 the lighter.
 

                                     Notes

1
The word kannaka is at the present day universally used in the South Seas by
Europeans to designate the islanders. In the various dialects of the principal
groups it is simply a sexual designation applied to the males; but it is now
used by the natives in their intercourse with foreigners in the same sense in
which the latter employ it.
    A tabooed kannaka is an islander whose person has been made, to a certain
extent, sacred by the operation of a singular custom hereafter to be explained.
 
2 I presume this might be translated into »Strong Waters.« Arva is the name
bestowed upon a root, the properties of which are both inebriating and
medicinal. Wai is the Marquesan word for water.
 
3 White appears to be the sacred colour among the Marquesans.
 
4 The word Artua, although having some other significations, is in nearly all
the Polynesian dialects used as the general designation of the gods.
 
5 This passage, which is cited as an almost literal translation from the
original, I found in a small volume entitled Circumnavigation of the Globe, in
which volume are several extracts from Dalrymple's Historical Collections. The
last-mentioned work I have never seen, but it is said to contain a very correct
English version of great part of the learned Doctor Christoval Suaverde de
Figueroa's History of Mendanna's Voyages, published at Madrid, A.D. 1613.
 
6 Accounts like these are sometimes copied into English and American journals.
They lead the reader to infer that the arts and customs of civilised life are
rapidly refining the natives of the Sandwich Islands. But let no one be deceived
by these accounts. The chiefs swagger about in gold lace and broadcloth, while
the great mass of the common people are nearly as primitive in their appearance
as in the days of Cook. In the progress of events at these islands, the two
classes are receding from each other: the chiefs are daily becoming more
luxurious and extravagant in their style of living, and the common people more
and more destitute of the necessaries and decencies of life. But the end to
which both will arrive at last will be the same: the one are fast destroying
themselves by sensual indulgences, and the other are fast being destroyed by a
complication of disorders, and the want of wholesome food. The resources of the
domineering chiefs are wrung from the starving serfs, and every additional
bauble with which they bedeck themselves is purchased by the sufferings of their
bondsmen; so that the measure of gewgaw refinement attained by the chiefs is
only an index to the actual state of degradation in which the greater portion
