’As wives in private life, they are affectionate, tender and obedient to their husbands, and uncommonly fond of their children:  they nurse them with the utmost care, and are particularly attentive to keep the infant’s limbs supple and straight.  A cripple is hardly ever seen among them in early life.  A rickety child is never known; anything resembling it would reflect the highest disgrace on the mother.

’The Otaheitans have no partitions in their houses; but, it may be affirmed, they have in many instances more refined ideas of decency than ourselves; and one, long a resident, scruples not to declare, that he never saw any appetite, hunger and thirst excepted, gratified in public.  It is too true that, for the sake of gaining our extraordinary curiosities, and to please our brutes, they have appeared immodest in the extreme.  Yet they lay this charge wholly at our door, and say that Englishmen are ashamed of nothing, and that we have led them to public acts of indecency never before practised among themselves.  Iron here, more precious than gold, bears down every barrier of restraint; honesty and modesty yield to the force of temptation.’[2]

Such are the females and the mothers here described, whose interesting offspring are now peopling Pitcairn’s Island, and who, while they inherit their mothers’ virtues, have hitherto kept themselves free from their vices.

The greater part of the food of Otaheitans is vegetable.  Hogs, dogs, and poultry are their only animals, and all of them serve for food.  ’We all agreed,’ says Cook, ’that a South-Sea dog was little inferior to an English lamb,’ which he ascribes to its being kept up and fed wholly on vegetables.  Broiling and baking are the only two modes of applying fire to their cookery.  Captain Wallis observes, that having no vessel in which water could be subjected to the action of fire, they had no more idea that it could be made hot, than that it could be made solid; and he mentions that one of the attendants of the supposed queen, having observed the surgeon fill the tea-pot from an urn, turned the cock himself, and received the water in his hand; and that as soon as he felt himself scalded, he roared out and began to dance about the cabin with the most extravagant and ridiculous expressions of pain and astonishment; his companions, unable to conceive what was the matter, staring at him in amaze, and not without some mixture of terror.

One of Oberea’s peace-offerings to Mr. Banks, for the robbery of his clothes committed in her boat, was a fine fat dog, and the way in which it was prepared and baked was as follows.  Tupei, the high priest, undertook to perform the double office of butcher and cook.  He first killed him by holding his hands close over his mouth and nose for the space of a quarter of an hour.  A hole was then made in the ground about a foot deep, in which a fire was kindled, and some small stones placed in layers, alternately with