3 Library of Ent. Knowl.: The New Zealanders, pp. 223-237.

4 Wilkes, Narrative of the U. S. Exploring Expedition, vol. iii.
ch. 3.

he came near the giant, shot at him, and ran by while the monster
was dodging the bullet.

The people of the Sandwich Islands held a confused medley of
notions as to another life. In different persons among them were
found, in regard to this subject, superstitious terror, blank
indifference, positive unbelief. The current fancy was that the
souls of the chiefs were led, by a god whose name denotes the
"eyeball of the sun," to a life in the heavens, while plebeian
souls went down to Akea, a lugubrious underground abode. Some
thought spirits were destroyed in this realm of darkness; others,
that they were eaten by a stronger race of spirits there; others
still, that they survived there, subsisting upon lizards and
butterflies.5 What a piteous life they must have led here whose
imaginations could only soar to a future so unattractive as this!

The Kamtschadales send all the dead alike to a subterranean
elysium, where they shall find again their wives, clothes, tools,
huts, and where they shall fish and hunt. All is there as here,
except that there are no fire spouting mountains, no bogs,
streams, inundations, and impassable snows; and neither hunting
nor fishing is ever pursued in vain there. This lower paradise is
but a beautified Kamtschatka, freed from discommoding hardships
and cleansed of tormenting Cossacks and Russians. They have no
hell for the rectification of the present wrong relations of
virtue and misery, vice and happiness. The only distinction they
appear to make is that all who in Kamtschatka are poor, and have
few small and weak dogs, shall there be rich and be furnished with
strong and fat dogs. The power of imagination is very remarkable
in this raw people, bringing the future life so near, and
awakening such an impatient longing for it and for their former
companions that they often, the sooner to secure a habitation
there, anticipate the natural time of their death by suicide.6

The Esquimaux betray the influence of their clime and habits, in
the formation of their ideas of the life to come, as plainly as
the Kamtschadales do. The employments and enjoyments of their
future state are rude and earthy. They say the soul descends
through successive places of habitation, the first of which is
full of pains and horrors. The good, that is, the courageous and
skilful,