126 POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
is represented by some as having been an enter¬ 
prising and restless young man, aspiring to share 
the government with his cousin, if not to reign in 
his stead. The late king Tamehameha, a short 
time before his death, left the government of the 
islands to his eldest son Rihoriho, and the care of 
the gods, their temples, and the support of their 
worship, to the king and Kekuaokalani, together 
with the rest of the chiefs. 
Almost the first public act of the young king 
Rihoriho, and before the arrival of any Mis¬ 
sionary, was the abolition of the national idolatry, 
and all the restrictions of the tabu system by 
which it was upheld. This system, with all its 
superstitious cruelty, had existed, and had ex¬ 
erted its degrading yet almost supernatural influ¬ 
ence over the people, from time immemorial; and 
it required no small degree of courage by one 
single act to abrogate its inflexible laws, and 
destroy its dreaded power. But several acts of 
Rihoriho’s reign shew that he possessed a mind 
well adapted for such undertakings. 
His motives for this decisive measure appear to 
have been, in the first place, a desire to ameliorate 
the condition of his wives, and the females in 
general, whom the tabu sunk into a state of 
extreme wretchedness and degradation, obliging 
them to subsist only on inferior kinds of food, 
and not allowing them to cook their provisions, 
such as they were, at the same fire, or even eat in 
the same place where the men took theirs. And 
in the second place, he seems to have been influ¬ 
enced by a wish to diminish the power of the 
priests, and avoid that expenditure of labour and 
property which the support of idolatry required, 
and which he was anxious to employ for other 
