So at Star Island three or four natives said, ’In ten moons you two come back; very good, then we go with you.’  ‘I think,’ Patteson tells his sisters, ’you would have liked to have seen me, standing on a rock, with my two supporters, two fine young men, who will I trust go with us next time, my arms round their necks, and a fine background of some thirty or forty dark figures with bows and arrows, &c., and two or three little rogues, perched on a point of rock above me, just within reach, asking for fish-hooks.’  He says it in all simplicity, but the picture presupposes some strength of mind in the sisters who were to appreciate it.

Few natives appeared at Espiritu Santo, and the vessel passed on to Oanuta or Cherry Island, where the Bishop had never been, and where a race of dull, good-natured giants was found.  The chief was a noble-looking man with an aquiline nose, and seemed to have them well under command, and some of the younger men, who had limbs which might have been a model for a sculptor, could have lifted an ordinary-sized Englishman as easily as a child.  They were unluckily already acquainted with whalers, whom they thought the right sort of fellows, since they brought tobacco and spirits, did not interfere with native habits, nor talk of learning, for which the giants saw no need.  The national complexion here was of a lighter yellow, the costume a tattooed chest, the language akin to Maori; and it was the same at Tikopia, where four chiefs, one principal one immensely fat, received their visitors seated on a mat in the centre of a wide circle formed by natives, the innermost seated, the others looking over them.  These, too, were accustomed to whalers, and when they found that pigs and yams in exchange for spirits and tobacco were not the object, they were indifferent.  They seemed to despise fish-hooks, and it was plain that they had even obtained muskets from the whalers, for there were six in the chiefs house, and one was fired, not maliciously but out of display.  The Bishop told them his object, and they understood his language, but were uninterested.  The fat chief regaled the two guests with a cocoa-nut apiece, and then seemed anxious to be rid of them.

The Banks Islands, as usual, were much more hopeful, Santa Maria coming first.  Canoes came round the vessel, and the honesty of the race showed itself, for one little boy, who had had a fish-hook given him, wished to exchange it for calico, and having “forgotten to restore the hook at the moment, swam back with it as soon as he remembered it.  There was a landing, and the usual friendly intercourse, but just as the boat had put off, a single arrow was suddenly shot out of the bush, and fell about ten yards short.  It was curious that the Spanish discoverers had precisely the same experience.  It was supposed to be an act of individual mischief or fun, and the place obtained the appropriate name of Cock Sparrow Point.

It was not possible to get into the one landing-place in the wall round Mota’s sugar-loaf, but there was an exchange of civilities with the Saddleites, and in Vanua Lava, the largest member of the group, a beautiful harbour was discovered, which the Bishop named Port Patteson, after the Judge.