height above the level of the ground. They likewise have such pavements near their houses, on which they sit to eat and amuse themselves. In the matter of eating, these people are by no means so cleanly as the Tahitians; they are likewise dirty in their cookery. Pork and fowls are cooked in an oven of hot stones as at Tahiti; but fruit and roots they roast on the fire and, after taking off the rind or skin, put them into a platter or trough with water, out of which I have seen both men and hogs eat at the same time. . . . They seem to have dwellings or strongholds on the summits of the highest hills. These we saw only by the help of telescopes, for I did not permit any of our people to go there. We were not sufficiently acquainted with the disposition of the natives, which, however, I believe is humane and peaceful. . . . 143. The Hawaiian Islanders 1 ... Less than a year after his return to England Cook received a commission from George III to undertake still another voyage. This was for the purpose of solving the old problem of the Northwest Passage.2 Previous navigators had worked from the east through Hudson Bay; Cook was to try to find an opening on the northwest coast of America which would lead into Hudson Bay. He sailed in June, 1776, with the Resolution and the Discovery, visited Tasmania and New Zealand, and passed thence into the island world of the Pacific. Here he discovered several islands of the Hervey or Cook Archipelago (April, 1777). In February, 1778, he rediscovered the Hawaiian Islands, which a Spanish navigator had probably seen more than two centuries before, but whose existence had been forgotten. Cook then proceeded up the western coast of North America to Bering Strait and beyond, until he found the passage barred by ice. After examining both sides of the strait, he determined that the two continents of America and Asia approached each other as nearly as thirty-six miles. On the return voyage Cook again visited the Hawaiian group, which he named after his friend and patron, Lord Sandwich. Here he was slain by the natives (February, 1779). Thus closed the career of one who gave to England her title to Australia, and by his discoveries in the Pacific vastly added to geographical knowledge. 1 A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, bk. iii, ch. 12. 2 See page 220. In religious beliefs and in the manner of disposing of the dead there are many resemblances between the customs of the Hawaiians and those of other Polynesian peoples. The natives of the Tonga Islands inter their dead in a very decent manner, and they also inter their human sacrifices; but they do not offer or expose either animals or even plants to their gods, as far as we know. Those of Tahiti do not inter their dead, but expose them to waste by time and putrefaction, though the bones are afterwards buried; and, as this is the case, it is very remarkable that they should inter the entire bodies of their human sacrifices. They also offer various animals and plants to their gods. . . . The people of the Hawaiian Islands, again, inter both their common dead and human sacrifices as in the Tonga Islands; but they resemble those of Tahiti in offering animals and plants to their gods. The taboo1 also prevails in Hawaii to its full extent, and seemingly with much more rigor than even in the Tonga Islands. For the people here always asked, with great eagerness and signs of fear to offend, whether any particular thing which they desired to see, or we were unwilling to show, was taboo? The maia raa, or forbidden articles at the Society Islands, though doubtless the same thing, did not seem to be so strictly observed by them, except with respect to the dead, about whom we thought them more superstitious than any of the others were. But these are circumstances with which we are not as yet sufficiently acquainted to be decisive about; and I shall only just observe, to show the similitude in other matters connected with religion, that the priests here are as numerous as at the other islands, if we may judge from our being able, during our stay, to distinguish several saying their prayers. But whatever resemblance we might discover in the manners of the people of Hawaii to those of Tahiti, these of course were less striking than the coincidence of language. Indeed, the languages of both places may be said to be almost word for word the same. It is true that we sometimes heard various A word of Polynesian origin; Tonga tabu, Samoan tapu, Hawaiian kapu. words which were pronounced exactly as we had found at New Zealand and the Tonga Islands; but though all the four dialects are indisputably the same, the Hawaiians in general have neither the strong guttural pronunciation of the former, nor a less degree of it which also distinguishes the latter; and they have not adopted the soft mode of the Tahitians in avoiding harsh sounds. . . . ... How shall we account for this people's having spread itself into so many detached islands, so widely separated from each other and in every quarter of the Pacific Ocean? We find it from New Zealand in the south, as far as the Hawaiian Islands to the north, and, in another direction, from Easter Island to the New Hebrides; that is, over an extent of sixty degrees of latitude, or twelve hundred leagues north and south, and eightythree degrees of longitude, or sixteen hundred and sixty leagues east and west. How much farther in either direction its colonies reach is not known; but what we know already, in consequence of this and our former voyage, warrants our pronouncing it to be, though perhaps not the most numerous, certainly by far the most extensive, people upon earth. . . . CHAPTER XXX FRANCE ON THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION 1 DURING the years 1787, 1788, and 1789 Arthur Young, an Englishman of means, leisure, and intelligence, made three extended journeys in France. Young, who was much interested in the improvement of farming methods, went to France particularly to study the agricultural situation there, but his observant eyes did not miss many aspects of the economic and political conditions prevailing at the outbreak of the Revolution. Consequently his Travels is a book of considerable historical interest, from the sidelights it throws on the life and manners of the French people under the Old Régime. 144. Poverty and Misery of the People 2 Poverty and poor crops as far as Amiens; women are now ploughing with a pair of horses. The difference of the customs of the two nations is in nothing more striking than in the labors of the female sex. In England, it is very little that women will do in the fields except to glean and make hay; the first is a party of pilfering and the second of pleasure; in France, they plough and fill the dung-cart. The same wretched country continues to La Loge; the fields are scenes of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery. Yet all this country is highly improvable, if they knew what to do with it; the property, perhaps, of some of those glittering beings who figured in the procession the other day at 1 Arthur Young's Travels in France, edited by Miss Betham-Edwards. 4th edition. London, 1892. George Bell and Sons. 2 Young, Travels in France, pp. 8-9, 19, 27, 123, 125, 189, 197-198. Versailles. Heaven grant me patience when I see a country thus neglected and forgive me the oaths I swear at the absence and ignorance of the possessors. Pass Payrac, and meet many beggars, which we had not done. before. All the country people, girls and women, are without shoes or stockings; and the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor feet to their stockings. This is a kind of poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity; a large consumption among the poor being of more consequence than among the rich. The wealth of nation lies in its circulation and consumption; and the case of poor people abstaining from the use of manufactures of leather and wool ought to be considered as an evil of the first magnitude. It reminded me of the misery of Ireland. As far as Combourg the country has a savage aspect... the people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal, filthy places that can be seen: mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none yet here is a château, and inhabited. Who is this M. de Chateaubriand, the owner, that has nerves strong for a residence amid such filth and poverty? To Montauban. The poor people seem poor indeed; the children terribly ragged, if possible worse clad than if with no clothes at all; as to shoes and stockings, they are luxuries. A beautiful girl of six or seven years playing with a stick, and smiling under such a bundle of rags as made my heart ache to see her; they did not beg, and when I gave them anything seemed more surprised than obliged. One-third of what I have seen of this province seems uncultivated, and nearly all of it in misery. What have kings, and ministers, and 'parliaments, and states to answer for their prejudices, seeing millions of hands that would be industrious are rather idle and starving, through the execrable maxims of despotism or the equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility. Nangis is near enough to Paris for the people to be politi |