60 INHABITANTS OF THE FRIENDLY ISLANDS. 
men apart. If the family be large, there are small huts adjoining, to 
which the servants retire at night, so that privacy is much observed. 
The clothes they wear in the day serves for a covering at night. 
Their whole fortune consists of a bowl or two, in which they make 
kava, a few gourds, cocoa-nut shells, and some small wooden stools 
which serve them for pillows. 
They d isplay much ingenuity in building and navigating their 
canoes. The only tools that they use to construct them, which are 
very dexterously made, are hatchets, or rather thick adzes, of a smooth 
black stone that abounds at Toofoa, augers made of shark’s teeth 
fixed on small handles, and rasps of a rough skin of a fish fastened 
on flat pieces of wood, thinner on one side, with handles. The cord- 
age is made from the fibres of the cocoa-nut husk, which, though 
nine or ten inches long, they plait about the size of a quill, to any 
length, and roll it up in balls, from which the larger ropes are made 
by twisting several of these together. The lines that they fish with 
are as strong and even as the best cord we make. 
Their weapons are clubs of different sorts, spears, and darts. They 
have also bows and arrows for shooting birds. The stoo'ls are about 
two feet long, but only four or five inches high, and four broad, bending 
downward in the middle, with four strong legs, and circular feet; the 
whole made of one piece of black or brown wood, neatly polished, 
and inlaid with bits of ivory. Yams, plantains, bread-fruit, and 
cocoa-nuts, compose the greatest part of their vegetable diet. 
Of their animal food, the chief articles are hogs, fowl, fish, and 
shell-fish : the lo^er people eat rats. Their food is generally dressed 
by baking, and they have the art of making, from difterent kinds of 
fruit, several dishes, which Captain Cook’s people esteemed very good. 
The women eat with the men, but there are certain ranks among; 
them that can neither eat nor drink together; They seem to have 
no set time for meals. They go to bed as soon as it is dark, and 
rise with the dawn. Their diversions are chiefly singing, dancing, 
and music. The dancing of the men has a thousand different motions 
with the hands, performed with an ease and grace not to be described 
but by those who have seen them. Most of the men satisfy them- 
selves with one wife ; the chiefs, however, have commonly several, 
though only one is looked upon as mistress of the family. 
When any person of rank dies, his body is washed and decorated 
by women appointed for the occasion ; who, by their customs, must 
not touch any food with their hands for many months afterwards ; 
and the length of the time that they are thus proscribed is the greater 
in proportion to the rank of the chief whom they had washed. The 
concern of these people for the dead is extraordinary. They beat 
their teeth with stones, strike a shark’s tooth into the head until the 
blood flows in streams, and thrust spears into the inner part of the 
thigh, into their sides below the arm-pits, and through the cheeks 
into the mouth. But these painful operations are only practised to 
the dead nearly related. Their long and general mourning proves 
that they consider death as a very great evil, and this is confirmed 
by a very old custom which they practise to avert it. They suppose 
that the Deity will accept of the little finger, as a sort of sacrifice to 
