nowledge: We found it like the religion of most other
countries, involved in mystery, and perplexed with apparent
inconsistencies. The religious language is also here, as it is in China,
different from that which is used in common; so that Tupia, who took
great pains to instruct us, having no words to express his meaning which
we understood, gave us lectures to very little purpose: What we learnt,
however, I will relate with as much perspicuity as I can.

Nothing is more obvious to a rational being, however ignorant or stupid,
than that the universe and its various parts, as far as they fall under
his notice, were produced by some agent inconceivably more powerful than
himself; and nothing is more difficult to be conceived, even by the most
sagacious and knowing, than the production of them from nothing, which
among us is expressed by the word _Creation_. It is natural therefore,
as no Being apparently capable of producing the universe is to be seen,
that he should be supposed to reside in some distant part of it, or to
be in his nature invisible, and that he should have originally produced
all that now exists in a manner similar to that in which nature is
renovated by the succession of one generation to another; but the idea
of procreation includes in it that of two persons, and from the
conjunction of two persons these people imagine every thing in the
universe either originally or derivatively to proceed.

The Supreme Deity, one of these two first beings, they call
_Taroataihetoomoo_, and the other, whom they suppose to have been a
rock, _Tepapa_. A daughter of these was _Tettowmatatayo_, the year, or
thirteen months collectively, which they never name but upon this
occasion, and she, by the common father, produced the months, and the
months, by conjunction with each other, the days; the stars they suppose
partly to be the immediate offspring of the first pair, and partly to
have increased among themselves; and they have the same notion with
respect to the different species of plants. Among other progeny of
Taroataihetoomoo and Tepapa, they suppose an inferior race of deities
whom they call _Eatuas_. Two of these Eatuas, they say, at some remote
period of time, inhabited the earth, and were the parents of the first
man. When this man, their common ancestor, was born, they say that he
was round like a ball, but that his mother, with great care, drew out
his limbs, and having at length moulded him into his present form