them out.

In a couple of hours we found ourselves with a full creel of eels and
oura, and I a trifle dismayed at facing the march home. Raiere relieved
Tahitua of the burden, and a song shortened the way. I gave them the
ditty of the New-Zealand Maori, who metaphorically toasted his enemy:

O, the saltiness of my mouth
In drinking the liquid brains of Nuku
Whence welled up his wrath!
His ears which heard the deliberations!
Mine enemy shall go headlong
Into the stomach of Hinewai!
My teeth shall devour Kaukau!
The three hundred and forty of my enemy
Shall be huddled in a heap in my trough;
Te Hika and his multitudes
Shall boil in my pot!
The whole tribe shall be
My sweet morsel to finish with! E!

Chapter XXIV

In the days of Captain Cook--The first Spanish
missionaries--Difficulties of converting the heathens--Wars over
Christianity--Ori-a-Ori, the chief, friend of Stevenson--We read the
Bible together--The church and the himene.

Captain Cook barely escaped shipwreck here. The Bay of Tautira is
marked on the French map, "Mouillage de Cook," the anchorage of
Cook. That indomitable mariner risked his vessels in many dangerous
roadsteads to explore and to procure fresh supplies for his crews. When
he had exhausted the surplus of pigs, cocoanuts, fowls, and green stuff
at one port, he sailed for another. Scurvy, the relentless familiar
of the sailor on the deep sea, made no peril or labor too severe. At
night Cook's ships approached Oati-piha, or Ohetepeha, Bay, as his
log-writers termed this lagoon, from the Vaitapiha River, flowing into
it, and the dawn found them in a calm a mile and a half from the reef.

They put down boats and tried to tow off their ships, but the tide set
them in more and more toward the rocks. For many hours they despaired
of saving the vessels, though they used "warping-machines," anchors,
and kedges. From my cook-house I saw where they had struggled for
their lives with breaker, current, and chartless bottom. A light
breeze off the land saved them, and in another day they returned to
"obtain cocoanuts, plantains, bananas, apples, yams and other roots,
which were exchanged for nails and beads." From the very pool into
which I dived Cook's hearties filled their casks with fresh water,
after shooting "two muskets and a great gun along the shore to
intimidate the Indians who were obstinate."

Cook, on his third voyage to Tahit