and by a certain process is made to undergo the two states of fermentation, the saccharine and acetous, in the latter of which it is moulded into balls, and called mahie. The natives seldom make a meal without this sour paste. Salt water is the universal sauce, without which no meal is eaten. Their drink in general consists of water, or the juice of the cocoanut, the art of producing liquors that intoxicate by fermentation being at this time happily unknown among them; neither

did they make use of any narcotic, as the natives of some other countries do opium, betel-nut, and tobacco. One day the wife of one of the chiefs came running to Mr. Banks, who was always applied to in every emergency and distress, and with a mixture of grief and terror in her countenance, made him understand that her husband was dying, in consequence of something the strangers had given him to eat. Mr. Banks found his friend leaning his head against a post, in an attitude of the utmost languor and despondency. His attendants brought out a leaf folded up with great care, containing part of the poison of the effects of which their master was now dying. On opening the leaf Mr. Banks found in it a chew of tobacco, which the chief had asked from some of the seamen, and imitating them, as he thought, he had rolled it about in his mouth, grinding it to powder with his teeth, and ultimately swallowing it. During the examination of the leaf he looked up at Mr. Banks with the most piteous countenance, and intimated that he had but a very short time to live. A copious draught of cocoanut milk, however, set all to rights, and the chief and his attendants were at once restored to that flow of cheerfulness and good-humour, which is the characteristic of these single-minded people.

There is, however, one plant from the root of which they extract a juice of an intoxicating quality, called ava, but Cook's party saw nothing of its effects, probably owing to their considering drunkenness as a disgrace. This vice of drinking ava is said to be peculiar almost to the chiefs, who vie with each other in drinking the greatest number of draughts, each draught being about a pint. They keep this intoxicating juice with great care from the

women.

As eating is one of the most important concerns of life here as well as elsewhere, Captain Cook's description of a meal made by one of the chiefs of

D

the island cannot be considered as uninteresting, and is here given in his own words.

"He sits down under the shade of the next tree, or on the shady side of his house, and a large quantity of leaves, either of the bread-fruit or bananas, are neatly spread before him upon the ground as a tablecloth; a basket is then set by him, that contains his provision, which, if fish or flesh, is ready dressed, and wrapped up in leaves, and two cocoanut shells, one full of salt water and one of fresh. His attendants, which are not few, seat themselves round him, and when all is ready, he begins by washing his hands and his mouth thoroughly with the fresh water, and this he repeats almost continually throughout the whole meal. He then takes part of his provision out of the basket, which generally consists of a small fish or two, two or three bread-fruits, fourteen or fifteen ripe bananas, or six or seven apples. He first takes half a bread-fruit, peels off the rind, and takes out the core with his nails; of this he puts as much into his mouth as it can hold, and while he chews it, takes the fish out of the leaves and breaks one of them into the salt water, placing the other, and what remains of the bread-fruit, upon the leaves that have been spread before him. When this is done, he takes up a small piece of the fish that has been broken into the salt water, with all the fingers of one hand, and sucks it into his mouth, so as to get with it as much of the salt water as possible. In the same manner he takes the rest by different morsels, and between each, at least very frequently, takes a small sup of the salt water, either out of the cocoanut shell, or the palm of his hand. In the mean time one of his attendants has prepared a young cocoanut, by peeling off the outer rind with his teeth, an operation which to a European appears very surprising; but it depends so much upon sleight, that many of us were able to do it before we left the island, and some that could