[Footnote 174:  Tasman saw eighteen or twenty of these small islands, every one of which was surrounded with sands, shoals, and rocks.  They are also called in some charts, Heemskirk’s Banks.  See Dalrymple’s Collection of Voyages to the South Pacific Ocean, vol. ii. p. 38, and Campbell’s edition of Harris’s, vol. i. p. 325.—­D.]

We have also very good authority to believe that Keppel’s and Boscawen’s Island, two of Captain Wallis’s discoveries in 1765, are comprehended in our list; and that they are not only well known to these people, but are under the same sovereign.  The following information seemed to me decisive as to this:  Upon my enquiring one day of Poulaho, the king, in what manner the inhabitants of Tongataboo had acquired the knowledge of iron, and from what quarter they had procured a small iron tool which I had seen amongst them when I first visited their island, during my former voyage, he informed me, that they had received this iron from an island which he called Neeootabootaboo.  Carrying my enquiries further, I then desired to know whether he had ever been informed from whom the people of Neeootabootaboo had got it.  I found him perfectly acquainted with its history.  He said that one of those islanders sold a club for five nails, to a ship which had touched there, and that these five nails afterward were sent to Tongataboo.  He added, that this was the first iron known amongst them, so that what Tasman left of that metal must have been worn out, and forgot long ago.  I was very particular in my enquiries about the situation, size, and form of the island; expressing my desire to know when this ship had touched there, how long she staid, and whether any more were in company.  The leading facts appeared to be fresh in his memory.  He said that there was but one ship; that she did not come to an anchor, but left the island after her boat had been on shore.  And from many circumstances which he mentioned, It could not be many years since this had happened.  According to his information, there are two islands near each other, which he himself had been at.  The one he described as high and peaked, like Kao, and he called it Kootahee; the other, where the people of the ship landed, called Neeootabootaboo, he represented as much lower.  He added, that the natives of both are the same sort of people with those of Tongataboo, built their canoes in the same manner, that their islands had hogs and fowls, and in general the same vegetable productions.  The ship so pointedly referred to in this conversation, could be no other than the Dolphin; the only single ship from Europe, as far as we have ever learned, that had touched of late years at any island in this part of the Pacific Ocean, prior to my former visit of the Friendly Islands.[175]