affirmed, they have in many instances more refined ideas of decency than
ourselves; and one, long a resident, scruples not to declare, that he
never saw any appetite, hunger and thirst excepted, gratified in public.
It is too true that, for the sake of gaining our extraordinary
curiosities, and to please our brutes, they have appeared immodest in
the extreme. Yet they lay this charge wholly at our door, and say that
Englishmen are ashamed of nothing, and that we have led them to public
acts of indecency never before practised among themselves. Iron here,
more precious than gold, bears down every barrier of restraint; honesty
and modesty yield to the force of temptation.'[2]

Such are the females and the mothers here described, whose interesting
offspring are now peopling Pitcairn's Island, and who, while they
inherit their mothers' virtues, have hitherto kept themselves free from
their vices.

The greater part of the food of Otaheitans is vegetable. Hogs, dogs, and
poultry are their only animals, and all of them serve for food. 'We all
agreed,' says Cook, 'that a South-Sea dog was little inferior to an
English lamb,' which he ascribes to its being kept up and fed wholly on
vegetables. Broiling and baking are the only two modes of applying fire
to their cookery. Captain Wallis observes, that having no vessel in
which water could be subjected to the action of fire, they had no more
idea that it could be made _hot_, than that it could be made _solid_;
and he mentions that one of the attendants of the supposed queen, having
observed the surgeon fill the tea-pot from an urn, turned the cock
himself, and received the water in his hand; and that as soon as he felt
himself scalded, he roared out and began to dance about the cabin with
the most extravagant and ridiculous expressions of pain and
astonishment; his companions, unable to conceive what was the matter,