404 NEW ZEALAND. 



This to me was the most entertaining part of the exhibition. They di I 

 not appear selfish towards each other ; the children were taken care 

 of, and all seemed to enjoy themselves. I received many thanks in 

 passing among them, and their countenances betokened contentment. 

 Although they were clothed for the occasion in their best, 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 produce 

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

 ing, 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 conversa- 

 tion, 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 construc- 

 tion of their phrases, and the syllables of words, as, for Hare-ma i, 

 Mai-hare; and for Paika, Ka-pai. The natives of Chatham Island 

 are not tattooed, do not wear clothing, and are said to be more intelli- 

 gent 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 



