Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/162

104 high; on these they offer meat of all kinds to the gods. We have thus seen large hogs offered; and here were the skulls of above fifty of them, besides those of dogs, which the priest who accompanied us assured us were only a small fraction of what had been here sacrificed. This marai and apparatus for sacrifice belonged, we were told, to Oborea and Oamo.

The greatest pride of an inhabitant of Otahite is to have a grand marai; in this particular our friends far exceed any one in the island, and in the Dolphin's time the first of them exceeded every one else in riches and respect. The reason of the difference of her present appearance, I found by an accident which I now relate. Our road to the marai lay by the seaside, and everywhere under our feet were numberless human bones, chiefly ribs and vertebræ. So singular a sight surprised me much, and I inquired the reason. I was told that in the month called by them Owarahew last, which answers to our December 1768, the people of Tiarreboo made a descent here and killed a large number of people, whose bones we now saw; that upon this occasion Oborea and Oamo were obliged to flee for shelter to the mountains; that the conquerors burnt all the houses, which were very large, and took away all the hogs, etc.; that the turkey and goose which we had seen were part of the spoils, as were the jaw-bones which we had also seen; these had been carried away as trophies, and are used by the Indians here in exactly the same manner as the North Americans do scalps.

30th. At night we came to Otahourou, the very place at which we were on the 28th of May; here we were among our intimate friends, who expressed the pleasure they had in entertaining us, by giving us a good supper and good beds, in which we slept the better for being sure of reaching Matavie [where the ship lay] to-morrow night at the farthest. Here we learned that the bread-fruit (a little of which we saw just sprouting upon the trees) would not be fit to eat in less than three months.

2nd July. All our friends crowded this morning to see