some hard fighting obliged their assailants to retreat and abandon
their design of conquest.

The invaders, on their march back to the sea, consoled themselves for
their repulse by setting fire to every house and temple in their route;
and a long line of smoking ruins defaced the once-smiling bosom of the
valley, and proclaimed to its pagan inhabitants the spirit that reigned
in the breasts of Christian soldiers. Who can wonder at the deadly
hatred of the Typees to all foreigners after such unprovoked atrocities?

Thus it is that they whom we denominate 'savages' are made to deserve
the title. When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry
the 'big canoe' of the European rolling through the blue waters towards
their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms
stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their
bosom the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and
the instinctive feeling of love within their breast is soon converted
into the bitterest hate.

The enormities perpetrated in the South Seas upon some of the
inoffensive islanders will nigh pass belief. These things are seldom
proclaimed at home; they happen at the very ends of the earth; they
are done in a corner, and there are none to reveal them. But there is,
nevertheless, many a petty trader that has navigated the Pacific whose
course from island to island might be traced by a series of cold-blooded
robberies, kidnappings, and murders, the iniquity of which might be
considered almost sufficient to sink her guilty timbers to the bottom of
the sea.

Sometimes vague accounts of such thing's reach our firesides, and
we coolly censure them as wrong, impolitic, needlessly severe, and
dangerous to the crews of other vessels. How different is our tone when
we read the highly-wrought description of the massacre of the crew of
the Hobomak by the Feejees; how we sympathize for the unhappy victims,
and with what horror do we regard the diabolical heathens, who, after
all, have but avenged the unprovoked injuries which they have received.
We breathe nothing but vengeance, and equip armed vessels to traverse
thousands of miles of ocean in order to execute summary punishment upon
the offenders. On arriving at their destination, they burn, slaughter,
and destroy, according to the tenor of written instructions, and sailing
away from the scene of devastation, call upon all Christendom to applaud
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