at externally they resembled the top of hay-stacks
or rather barns with the thatched roof sloping down steeply to two very
low sides, and with gable ends to match. The entrance, placed
indifferently in one of the sides or ends, was an oblong hole, so low
that one had rather to creep than walk in, and often shut by a board of
planks fastened together, which served as a door. No light entered the
house but by this opening, for there were no windows. Internally every
house consisted of a single room without partitions. In spite of the
extreme simplicity of their structure, the houses were kept very clean;
the floors were covered with a large quantity of dried grass, over which
they spread mats to sit and sleep upon. At one end stood a kind of bench
about three feet high, on which were kept the household utensils. These
consisted merely of a few wooden bowls and trenchers, together with
gourd-shells, serving either as bottles or baskets. The houses varied in
size with the wealth or rank of the owners. Those of the poor were mere
hovels, which resembled the sties and kennels of pigs and dogs rather
than the abodes of men. The houses of the chiefs were generally large
and commodious by comparison, some forty to sixty feet long by twenty or
thirty feet broad, and eighteen or twenty feet high at the peak of the
roof. Chiefs had always a separate eating-house, and even people of the
lower ranks had one such house to every six or seven families for the
men. The women were forbidden to eat in company with the men and even to
enter the eating-house during the meals; they ate in the same houses in
which they slept. The houses of the chiefs were enclosed in large yards,
and sometimes stood on stone platforms, which rendered them more
comfortable.[11]

[10] J. Cook, vii. 125.

[11] J. Cook, _Voyages_, vi. 214 _sq._; U. Lisiansky, _Voyage
round the World_, p. 127; A. Campbell, _Voyage round the World_,
pp. 180-182; C. S. Stewart, _Residence in the Sandwich Islands_,
p. 107; W. Ellis, _op. cit._ iv. 320-322; Tyerman and Bennet,
_op. cit._ i. 371 _sq._; J. J. Jarves, _op. cit._ pp. 67 _sq._

In the mechanical arts the Hawaiians displayed a considerable degree of
ingenuity and skill. While the men built the houses and canoes and
fashioned wooden dishes and bowls, the women undertook the manufacture
of bark-cloth (_kapa_) and mats. Bark-cloth was made in the usual way
from the bark of the paper-mulberry, which was