324 CAPTAIN COOK'S VOYAGES 



hinder the natives from visiting us daily. They frequently 

 brought us a tolerable supply of fish, either sardines, or what 

 resembled them much, a small kind of bream, and some- 

 times small cod. 



" On the 18th, a party of strangers, in six or eight canoes, 

 came into the cove, where they remained looking at us for 

 some time, and then retired without coining alongside either 

 ship. We supposed that our old friends, who were more 

 numerous about us than these new visitors, would not 

 permit them to have any intercourse with us. We also 

 found that many of the principal natives who lived near us, 

 carried on a trade with more distant tribes in the articles 

 they had procured for us. For we observed that they w r ould 

 frequently disappear for four or five days at a time, and 

 then return with fresh cargoes of skins and curiosities, 

 which our people were so passionately fond of, that they 

 always came to a good market. Nothing would go down 

 with our visitors but metal ; and brass had by this time 

 supplanted iron, being so eagerly sought after, that, before 

 we left this place, hardly a bit of it was left in the ships, 

 except what belonged to our necessary instruments. 

 Whole suits of clothes were stripped of every button ; 

 bureaus of their furniture, and copper kettles, Lin canisters, 

 candle-sticks, and the like, all went to wreck. 



" After a fortnight's bad weather, the 19th proving a fair 

 day, we availed ourselves of it to get up the topmasts and 

 yards, and to fix up the rigging ; and having now finished 

 most of our heavy work, I set out next morning to take a 

 view of the Sound. I first went to the west point, where I 

 found a large village. The people received me very 

 courteously. In most of the houses were women at work, 

 making dresses of the plant or bark before mentioned, which 

 they executed exactly in the same manner that the New 

 Zealanders manufacture their cloth. Others were occupied 

 in opening and curing fish. 



" I now found, by traversing a few miles west of this 

 village, what I had before conjectured, that the land under 

 which the ships lay was an island, and that there were many 

 smaller ones lying scattered in the Sound, on the west of it. 

 Opposite the north end of our island, upon the mainland, 

 I observed a village, and there I landed. The inhabitants of 

 it were not so polite as those of the other. But this cold 

 reception seemed owing to one surly chief, who would not let 

 me enter their houses, following me wherever I went, and 

 several times, by expressive signs, marking his impatience 

 that I should be gone. Some of the young women, better 

 pleased with us than was their inhospitable chief, dressed 

 themselves expeditiously in their best apparel, and wel- 



