182 LETTER FROM MR. ARMSTRONG. 
Mr. Armstrong, in a letter, dated Valparaiso, 
Oct. 18, 1849, said : 
" The people tell rne they have, for the pre- 
sent, a good supply of books, having received 
a very suitable grant from the Society for Pro- 
moling Christian Knowledge. The whole of the 
books will, I am sure, highly delight them ; and, 
from all I hear, I have no doubt they will be 
prized, and made good use of." 
The more recent account given by Captain 
Morshead, in a letter to Rear-Admiral Moresby, 
dated Dec. 15, 1853, deserves to be added to 
the array of testimony to the character of the 
islanders. 
" With reference to the provisions that you 
entrusted to my discretion, I have left them on 
the island. Their yarn harvest had been a fair 
average ; but owing to a long drought, great 
fears were entertained for the potato crop, on 
which they are equally dependent. One whaler 
only had been supplied for the year, yet there 
was not on the island a single yam, potato, hog 
or goat available for traffic, although they would 
exchange them for an equal amount of nutri- 
ment in biscuit or flour. Their famine has taught 
them a good lesson, for in many houses I saw 
small parcels of biscuit tied up to the beams 
to await their pending scarcity. Under these 
circumstances, I was induced to leave the sup- 
plies with directions that they were to be 
reserved for the contingency. 
" It has long been their custom to leave 
any cases at issue for the decision of a captain 
of a man-of-war as a final appeal. Only one 
