Endnotes
The word Kanaka is at the present day universally used in the South Seas by Europeans to designate the Islanders. In the various dialects of the principal groups it is simply a sexual designation applied to the males; but it is now used by the natives in their intercourse with foreigners in the same sense in which the latter employ it.
A “Tabooed kanaka” is an islander whose person has been made to a certain extent sacred by the operation of a singular custom hereafter to be explained. ↩︎
I presume this might be translated into “Strong Waters.” Arva is the name bestowed upon a root the properties of which are both inebriating and medicinal. Wai is the Marquesan word for water. ↩︎
White appears to be the sacred colour among the Marquesans. ↩︎
The word Artua, although having some other significations, is in nearly all the Polynesian dialects used as the general designation of the gods. ↩︎
This passage, which is cited as an almost literal translation from the original, I found in a small volume entitled Circumnavigation of the Globe, in which volume are several extracts from Dalrymple’s Historical Collections. The last-mentioned work I have never seen, but it is said to contain a very correct English version of great part of the learned Doctor Christoval Suaverde da Figueroa’s History of Mendanna’s Voyage, published at Madrid, AD 1613. ↩︎
Accounts like these are sometimes copied into English and American journals. They lead the reader to infer that the arts and customs of civilized life are rapidly refining the natives of the Sandwich Islands. But let no one be deceived by these accounts. The chiefs swagger about in gold lace and broadcloth, while the great mass of the common people are nearly as primitive in their appearance as in the days of Cook. In the progress of events at these islands, the two classes are receding from each other; the chiefs are daily becoming more luxurious and extravagant in their style of living, and the common people more and more destitute of the necessaries and decencies of life. But the end to which both will arrive at last will be the same: the one are fast destroying themselves by sensual indulgences, and the other are fast being destroyed by a complication of disorders, and the want of wholesome food. The resources of the domineering chiefs are wrung from the starving serfs, and every additional bauble with which they bedeck themselves is purchased by the sufferings of their bondsmen; so that the measure of gewgaw refinement attained by the chiefs is only an index to the actual state in which the greater portion of the population lie grovelling. ↩︎
The strict honesty which the inhabitants of nearly all the Polynesian Islands manifest toward each other, is in striking contrast with the thieving propensities some of them evince in their intercourse with foreigners. It would almost seem that, according to their peculiar code of morals, the pilfering of a hatchet or a wrought nail from a European, is looked upon as a praiseworthy action. Or rather, it may be presumed, that bearing in mind the wholesale forays made upon them by their nautical visitors, they consider the property of the latter as a fair object of reprisal. This consideration, while it serves to reconcile an apparent contradiction in the moral character of the islanders, should in some measure alter that low opinion of it which the reader of South Sea voyages is too apt to form. ↩︎