Of the food eaten here the greater part is vegetable.  Here are no tame animals except hogs, dogs, and poultry, as I have observed before, and these are by no means plenty.  When a chief kills a hog, if is almost equally divided among his dependants; and as they are very numerous, the share of each individual at these feasts, which are not frequent, must necessarily be small.  Dogs and fowls fall somewhat more frequently to the share of the common people.  I cannot much commend the flavour of their fowls; but we all agreed, that a South Sea dog was little inferior to an English lamb; their excellence is probably owing to their being kept up, and fed wholly upon vegetables.  The sea affords them a great variety of fish.  The smaller fish, when they catch any, are generally eaten raw, as we eat oysters; and nothing that the sea produces comes amiss to them:  They are fond of lobsters, crabs, and other shell-fish, which are found upon the coast; and they will eat not only sea-insects, but what the seamen call blubbers, though some of them are so tough, that they are obliged, to suffer them to become putrid before they can be chewed.  Of the many vegetables that have been mentioned already as serving them for food, the principal is the bread-fruit, to procure which costs them no trouble or labour but climbing a tree:  The tree which produces it, does not indeed shoot up spontaneously; but if a man plants ten of them in his lifetime, which he may do in about an hour, he will as completely fulfil his duty to his own and future generations, as the natives of our less temperate climate can do by ploughing in the cold of winter, and reaping in the summer’s heat, as often as these seasons return; even if, after he has procured bread for his present household, he should convert a surplus into money, and lay it up for his children.

It is true, indeed, that the bread-fruit is not always in season; but cocoa-nuts, bananas, plantains, and a great variety of other fruits, supply the deficiency.

It may well be supposed, that cookery is but little studied by these people as an art; and, indeed, they have but two ways of applying fire to dress their food, broiling and baking; the operation of broiling is so simple that it requires no description, and their baking has been described already, in the account of an entertainment prepared for us by Tupia.  Hogs and large fish are extremely well dressed in the same manner; and, in our opinion, were more juicy, and more equally done, than by any art of cookery now practised in Europe.  Bread-fruit is also cooked in an oven of the same kind, which renders it soft, and something like a boiled potatoe; not quite so farinaceous as a good one, but more so than those of the middling sort.

Of the-bread-fruit they also make three dishes, by putting either water or the milk of the cocoa-nut to it, then beating it to a paste with a stone pestle, and afterwards mixing it with ripe plantains, bananas, or the sour paste which they call mahie.