the night on approaching a _toopapaoo_,
where the dead are exposed, in the same manner that many of our
ignorant and superstitious people are with the apprehensions of
ghosts, and at the sight of a church-yard; and they have an equal
confidence in dreams, which they suppose to be communications either
from their god, or from the spirits of their departed friends,
enabling those favoured with them to foretell future events; but this
kind of knowledge is confined to particular people. Omai pretended to
have his gift. He told us, that the soul of his father had intimated
to him in a dream, on the 26th of July 1776, that he should go on
shore at some place within three days; but he was unfortunate in this
first attempt to persuade us that he was a prophet; for it was the
1st of August before we got into Teneriffe. Amongst them, however,
the dreamers possess a reputation little inferior to that of their
inspired priests and priestesses, whose predictions they implicitly
believe, and are determined by them in all undertakings of
consequence. The priestess who persuaded Opoony to invade Ulietea,
is much respected by him; and he never goes to war without consulting
her. They also, in some degree, maintain our old doctrine of planetary
influence; at least, they are sometimes regulated in their public
counsels by certain appearances of the moon; particularly when lying
horizontally, or much inclined on the convex part, on its first
appearance after the change, they are encouraged to engage in war with
confidence of success.

They have traditions concerning the creation, which, as might be
expected, are complex and clouded with obscurity. They say, that a
goddess, having a lump or mass of earth suspended in a cord, gave it a
swing, and scattered about pieces of land, thus constituting Otaheite
and the neighbouring islands, which were all peopled by a man and
woman, originally fixed at Otaheite. This, however, only respects
their own immediate creation; for they have notions of an universal
one before this; and of lands, of which they have now no other
knowledge than what is mentioned in the tradition. Their most remote
account reaches to Tatooma and Tapuppa, male and female stones or
rocks, who support the congeries of land and water, or our globe
underneath. These produced Totorro, who was killed, and divided into
land; and after him Otaia and Oroo were begotten, who were afterward
married, and produced, first, land, and then a