KEARAKEKUA BAY. 
37 
the noise and crowds of natives. The striking 
contrast between the state of the people of the 
place, their flagrant cheating in barter, &c., and 
the tranquillity and religious occupations of those 
we had left at Huahine, deeply affected them; 
and I endeavoured to excite gratitude to God, 
and sympathy for the strangers, in the minds of 
our Tahitian companions, by an address from the 
words of the apostle, “ And such were some of 
you,” &c. The smallness and confinement of the 
births below, and the heat of the weather, &c. 
did not appear to occasion so much unpleasant¬ 
ness to our Tahitian voyagers, as the loss of the 
luxury of bathing, to which they had been ac¬ 
customed on shore, two or three times every day, 
in the cool and flowing streams of their native 
islands ; and nothing, during the voyage, had 
been more grateful to them than a copious shower. 
At such seasons, they stripped off the greater part 
of their clothes, and, under the refreshing influ¬ 
ence of the rain, could scarcely refrain from 
dancing about the deck for joy. Early, therefore, 
on the morning after our arrival in Kearakekua 
bay, a party of our natives went on shore to 
bathe. Soon after breakfast, we landed on the 
north side of the bay, surprised at the striking 
and decisively volcanic aspect of the shore; the 
whole of that part of the coast seemed one 
extensive mass of barren lava, with here and 
there a straggling bush growing between the 
crevices, or in places where a partial decom¬ 
position had taken place. In one of the first 
houses which we entered, a man and a boy, appa¬ 
rently father and son, entertained us with a hura 
ta raau, singing to the beating of a stick: we 
could not comprehend very distinctly the burden 
