104 OTAHITE CHAP, v 



high ; on these they offer meat of all kinds to the gods. 

 We have thus seen large hogs offered; and here were the 

 skulls of above fifty of them, besides those of dogs, which 

 the priest who accompanied us assured us were only a small 

 fraction of what had been here sacrificed. This marai and 

 apparatus for sacrifice belonged, we were told, to Oborea and 

 Oamo. 



The greatest pride of an inhabitant of Otahite is to 

 have a grand marai; in this particular our friends far 

 exceed any one in the island, and in the Dolphin's time the 

 first of them exceeded every one else in riches and respect. 

 The reason of the difference of her present appearance, I 

 found by an accident which I now relate. Our road to the 

 marai lay by the seaside, and everywhere under our feet were 

 numberless human bones, chiefly ribs and vertebrae. So 

 singular a sight surprised me much, and I inquired the reason. 

 I was told that in the month called by them Owarahew last, 

 which answers to our December 1*768, the people of Tiar- 

 reboo made a descent here and killed a large number of 

 people, whose bones we now saw ; that upon this occasion 

 Oborea and Oamo were obliged to flee for shelter to the 

 mountains ; that the conquerors burnt all the houses, which 

 were very large, and took away all the hogs, etc. ; that the 

 turkey and goose which we had seen were part of the spoils, 

 as were the jaw-bones which we had also seen ; these had 

 been carried away as trophies, and are used by the Indians 

 here in exactly the same manner as the North Americans 

 do scalps. 



30^. At night we came to Otakourou, the very place at 

 which we were on the 28th of May; here we were among 

 our intimate friends, who expressed the pleasure they had 

 in entertaining us, by giving us a good supper and good 

 beds, in which we slept the better for being sure of reaching 

 Matavie [where the ship lay] to-morrow night at the farthest. 

 Here we learned that the bread-fruit (a little of which we 

 saw just sprouting upon the trees) would not be fit to eat 

 in less than three months. 



2nd July. All our friends crowded this morning to see 



