y spend their youthful days, habituated to the practice of
enormities which would disgrace the most savage tribes; but are
peculiarly shocking amongst a people whose general character, in other
respects, has evident traces of the prevalence of humane and tender
feelings.[3] When an _Erreoe_ woman is delivered of a child, a piece
of cloth, dipped in water, is applied to the mouth and nose, which
suffocates it.

[Footnote 3: That the Caroline Islands are inhabited by the same tribe
or nation, whom Captain Cook found, it such immense distances,
spread throughout the South Pacific Ocean, has been satisfactorily
established in some preceding notes The situation of the Ladrones, or
Marianne Islands, still farther north than the Carolines, but at
no great distance from them, is favourable, at first sight, to the
conjecture, that the same race also peopled that cluster; and, on
looking into Father Le Gobien's history of them, this conjecture
appears to be actually confirmed by direct evidence. One of the
greatest singularities of the Otaheite manners, is the existence of
the society of young men called _Erreoes_, of whom some account is
given in the preceding paragraph. Now we learn from Father Le Gobien,
that such a society exists also amongst the inhabitants of the
Ladrones. His words are: _Les Urritoes sont parmi eux les jeuns gens
qui vivent avec des maitresses, sans vouloir s'engager dans les liens
du mariage_. That there should be young men in the Ladrones, as well
as in Otaheite, _who live with mistresses, without being inclined to
enter into the married state_, would not, indeed, furnish the shadow
of any peculiar resemblance between them. But that the young men in
the Ladrones, and in Otaheite, whose manners are thus licentious,
should be considered as a distinct confraternity, called by a
particular name; and that this name should be the same in both places:
this singular coincidence of custom, confirmed by that of language,
seems to furnish an irrefragable proof of the inhabitants of both
places being the same nation. We know, that it is the general property
of the Otaheite dialect, to soften the pronunciation of its words.
And, it is observable, that, by the omission of one single letter (the
consonant t), our _Arreoys_ (as spelled in Hawkesworth's collection),
or _Erreoes_ (according to Mr Anderson's orthography), and the
_Urritoes_ of the Ladrones, are brought to such a similitude of sound
(the only rule of compa