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PORTER’S JOURNAL. 
an end; these are planted on all the platforms of stones where 
women are not permitted to approach, and this practice appears 
more generally adopted than any other—the sticks used on such 
occasions are of a very light and white kind of soft wood (used 
by the natives for producing fire by friction) of the bark of which 
they make cordage of a handsome and strong quality. 
It remains for me now to say something of their domestic 
economy, their furniture, utensils, and implements: I have already 
described their houses, from which it will be seen that their apart¬ 
ments are few, and that however numerous may be the family, 
they have but one common sleeping place; this is covered with 
dry grass, on which mats are spread for the chief persons; the 
servants and others sleep on the grass alone or on matts if they 
have them. It has been represented by former voyagers, that the 
women of this great nation disseminated among the South Sea 
Islands, are not permitted to eat with the men, and that they are not 
allowed to eat pork on any occasion; those people are an excep¬ 
tion; men women and children eat together, although each have 
their messes in separate dishes, and the women are not prohibited 
from eating pork only during the existence of taboos, but even 
then they will eat it, if the men are not present, or if they will 
only have the complaisance to turn away their faces and not seem 
to notice them, which they generally do. Among tribes not ta¬ 
booed I have seen men and women eating pork together, as was 
the case at Lewis’s Bay, as I before mentioned. The men and 
women are both remarkably fond of pork, and from their desire 
to eat it one would suppose that it was an article of great rarity 
and scarcity among them, as in fact it is; for although the island 
abounds in hogs, the natives seldom kill them for the use of their 
families, but keep them for their feasts; and, on such occasionsj 
they will frequently kill five or six hundred at a time. If a re¬ 
lation die, they have a feast on the occasion; and they will save 
their hogs for years in order to make their feast abundant, in 
which consists its chief splendour. 
I gave Gattanewa some hogs of an English breed, and re¬ 
quested him not to kill any until they had become numerous; 
he told me he would not; that he intended to have a feast for his 
mother, and that he should not give it until he had an hundred 
