ett, _op. cit._ i. 304.

[18] M. Radiguet, _op. cit._ p. 169.

[19] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ p. 39.

[20] Eyriaud des Vergnes, _op. cit._ pp. 39 _sq._; H. Melville,
_Typee_, p. 195.

[21] C. S. Stewart, _Visit to the South Seas_, i. 231 _sq._, who
speaks highly of the beauty of the women. But the general
opinion appears to be that the Marquesan women are much less
handsome than the men. See Langsdorff, _op. cit._ i. 94-96;
Porter, _op. cit._ ii. 59.

[22] F. D. Bennett, _op. cit._ i. 308 _sq._

Sec. 3. _Food, Weapons, Tools, Houses, Canoes, Fishing_

The Marquesans subsist chiefly on a vegetable diet. Their staple food is
the bread-fruit, and their national dish is a paste called _popoi_,
which is prepared from bread-fruit after it has been subjected to a
process of fermentation. Fish is also a common article of diet; the
natives usually eat it raw, even when it is rotten and stinking. They
keep pigs, but seldom kill them except for a festival or at the
reception of a stranger. Hence pork is not a regular or common article
of diet with them; and apart from it they hardly taste flesh. Other
sorts of food, such as bananas, taro, and sugar-cane, are entirely
subsidiary to the great staples, bread-fruit and fish. The natives do
not readily accustom themselves to a European diet; indeed when the
experiment has been made of feeding them exclusively in our manner, they
have wasted away and only recovered their health when they were allowed
to return to their usual nourishment. Their ordinary beverage was water,
but they were also addicted to the drinking of kava, which was extracted
from the root of the _Piper methysticum_ in the usual fashion.[23]
Drawing their sustenance chiefly from the bread-fruit tree, the
Marquesans paid little attention to the cultivation of the soil;
however, they grew a certain amount of taro, sweet potatoes, and
sugar-cane; and they had plantations of the paper-mulberry,[24] the bark
of which was manufactured by the women into cloth in the ordinary way.
But the bark of other trees was also employed for the same purpose.
Since the natives were able to procure European stuffs, the indigenous
manufacture of bark-cloth has much declined.[25] Hence agriculture
engaged the men very little; fishing, though it was part of their
business, they are said to have neglected; the only work of consequence
they did was to build their houses and manufacture the