Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/203

1769 seen in Europe, though their time is certainly much more simple. This exercise is, however, left off as they arrive at years of maturity.

The great facility with which these people have always procured the necessaries of life may very reasonably be thought to have originally sunk them into a kind of indolence, which has, as it were, benumbed their inventions, and prevented their producing such a variety of arts as might reasonably be expected from the approaches they have made in their manners to the politeness of the Europeans. To this may also be added a fault which is too frequent even among the most civilised nations, I mean an invincible attachment to the customs which they have learnt from their forefathers. These people are in so far excusable, as they derive their origin, not from creation, but from an inferior divinity, who was herself, with others of equal rank, descended from the god, causer of earthquakes. They therefore look upon it as a kind of sacrilege to attempt to mend customs which they suppose had their origin either among their deities or their ancestors, whom they hold as little inferior to the divinities themselves.

They show their greatest ingenuity in marking and dyeing cloth; in the description of these operations, especially the latter, I shall be rather diffuse, as I am not without hopes that my countrymen may receive some advantage, either from the articles themselves, or at least by hints derived from them.

The material of which it is made is the internal bark or liber of three sorts of trees, the Chinese paper mulberry (Morus papyrifera), the bread-fruit tree (Sitodium utile ), and a tree much resembling the wild fig-tree of the West Indies (Ficus prolixa). Of the first, which they name aouta, they make the finest and whitest cloth, which is worn chiefly by the principal people; it is likewise the most suitable for dyeing, especially with red. Of the second, which they call ooroo, is made a cloth inferior to the former in whiteness and softness, worn chiefly by people of inferior degree. Of the