not exposed to vengeance. I would not even advise
placing too much confidence in the inhabitants of Radack, who are
certainly among the best of these islanders. It is only when ideas of
right and wrong are steadily fixed, that man becomes really rational;
before this, he is like other animals, the mere slave of his instincts.

The inhabitants of Maouna are probably the worst of these tribes; those
we saw were at least five feet and a half in height, slender, their
limbs of a moderate size, and strikingly muscular; I should have thought
their faces handsome, had they not been disfigured by an expression of
wildness and cruelty; their colour is dark brown; some let their long,
straight, black hair hang down unornamented over neck, face, and
shoulders; others wore it bound up, or frizzed and crisped by burning,
and entangled like a cap round the head: these caps are coloured yellow,
and make a striking contrast with the heads which remain black. Some,
again, coloured their hair red, and curled it over their shoulders like
a full-bottomed wig. A great deal of time must be required for this
mode of dressing, a proof that vanity may exist even among cannibals.
The glass beads they obtained from us they immediately hung over their
neck and ears, but had previously no ornaments on either. Most of them
were quite naked; only a few had aprons made of the leaves of some kind
of palm unknown to us, which from their various colours and red points
resemble feathers. Since the time of La Perouse, the fashion in
tattooing appears to have very much altered: he found the inhabitants of
the South Sea Islands so tattooed over the whole body, as to have the
appearance of being clothed;--now most of them are not tattooed at all;
and those few who are, not with various drawings as formerly, but merely
stained blue from the hip to the knee, as though they had on short
breeches.

In the canoes we saw a few women who were all very ugly: these
disagreeable creatures gave us to understand that we should by no means
find them cruel--a complaisance which did not render them the less
disgusting. La Perouse here describes some attractive females: these
were as brown as the men, and as little dressed; their hair was cut
short off, with the exception of two bunches stained red, which hung
over their faces.

Scarcely one of these savages was without some remarkable scar: one of
them attracted our attention by a deep cut across the belly. We
contrived