grees, even themselves laid aside their European habits;
they exchanged their clothing for the half-exposed fashion of the native
chiefs; and, adopting their pursuits and pleasures, became hunters, and
bold fishers in the light canoe. Finally, they learnt to speak the
language, as if they had been born in the island; and, at length, sealed
their insular destiny by marrying native women. Laonce was hardly
eighteen when he was first cast ashore amongst them; but having a
handsome person, and those engaging manners, from a naturally amiable
disposition added to a gentleman's breeding, which never fail agreeably
impressing even the rudest minds, the eye of female tenderness soon
found him out; and the maiden, being the daughter of the king, and
beautiful withal, had only to hint her wishes to her royal sire; and the
king naming them to their distinguished object, she immediately became
his happy bride. Laonce, becoming thus royally allied, and in the line
of the throne, instantly received publicly the investiture of the
highest order of Otaheitan nobility, namely, a species of tattooing
appropriated to chiefs alone. The limbs of the body thus distinguished,
are traversed all over with a damasked sort of pattern, while the
particular royal insignia is marked on the left side of the forehead,
and below the eye, like a thick mass of dark tattooing.

But the young Frenchman, and his north Briton companion, had reserved to
themselves means of increasing their consequence, still more than by
their mere personal merits, with their new fellow-countrymen. A few days
after the wreck, the subsiding elements had cast up certain articles of
the ship, which they managed to turn to good account: the most valuable
of them were fire-arms and some gunpowder, and a few other implements,
both of defence, and use in household, or ship's repairs. The fire-arms
seemed to endow the new young chief, just engrafted into the reigning
stock, with a kind of preternatural authority; and, by the aid of his
old messmate, and new bosom-coadjutor, he exerted all his influence over
their awed minds, to prevent their recurrence to the frightful practice
he had seen on his first landing, of devouring the prisoners they took
in war. His marriage had invested him with the power of a natively born
son of the king; and, having made himself master of their language, his
persuasions were so conclusive with the leading warriors, that, in the
course of a very little ti