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 
marat lay by the seaside, and everywhere under our feet were 
numberless human bones, chiefly ribs and vertebre. 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 1768, the people of Ziar- 
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. 
30th. At night we came to Otahowrou, 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 
