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Updated: June 25, 2025
Two priests came forward to Otoo, one placing a young plantain tree in front of him, and the other touching his foot with a bunch of red feathers, and then rejoining the others, who immediately went off to a smaller Morai near, and, seating themselves facing the sea, one commenced reciting a long prayer, occasionally sending one of his attendants to place a young plantain on the body.
The ships had dropped anchor in the centre of a horn-shaped bay called Karakakooa, in Hawaii, about two miles from horn to horn. On the sandy flats of the north horn was the native village of Kowrowa: amid the cocoanut grove of the other horn, the village of Kakooa, with a well and Morai, or sacred burying-ground, close by. Between the two villages alongshore ran a high ledge of black coral rocks.
We were here met by a tall young man with a long beard, who presented Captain Cook to the images, and after chanting a kind of hymn, in which he was joined by Koah, they led us to that end of the Morai where the five poles were fixed.
The common people, however, wear but scant clothing, none being required in this favoured climate. Their great war-god is Tairi. To propitiate him human sacrifices are offered up, and his idol is carried at the head of their armies. Lesser chiefs have also their idols carried before them. One of their temples, a morai, merits description.
Next morning they all returned to the Morai; a pig was sacrificed and placed on the same altar, and about eight o'clock the priests, Otoo, and a great number of people assembled. The two bundles were still in the same place as on the previous night, but two drums were now standing in front of them between which Otoo and Cook seated themselves.
The Indian, however, approaches his morai with a reverence and humility that disgraces the christian, not because he holds any thing sacred that is there, but because he there worships an invisible divinity, for whom, though he neither hopes for reward, nor fears punishment, at his hand, he always expresses the profoundest homage and most humble adoration.
They generally, however, select some of the poorer people as their victims. We see arranged near the morai a pile of sixty skulls, and that of the youth just slain is now added to it. They appear but little changed by the air, and Taro says that they are those of victims who have all been offered up within the last few months.
The morai, as has already been observed, is at once a burying-ground and a place of worship, and in this particular our churches too much resemble it.
As we accompany him to the morai, we see dragged on by the crowd no less than eleven men, whose looks of terror, show that something they dread is about to happen. Arrived before the temple, there is a cry from the multitude, who instantly set on them with their clubs.
Burney says that two launch-loads for each ship were obtained, "a seasonable supply, as we had been four months since we wooded." On 31st January Whatman, one of the gunner's crew, and greatly attached to Cook, died and was buried in the Morai.
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