However remote or secluded from frequent intercourse with more polished nations the inhabitants of any parts of the world be, if history or our own observation should make it evident that they have been formerly visited, and that foreign manners and opinions, and languages, have been blended with their own, little use can be made of what is observed amongst such people toward drawing a real picture of man in his natural uncultivated state.  This seems to be the situation of the inhabitants of most of the islands that lie contiguous to the continent of Asia, and of whose manners and institutions the Europeans, who occasionally visit them, have frequently given us accounts.  But the islands which our enterprising discoverers visited in the centre of the South Pacific Ocean, and are indeed the principal scenes of their operations, were untrodden ground.  The inhabitants, as far as could be observed, were unmixed with any different tribe, by occasional intercourse, subsequent to their original settlement there; left entirely to their own powers for every art of life, and to their own remote traditions for every political or religions custom or institution; uninformed by science; unimproved by education; in short, a fit soil from whence a careful observer could collect facts for forming a judgment, how far unassisted human nature will be apt to degenerate, and in what respects it can ever be able to excel.  Who could have thought, that the brutal ferocity of feeding upon human flesh, and the horrid superstition of offering human sacrifices, should be found to exist amongst the natives lately discovered in the Pacific Ocean, who, in other respects, appear to be no strangers to the fine feelings of humanity, to have arrived at a certain stage of social life, and to be habituated to subordination and government, which tend so naturally to repress the ebullitions of wild passion, and expand the latent powers of the understanding?

Or, if we turn from this melancholy picture, which will suggest copious matter for philosophical speculation, can we, without astonishment, observe to what a degree of perfection the same tribe (and indeed we may here join, in some of those instances, the American tribes visited in the course of the present voyage) have carried their favourite amusements, the plaintive songs of their women, their dramatic entertainments, their dances, their olympian games, as we may call them, the orations of their chiefs, the chants of their priests, the solemnity of their religious processions, their arts and manufactures, their ingenious contrivances to supply the want of proper materials, and of effective tools and machines, and the wonderful productions of their persevering labour under a complication of disadvantages, their cloth and their mats, their weapons, their fishing instruments, their ornaments, their utensils, which in design and in execution may vie with whatever modern Europe or classical antiquity can exhibit?