In the afternoon the two captains landed, to examine the watering place, which they found very convenient. During their absence a crowd of natives came on board, and amply confirmed the unenviable reputation they had acquired in the earlier records of Bougainville and Cook.
"One of the officers, standing on the quarter-deck," says the narrative, "desiring to give a child six years old, in one of the pirogues, some glass beads, let them fall into the sea. The child at once jumped into the water and dived until he recovered them. To reward his skill, he threw other trifles to him, a generosity which tempted a crowd of men and women, who amused us by their surprising agility in the waves. Their easy attitudes in the water, and the suppleness of their limbs, made them like amphibious animals."
But the Tahitans who came on board were detected in several acts of theft. One of them, who remained for the greater part of the day in Cook's bedroom, hastened to jump into the sea, and the captain, enraged by his conduct, had shots fired over his head. A boat, sent to take the pirogues of the robbers, was assailed with stones until it reached the shore, and it was only after a discharge of shot that the assailants determined to retreat. These hostilities led to no result, the natives came on board as if nothing had occurred.
Cook learned from them that the greater part of his old friends from the neighbourhood of Matavai had fallen in a battle between the inhabitants of the two peninsulas.
The officers made many excursions on land. Forster, animated by an ardour for botanical research, missed none of them. In one of these he witnessed the method employed by the Tahitans in preparing their stuffs.
"We had gone but a few paces," he says, "when a noise from the forest struck upon our ears. Following the sounds, we reached a little tent, where five or six women sitting upon either side of a large square piece of wood, were thrashing the fibrous bark of mulberry-trees to fabricate their stuffs. For this purpose they used a bit of square wood, with long parallel grooves more or less hollowed, according to the different sides. They paused a moment to enable us to examine the bark, the hammer, and the beam which served them for a table.
"They also showed us a kind of gum-water in a large cocoa-nut which they used from time to time to join the various bits of bark together.
"This glue, which appears to us to be obtained from the 'Hibiscus Esculentus,' is absolutely needful in the fabrication of the stuff, which being occasionally two or three yards wide and fifty long, are composed of small pieces of the bark. The women employed at this work wore very old and ragged clothes and their hands were hard and knotted."
The same day Forster saw a man with very long nails, of which he was immensely proud, as proving that he was not obliged to work for his bread. In Annam, in China and other countries, this singular and ridiculous fashion is common. A single finger is kept with a shorter nail, being the one used to scratch with, a very frequent occupation in the extreme East.
In another of his walks Forster saw a native, who passed his days in being fed by his wives, quietly lying upon a carpet of thick shrubs. This melancholy person, who fattened without rendering any service to society, recalled Sir John Mandeville's anger at seeing "such a glutton who passed his days without distinguishing himself by any feats of arms, and who lived in pleasure, as a pig which one fattens in a sty."