380 FOOD. FIRE. 



pigeons, parroquets, with a few other birds, and rats, there 

 being no other quadruped, nor any serpent/'* The dogs 

 were kept entirely for food, and Captain Cook assures us that 

 " a South Sea dog was little inferior to an English lamb ; their 

 excellence is probably owing to their being kept up, and fed 

 wholly on vegetables." The natives preferred dog to pork. 

 From the sea they obtained excellent fish and shell- fish. They 

 had also bread-fruit, bananas., plantains, yams, cocoa-nuts, pota- 

 toes, the sugar cane, a fruit not unlike an apple, and several 

 other plants which served for fruit, and required very little 

 culture. The bread-fruit tree supplied them with abundance 

 of fresh fruit for eight months, and during the other four 

 they used "mahie," which is a kind of sour paste, prepared 

 from the fermented ripe fruit. It is probable that nine- 

 tenths of their diet consisted of vegetable food; and the 

 common people scarcely ever tasted either pork or dog, 

 although the hogs appear to have been very abundant. 



They obtained fire by friction. When the wood was quite 

 dry the process did not take longer than two minutes, but in 

 wet weather it was very tedious. Having no pottery, they 

 did not boil their food. It is impossible, says Wallis, "to 

 describe the astonishment they expressed when they saw the 

 gunner, who, while he kept the market, used to dine on 

 shore, dress his pork and poultry by boiling them in a pot ; 

 having, as I have before observed, no vessel that would bear 

 the fire, they had no idea of hot water." t Captain Cook 

 also expressly states that "they have but two ways of ap- 

 plying fire to dress their food, broiling and baking." J 

 Mr. Tylor, however, has pointed out that they were ac- 

 quainted with the use of boiling stones, and that they 

 could not therefore have been entirely ignorant of hot 

 water. In order to bake a hog, they made a small pit 



* Cook's Voyage Kound the World, p. 187. t Z-c. vol. i., p. 484. 



J Second Voyage, vol. ii., p. 197. Early History of Mankind, p. 266. 



