o common
amongst the Friendly Islanders, and which seems a consequence of their
being accustomed to much action, is lost here, where the superior
fertility of their country enables the inhabitants to lead a more
indolent life; and its place is supplied by a plumpness and smoothness
of the skin, which, though perhaps more consonant with our ideas of
beauty, is no real advantage, as it seems attended with a kind of
languor in all their motions, not observable in the others. This
observation is fully verified in their boxing and wrestling, which
may be called little better than the feeble efforts of children, if
compared to the vigour with which these exercises are performed at the
Friendly Islands.

Personal endowments being in great esteem amongst them, they have
recourse to several methods of improving them, according to their
notions of beauty. In particular, it is a practice, especially among
the _Erreoes_, or unmarried men of some consequence, to undergo a kind
of physical operation to render them fair. This is done by remaining
a month or two in the house; during which time they wear a great
quantity of clothes, eat nothing but bread-fruit, to which they
ascribe a remarkable property in whitening them. They also speak, as
if their corpulence and colour, at other times, depended upon
their food; as they are obliged, from the change of seasons, to use
different sorts at different times.

Their common diet is made up of, at least, nine-tenths of vegetable
food, and, I believe, more particularly the _mahee_, or fermented
bread-fruit, which enters almost every meal, has a remarkable effect
upon them, preventing a costive habit, and producing a very sensible
coolness about them, which could not be perceived in us who fed on
animal food. And it is, perhaps, owing to this temperate course of
life that they have so few diseases among them.

They only reckon five or six, which might be called chronic, or
national disorders; amongst which are the dropsy and the _fefai_, or
indolent swellings before mentioned as frequent at Tongataboo. But
this was before the arrival of the Europeans; for we have added to
this short catalogue, a disease which abundantly supplies the place
of all the others; and is now almost universal. For this they seem to
have no effectual remedy. The priests, indeed, sometimes give them a
medley of simples; but they own that it never cures them. And yet
they allow that in a few cases, nature, without the