tinuous, Captain Cook became alarmed at finding his currency almost
exhausted; and he relates his joy on recovering an old anchor which the
French Captain Bougainville had lost at Bolabola, on which he felt as
an English banker would do after a severe run upon him for gold, when
suddenly placed in possession of a fresh store of bullion.

The avidity for iron displayed by these poor islanders will not be
wondered at when we consider that whoever among them was so fortunate
as to obtain possession of an old nail, immediately became a man of
greater power than his fellows, and assumed the rank of a capitalist.
"An Otaheitan chief," says Cook, "who had got two nails in his
possession, received no small emolument by letting out the use of them
to his neighbours for the purpose of boring holes when their own
methods failed, or were thought too tedious."

The native methods referred to by Cook were of a very clumsy sort; the
principal tools of the Otaheitans being of wood, stone, and flint.
Their adzes and axes were of stone. The gouge most commonly used by
them was made out of the bone of the human forearm. Their substitute
for a knife was a shell, or a bit of flint or jasper. A shark's tooth,
fixed to a piece of wood, served for an auger; a piece of coral for a
file; and the skin of a sting-ray for a polisher. Their saw was made
of jagged fishes' teeth fixed on the convex edge of a piece of hard
wood. Their weapons were of a similarly rude description; their clubs
and axes were headed with stone, and their lances and arrows were
tipped with flint. Fire was another agency employed by them, usually
in boat-building. Thus, the New Zealanders, whose tools were also of
stone, wood, or bone, made their boats of the trunks of trees hollowed
out by fire.

The stone implements were fashioned, Captain Cook says, by rubbing one
stone upon another until brought to the required shape; but, after all,
they were found very inefficient for their purpose. They soon became
blunted and useless; and the laborious process of making new tools had
to be begun again. The delight of the islanders at being put in
possession of a material which was capable of taking a comparatively
sharp edge and keeping it, may therefore readily be imagined; and hence
the remarkable incidents to which we have referred in the experience of
the early voyagers. In the minds of the natives, iron became the
representative of power, efficiency, and wealth; and