WHALING VOYAGE. 
383 
paroxysms, of swallowing a quart in two or three 
draughts. When they came on board our ship, they 
stole every thing that they could lay their hands on, 
and if it had not been for our vigilance we should 
have been considerable losers from their visit. Pro- 
stitution is also carried on without limit, wives and 
daughters are compelled to abandon themselves for 
very trifling considerations. In fact, we found them 
the very worst people we had met with during our 
travels, although forty years’ expense and trouble had 
been devoted to them. They were indeed vastly infe- 
rior to the St. John’s Islanders, who had not a single 
European residing among them. So bad indeed had 
they become, that they had actually formed the plan of 
seizing our ship, of which we were informed by Mr. 
Platt and the two kings, who were father and son, and 
we thus succeeded in frustrating their designs. 
If expeditions, having for their object the moral or 
religious education and improvement of these islanders, 
are still to be sent out, at the expense of our liberal and 
well - meaning fellow - countrymen, is it not high time 
that a different system should be pursued, by which we 
should have a better chance of promoting the extension 
of the above objects, finding that the old system, after 
having been persevered in with great obstinacy for forty 
years, has entirely failed? 
The old king of Bolabola, who had formerly been very 
pic$us, had, like the rest of his countrymen, much de- 
generated, and seemed to possess but little real power 
among his people ; for when the native pilot, who had 
