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Updated: June 10, 2025
I must, however, warn him to arm himself with patience; for though the Tahaitians are very ready with their assistance, they have quite as bad a habit as ourselves of laughing at any one who speaks their language ill, I say this from experience. Some months before us, the French Captain Duperré had visited Tahaiti upon a voyage of discovery, in the corvette Coquille.
The Society Islands, of which Tahaiti is the largest, are, like many others, either fragments of a Southern continent swallowed up by earthquake, or a mass of rock ejected from the bottom of the sea by subterranean fire, which gradually becoming covered with a fertile soil, is now adorned by the most beautiful vegetation.
The inhabitants of Tahaiti were celebrating the Sunday, on which account they did not leave their houses, where they lay on their bellies reading the Bible and howling aloud; laying aside every species of occupation, they devoted, as they said, the whole day to prayer. According to our reckoning, the day was Saturday.
On Sunday, the inhabitants of Wahu make their appearance at church in full dress to be admired; and if the spectacle on these occasions is not so thoroughly laughable as at O Tahaiti, it is certainly sufficiently comic.
Tahaiti: printed at the Mission Press, Burder's Point, 1823." He also first instructed the Tahaitians in reading and writing, which acquirements are now tolerably common among them. I am sorry not to have known Mr. Nott better, and therefore not to have it in my power to judge of the man as well as the Missionary. His character stands very high.
At first the colony suffered from a scarcity of provisions, as the island produced neither bread-fruit nor cocoa-trees; they, however, contented themselves with a temporary subsistence on roots and fish, relying for the future improvement of their supplies on the trees destined for the West Indies, and other plants brought from Tahaiti; which had all been landed uninjured, and immediately planted.
The men, however, are inferior to the Friendly Islanders, in strength and activity; and the women are not so delicately formed as those of Tahaiti: their colour is also a little browner, and they are not so handsome, but the features of both sexes are open and agreeable; the females especially have beautiful eyes and teeth, and a sweet expression of countenance.
We soon lost sight of land, but a black cloud still lowered in that part of the horizon where it had disappeared; a proof how powerfully these masses of coral attract thunder clouds. We now recovered the south-east wind, and favoured by it, took the shortest way to O Tahaiti.
This difference proceeded from the first Missionaries having reached Tahaiti from the west by the way of New Holland, while we had come eastward by Cape Horn. I resolved to go ashore and pay a visit to Mr. Wilson, that I might procure, through his means, a convenient place for our astronomical observations.
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