210 Pickering on the Language and Inhabitants 
This group, at present the most important of all in relation to 
the civilized world, has for many years been the resort of Amer- 
ican whaling-ships; and at the time when the American Mission 
was established there, the rude inhabitants led such a life as 
would be the natural consequence of a native ignorance, which had 
been just enough enlightened to be trained to the most disgusting 
licentiousness and depravity by an unrestrained intercourse with 
the profligate part of their civilized visiters, from the time of their 
discovery by Captain Cook; but since the establishment of the 
American Mission, now a little more than twenty years ago, an 
essential change has taken place in the condition of the people 
of these islands; and, when it is stated that reading and writing, 
and printing, too, are extensively diffused, and that the natives 
feel the most intense interest in those precious arts, an intelligent 
reader will desire no more in order to enable him to form an 
estimate of their present condition and future prospects. 
For this important change in their condition, —of which the 
natives are fully sensible, —they have been indebted to Americans. 
Their curiously constructed language, of more than Italian soft- 
ness, was first reduced to writing by American missionaries ; * 
and they now have in their own language elementary books of all 
the most useful and necessary kinds; an annual almanac, primers, 
spelling-books, and reading-books ; and among these | cannot 
omit mentioning books of arithmetic, the study of which is almost 
a passion with them, and, as some persons believe, has done more 
to excite their thinking powers than any other works which have 
ever been published for their use. The Old and New Testaments 
have been translated into their language, and have been for some 
* According to the principles of a systematic orthography recommended by 
the author of this paper, in “‘ Memoirs of the American Academy,”’ Vol. IV., 
p. 319. 
