304 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
to their hiding-places, while others repaired to the 
villages, and destroyed the wives, children, infirm 
and afflicted relatives, of those who had fled before 
them in the field. These defenceless wretches 
seldom made much resistance to the lawless and 
merciless barbarians, whose conduct betrayed a 
cowardly delight in torturing their helpless victims. 
Plunder and revenge were the principal objects in 
these expeditions. Every thing valuable they 
destroyed or bore away, while the miserable objects 
of their vengeance were deliberately murdered. 
No age or sex was spared. The infant that un¬ 
consciously smiled in its mother’s arms, and the 
venerable gray-haired father or mother, expe¬ 
rienced unbridled and horrid barbarity. The aged 
were at once despatched, though embowelling and 
every horrid torture was practised. The females 
experienced brutality and murder, and the tender- 
est infants were perhaps transfixed to the mother’s 
heart by a ruthless weapon—caught up by ruffian 
hands, and dashed against the rocks or the trees— 
or wantonly thrown up in the air, and caught on 
the point of the warrior’s spear, where it writhed 
in agony and died. A spear was sometimes thrust 
through the infant’s head from ear to ear, a line 
passed through the aperture, and when the horrid 
carnage has been over, and the kindling brand has 
been applied to the dwellings, while the flames 
have crackled, the dense columns of smoke as¬ 
cended, and the ashes mingled with the blood 
from the victims, the cruel warriors have retired 
with fiendish exultation, some bearing the spoils of 
plunder, some having two or three infants hanging 
on the spear they bore across their shoulders, and 
others dragging along the sand those that were 
strung together by a line through their heads, or a 
