12, CORALS AND CORAL ISLANDS. 
(Su) 
and has already been described (p. 168). The grove of cocoa- 
nut trees contains the sacred or public house of the island— 
a well-made structure measuring fifty feet by thirty-five in 
length and breadth, and twenty feet in height. In front of 
the building stands the deity of the place, consisting of a 
block of stone fourteen feet high, enveloped in mats; and also 
near by, a smaller idol, partially covered with matting. In 
the left corner there is a young cocoanut palm—usually a more 
beautiful object than the full-grown tree. 
This island and the two others near it were among the 
few, perhaps the last, examples that remained until 1840, 
of Pacific lands never before visited by the white man. 
The people therefore were in that purely savage state which 
Captain Cook found almost universal through the ocean in 
the latter part of last century. A few words respecting our 
reception at this coral island, may not, therefore, be an im- 
proper digression. 
The islanders knew nothing of any other land or people: 
—an ignorance not surprising, since the lagoons of the group 
have no good entrances, and a nation cannot be great in nav- 
igation or discovery without harbors. As a consequence, our 
presence was to them like an apparition. The simple in- 
habitants took us for gods from the sun, and, as we landed, 
came with abundant gifts of such things as they had, to pro- 
pitiate their celestial visitors. They, no doubt, imagined that 
our strange ship had sailed off from the sun when it touched 
the water at sunrise, or sunset, and any child among them 
could see that this was a reasonable supposition. The king, 
after embracing Captain Hudson, as the latter states in his 
Journal (Wilkes’s Narrative), rubbed noses, pointed to the 
sun, howled, moaned, hugged him again and again, put a mat 
around his waist, securing it with a cord of human hair, and 
