SANDWICH ISLANDS. 
23 
prudent to attempt. But though, by various causes, image 
worship is abandoned, and the expectation of returning 
chiefs and benefactors given up, there is still one office of 
the prophets that remains; and that is, the supposed power 
of controlling the future by spells and incantations. An 
enemy is still imagined to have the power of destroying 
whom he hates, by procuring a priest to pray him to death, 
and sometimes a counter charm is sought in the prayers of 
another man of power. It is generally such as consume 
away by lingering disorders, that are supposed to be under 
the influence of evil prayers ; the life or death of the pa¬ 
tient, powerfully affected by imagination, stamps the cha¬ 
racter of the contending priests. 
Such was the state of the Sandwich Islanders, and such 
the progress they had made in civilization, when Captain 
Cook first discovered Atooi or Tauai, Woahoo or Oahu, 
Oneheow, Orehua, and Tahoora, in 1778, and O'why bee or 
Hawaii, and Mo wee or Maui in the end of the same year. 
These Islands were, at that time, under the dominion of 
almost as many separate chiefs between whom there were 
frequent wars both by sea and land, for these people were 
particularly dexterous in the management of their canoes *, 
* It is remarkable that some of their canoes were built of pine-wood, which 
does not grow in any of the Islands. The trees are drifted thither, appa- 
