he beach. Natives
were often there to watch them; the practice was excellent; and the
assault was never delivered--if it ever was intended, which I doubt, for
the natives are more famous for false rumours than for deeds of energy.
I was told the late French war was a case in point; the tribes on the
beach accusing those in the mountains of designs which they had never
the hardihood to entertain. And the same testimony to their backwardness
in open battle reached me from all sides. Captain Hart once landed after
an engagement in a certain bay; one man had his hand hurt, an old woman
and two children had been slain; and the captain improved the occasion
by poulticing the hand, and taunting both sides upon so wretched an
affair. It is true these wars were often merely formal--comparable with
duels to the first blood. Captain Hart visited a bay where such a war
was being carried on between two brothers, one of whom had been thought
wanting in civility to the guests of the other. About one-half of the
population served day about upon alternate sides, so as to be well with
each when the inevitable peace should follow. The forts of the
belligerents were over against each other, and close by. Pigs were
cooking. Well-oiled braves, with well-oiled muskets, strutted on the
paepae or sat down to feast. No business, however needful, could be
done, and all thoughts were supposed to be centred in this mockery of
war. A few days later, by a regrettable accident, a man was killed; it
was felt at once the thing had gone too far, and the quarrel was
instantly patched up. But the more serious wars were prosecuted in a
similar spirit; a gift of pigs and a feast made their inevitable end;
the killing of a single man was a great victory, and the murder of
defenceless solitaries counted a heroic deed.

The foot of the cliffs about all these islands is the place of fishing.
Between Taahauku and Atuona we saw men, but chiefly women, some nearly
naked, some in thin white or crimson dresses, perched in little
surf-beat promontories--the brown precipice overhanging them, and the
convolvulus overhanging that, as if to cut them off the more completely
from assistance. There they would angle much of the morning; and as fast
as they caught any fish, eat them, raw and living, where they stood. It
was such helpless ones that the warriors from the opposite island of
Tauata slew, and carried home and ate, and were thereupon accounted
mighty men of valour.