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Updated: July 26, 2025
They still adorn the common pottery made by the inhabitants of the little mission of Maypures; they ornament the bucklers of the Otaheitans, the fishing-implements of the Esquimaux, the walls of the Mexican palace of Mitla, and the vases of ancient Greece.
About that time Williams, one of the seamen, having the misfortune to lose his wife, forcibly took the wife of one of the Otaheitans, which, together with their continued ill-usage, so exasperated the latter that they formed a plan for murdering the whole of their oppressors. The plot, however, was discovered, and revealed by the Englishmen's wives, and two of the Otaheitans were put to death.
A market was organised by Monkhouse, and as soon as the natives understood that the stay of the ship would be very short, they managed to produce a fairly good supply of fruits and vegetables. The people were found to be rather lighter complexioned, and certainly not so addicted to thieving as the Otaheitans.
The island was then divided into nine equal portions amongst them a suitable spot of neutral ground being reserved for a village. The poor Otaheitans now found themselves reduced to the condition of mere slaves; but they patiently submitted, and everything went on peacefully for two years.
What the two captains had begun was afterward repeated every day, by one and another of our people; notwithstanding which, the curiosity of the Otaheitans still continued unabated. They were exceedingly delighted with these animals, after they had seen the use which was made of them.
But what would these Otaheitans conceive of the health and comfort and appearance and odour of the great mass of British ladies, who, unless banished to a watering place, no more think of being generally washed, than of being curried with a currying-comb, or undergoing the operation of tattowing?
When "this monk," as Gibbon calls him, "who, in the profound ignorance of human life, presumes to exercise the office of historian," tells us that the Romans, who were occasionally called in to aid against the Picts and Scots, "give energetic counsel to the timorous natives, and leave them patterns by which to manufacture arms," we seem to be reading an account of some remote tribe, to whom the Roman sword and buckler were as unfamiliar as the musket was to the Otaheitans when Cook first went among them.
The Otaheitans were in the former predicament, and accordingly were perhaps universally accessible to the charms of nails and hatchets and beads. Whereas, it is probable, that had even similar solicitations been attempted in any instances unknown to each other, they would perhaps have been resisted.
These reported they had been to a place where the people ate hogs, using the same word for the animal as the Otaheitans, Tupia asked if they had any in New Zealand, and the reply was "no." He asked if their ancestors brought any back, again the answer was "no"; whereon he told them their story must be a lie, for their ancestors could never have been such fools as to come back without some.
It is chiefly interesting on account of its having been the refuge of the mutinous crew of Captain Bligh's ship, the 'Bounty. The mutineers, after having turned their captain and a few of the crew out in an open boat, tried to make a settlement in the Society Islands; but failing, they, accompanied by some Otaheitans, fixed themselves in this isolated spot.
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