Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/201

1769 with arrows unfledged, kneeling upon one knee, and dropping the bow from their hands the instant the arrow parts from it. I measured a shot made by Tubourai Tamaide; it was 274 yards, yet he complained that as the bow and arrows were bad he could not shoot as far as he ought to have done. At Ulhietea bows were less common, but the people amused themselves by throwing a kind of javelin eight or nine feet long at a mark, which they did with a good deal of dexterity, often striking the trunk of a plantain tree, their mark, in the very centre. I could never observe that either these or the Otahite people staked anything; they seemed to contend merely for the honour of victory.

Music is very little known to them, and this is the more wonderful as they seem very fond of it. They have only two instruments, the flute and the drum. The former is made of a hollow bamboo, about a foot long, in which are three holes: into one of these they blow with one nostril, stopping the other nostril with the thumb of the left hand; the other two they stop and unstop with the forefinger of the left, and middle finger of the right hand. By this means they produce four notes, and no more, of which they have made one tune that serves them for all occasions. To it they sing a number of songs, pehay as they call them, generally consisting of two lines, affecting a coarse metre, and generally in rhyme. Maybe these lines would appear more musical if we well understood the accent of their language, but they are as downright prose as can be written. I give two or three specimens of songs made upon our arrival.

At any time of the day when they are lazy they amuse themselves by singing the couplets, but especially after dark;