. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 213 _sq._, vii. 121; W. Ellis, _op.
cit._ iv. 23.

The staple food of the Hawaiians consists of taro (_kalo_), sweet
potatoes, and fish, but above all of taro. That root (_Arum_ or
_Caladium esculentum_) is to the Hawaiians what bread-fruit is to the
Tahitians, and its cultivation is their most important agricultural
industry. It is grown wherever there is water or a marsh, and it is even
planted on some arid heights in the island of Hawaii, where it yields
excellent crops. Artificial irrigation was practised and even regulated
by law or custom in the old days; for it was a rule that water should be
conducted over every plantation twice a week in general, and once a
week during the dry season. The bread-fruit tree is not so common, and
its fruit not so much prized, as in the Marquesas and Tahiti. The
natives grew sweet potatoes even before the arrival of Europeans. Yams
are found wild, but are hardly eaten except in times of scarcity. There
are several sorts of bananas; the fruit for the most part is better
cooked than raw. In the old days the cooking was done in the ordinary
native ovens, consisting of holes in the ground lined with stones which
were heated with fire. After being baked in an oven the roots of the
taro are mashed and diluted with water so as to form a paste or pudding
called _poe_ or _poi_, which is sometimes eaten sweet but is more
generally put aside till it has fermented, in which condition it is
preferred by the natives. It is a highly nutritious substance, and
though some Europeans complain of the sourness of taro pudding, others
find it not unpalatable. Fish used to be generally eaten raw, seasoned
with brine or sea-water. But they also commonly salt their fish, not for
the sake of preserving it for a season of scarcity, but because they
prefer the taste. They construct artificial fish-ponds, into which they
let young fish from the sea, principally the fry of the grey mullet, of
which the chiefs are particularly fond. Every chief has, or used to
have, his own fish-pond. The natives are very skilful fishermen. In the
old days they made a great variety of fish-hooks out of mother-of-pearl
and tortoise shell as well as out of bone, and these they dragged by
means of lines behind their canoes, and so caught bonettas, dolphins,
and albicores. They took prodigious numbers of flying fish in nets. At
the time when the islands were discovered by Captain Cook, the natives
possesse