A confiderable number of thwarts were laid from gunwale to gunwale, to which they were fecurely lafhed on each fide, as a strengthening to the boat. The ornament at the head projected five or fix feet beyond the body, and was about four feet and an half high; the ornament at the stern was fixed upon that end, as the sternpost of a ship is upon her keel, and was about fourteen feet high, two feet broad, and an inch and an half thick. They both consisted of boards of carved work, of which the defign was much better than the execution. All their canoes, except a few at Opoorage or Mercury Bay, which were of one piece, and hollowed by fire, are built after this plan, and few are less than twenty feet long: fome of the smaller fort have outriggers, and sometimes two of them are joined together, but this is not common. The carving upon the ftern and head ornaments of the inferior boats, which seem to be intended wholly for fishing, confifts of the figure of a man, with a face as ugly as can be conceived, and a monftrous tongue thruft out of the mouth, with the white fhells of fea-ears stuck in for the eyes, But the canoes of the fuperior kind, which feem to be their men of war, are magnificently adorned with open work, and covered with loofe fringes of black feathers, which had a most ele gant appearance: the gunwale boards were alfo frequently carved in a grotefque tafte, and adorned 1770. March. adorned with tufts of white feathers placed upon a black ground. Of visible objects that are wholly new, no verbal description can convey a juft idea, but in proportion as they resemble fome that are already known, to which the mind of the reader must be referred: the carving of thefe people being of a fingular kind, and not in the likeness of any thing that is known on our fide of the ocean, either "in the heaven above, " or in the earth beneath, or in the waters that "are under the earth," I muft refer wholly to the representations which will be found of it in Plate XV. The paddles are small, light, and neatly made; the blade is of an oval fhape, or rather of a shape refembling a large leaf, pointed at the bottom, broadeft in the middle, and gradually lofing itself in the fhaft, the whole length being about fix feet, of which the shaft or loom including the handle is four, and the blade two. By the help of these oars they push on their boats with amazing velocity. In failing they are not expert, having no art of going otherwife than before the wind: the fail is of netting or matt, which is fet up between two poles that are fixed upright upon each gunwale, and serve both for masts and yards two ropes anfwered the purpose of sheets, and were confequently faftened above to the top of each pole. But clumfy and inconvenient as this apparatus is, they make good way before the wind, and are steered by two men who fit in the ftern, with each a paddle in his hand for that purpose. 1770. March. Having faid thus much of their workmanship, Tools. I fhall now give fome account of their tools; they have adzes, axes, and chiffels, which ferve them alfo as augers for the boring of holes: as they have no metal, their adzes and axes are made of a hard black ftone, or of a green talc, which is not only hard but tough; and their chiffels of human bone, or fmall fragments of jafper, which they chip off from a block in sharp angular pieces like a gun-flint. Their axes they' value above all that they poffefs, and never would part with one of them for any thing that we could give: I once offered one of the best axes I had in the fhip, befides a number of other things for one of them, but the owner would not fell it; from which I conclude that good ones are scarce among them. Their finall tools of jafper, which are used in finishing their niceft work, they use till they are blunt, and then, as they have no means of sharpening them, throw them away. We had given the people at Tolaga a piece of glafs, and in a fhort time they found means to drill a hole through it, in order to hang it round the neck as an ornament by a thread; and we imagine the tool must have been a piece of this jafper. How they bring |