Their cottages are spacious, and strongly built of wood, in an oblong form, and thatched with the leaves of the palm-tree bent round the stem of a branch from the same, and laced horizontally to rafters, so placed as to give a proper pitch to the roof.  An upper story is appropriated to sleeping, and has four beds, one in each angle of the room, and large enough for three or four persons to sleep on.  The lower is the eating room, having a broad table with several stools placed round it.  The lower room communicates with the upper, by a stout ladder in the centre.  Immediately round the village are small enclosures for fattening pigs, goats, and poultry; and beyond them are the cultivated grounds producing the banana, plantain, melon, yam, taro, sweet potatoes, tee-tree, cloth-plant, with other useful roots, fruits, and a variety of shrubs.  Every cottage has its out-house for making cloth, its baking-place, its pig-sty, and its poultry-house.

During the stay of the strangers on the island, they dined sometimes with one person, and sometimes with another, their meals being always the same, and consisting of baked pig, yams, and taro, and sometimes sweet potatoes.  Goats are numerous on the island, but neither their flesh nor their milk is relished by the natives.  Yams constitute their principal food, either boiled, baked, or mixed with cocoa-nut, made into cakes, and eaten with molasses extracted from the tee-root.  Taro-root is no bad substitute for bread; and bananas, plantains, and appoi, are wholesome and nutritive fruits.  The common beverage is water, but they make tea from the tee-plant, flavoured with ginger, and sweetened with the juice of the sugar-cane.  They but seldom kill a pig, living mostly on fruit and vegetables.  With this simple diet, early rising, and taking a great deal of exercise, they are subject to few diseases; and Captain Beechey says, ’they are certainly a finer and more athletic race than is usually found among the families of mankind.’

The young children are punctual in their attendance at school, and are instructed by John Buffet in reading, writing, and arithmetic; to which are added, precepts of religion and morality, drawn chiefly from the Bible and Prayer Book; than which, fortunately, they possess no others that might mystify and perplex their understandings on religious subjects.  They seldom indulge in jokes or other kinds of levity; and Beechey says, they are so accustomed to take what is said in its literal meaning, that irony was always considered a falsehood in spite of explanation; and that they could not see the propriety of uttering what was not strictly true, for any purpose whatever.  The Sabbath is wholly devoted to the church service, to prayer, reading, and serious meditation; no work of any kind is done on that day, not even cooking, which is prepared on the preceding evening.