428 NEW ZEALAND. 



they exhibited but a squalid and dirty appearance, both in their dress 

 and persons. 



No native music was heard by any of our officers, and they seem 

 to have little or none in their composition. In their attempts to sing 

 the hymns, chaunts, or old psalm-tunes, they entirely failed to pro- 

 duce any thing like a resemblance. The pitch of their voices when 

 speaking, is higher than that of Europeans, (the French excepted,) 

 and that of the women was not a tone above, which gives additional 

 coarseness to their character. Both sexes have but little intonation 

 in conversation, and there are no tones heard which would indicate 

 sympathy of feeling. 



Chatham Island, which will probably soon be connected with the 

 English colony of New Zealand, is now considered as a nest of 

 rogues, and several vessels have been robbed there. Its inhabitants 

 have a tradition that they are derived from New Zealand, whence 

 their progenitors came about a century since, having been driven off 

 in their canoes by a storm, and that on landing they had changed 

 their language. The change consisted in reversing the ordinary 

 construction of their phrases, and the syllables of words, as, for 

 Hare-mai, Mai-hare; and for Paika, Ka-pai. The natives of Chat- 

 ham Island are not tattooed, do not wear clothing, and are said to 

 be more intelligent than their progenitors. They were conquered a 

 few years ago by a party of New Zealanders from Port Nicholson, 

 who had been driven out by the Kapiti tribes, under the celebrated 

 Rauparaka. 



An examination of the charts of the Bay of Islands was made, and 

 some additional soundings added; the meridian distance, measured by 

 our chronometers from Sydney, gave the longitude of the point oppo- 

 site Mr. Clendon's wharf, 174° 07' E.; its latitude was found to be 35° 

 17' S. The dip and intensity observations were also made here, and 

 will be found registered with those results in the volume on Physics. 



Mr. Couthouy, who was left sick at Sydney, took passage in a 

 vessel to Tahiti, and passed through Cook's Straits, touching at 

 several of its anchorages. To his observations I am indebted for the 

 following information relative to the southern part of these islands. 



The first point they made was the Sugar Loaf Islands and Mount 

 Egmont. The charts published by Clintz at Sydney, give also the 

 height of this mountain as fourteen thousand feet, but this was believed 

 to be erroneous,* for only a small portion of the top was covered with 



* I have seen other authorities, which give its height at eight thousand feet. 



