The ships were surrounded by a crowd of pirogues, and every variety of fruit was exchanged for glass beads. Still the natives offered neither fowls nor pigs. Those that were seen near the cabins belonged to the king, and they had no right to sell them. Several of the Tahitans begged for news of Banks and the companions of Cook's earlier voyage. Some also inquired for news of Tupia, but they spoke no more of him when they had learned the circumstances of his death. Next day, the two vessels anchored in the roadstead of Otaiti-Piha, two cable-lengths from the shore, and were besieged by visitors and traffickers. Some profited by the crush to throw the merchandize they had already sold into their canoes, that they might sell it over again. To put a stop to this trick, Cook drove the perpetrators away, after having flogged them, a punishment which they accepted without complaining. In the afternoon the two captains landed, to examine the watering place, which they found very convenient. During their absence a crowd of natives came on board, and amply confirmed the unenviable reputation they had acquired in the earlier records of Bougainville and Cook. "One of the officers, standing on the quarter-deck," says the narrative, "desiring to give a child six years old, in one of the pirogues, some glass beads, let them fall into the sea. The child at once jumped into the water and dived until he recovered them. To reward his skill, he threw other trifles to him, a generosity which tempted a crowd of men and women, who amused us by their surprising agility in the waves. Their easy attitudes in the water, and the suppleness of their limbs, made them like amphibious animals." But the Tahitans who came on board were detected in several acts of theft. One of them, who remained for the greater part of the day in Cook's bedroom, hastened to jump into the sea, and the captain, enraged by his conduct, had shots fired over his head. A boat, sent to take the pirogues of the robbers, was assailed with stones until it reached the shore, and it was only after a discharge of shot that the assailants determined to retreat. These hostilities led to no result, the natives came on board as if nothing had occurred. Cook learned from them that the greater part of his old friends from the neighbourhood of Matavai had fallen in a battle between the inhabitants of the two peninsulas. The officers made many excursions on land. Forster, animated by an ardour for botanical research, missed none of them. In one of these he witnessed the method employed by the Tahitans in preparing their stuffs.