The principal vegetable foods of the natives of the island of Tahiti were bread-fruit, coconuts, bananas of thirteen sorts, and the long banana which is known by the name of plantain; then there were a fruit not unlike an apple, which when ripe was very pleasant; another resembling a nectarine, and called _ahiya_; sweet potatoes, _dioscorea_ yams, koko or taro yams (an aroid); a fruit known by the name of _jambu_, and reckoned most delicious; sugar cane; a root called by the inhabitants _pea_; a plant called _ethe_, of which the root only was eaten; a fruit like a large kidney-bean, grown in a pod and tasting like a chestnut after being roasted, called by the natives _ahi_; the fruits of the pandanus; the _morinda_ fruit; a kind of bracken fern, of which not only the root but the leaves were sometimes eaten; and a plant called _theve_, which had an edible root. There was also in the island the paper-mulberry tree (the range of which extends from China to Polynesia), and several fig trees, some of which, with their enormously extended aerial roots and branches, covered an area of 60 square feet. This mulberry and most of the figs provided bast which was made into cloth. Bread-fruit was sometimes turned into a delicious dish by mixing its farinaceous pulp with coconut milk, with pounded bananas, or with a paste made of the _mahi_ fruit. This _mahi_ was gathered just before it became ripe, and, being laid in heaps, was closely covered with leaves. In this state it fermented and became disagreeably sweet. After pulling out the core from the rotten fruit the rest was thrown into a hole neatly lined with grass. The hole having been covered with stones, the fruit then underwent fermentation and became sour. After that it was wrapped up in leaves and baked, and, both cooked and uncooked, would keep for weeks. It was eaten hot or cold, and the natives seldom made a meal without it, though its taste to Europeans was "as disagreeable as that of a pickled olive". Salt water was the universal sauce to their food, no meal being eaten without it, so much so that the natives who lived at a great distance from the seacoast had to keep sea water in segments of bamboos like tubes. A kind of butter was also made of coconut kernels flavoured with salt water, which at first tasted to the Europeans nauseous and rancid, but afterwards grew so much in favour with them that they preferred it to the sauces they had brought out from England. The Tahitians possessed no narcotic like opium, betel, or tobacco, and at first Cook thought that they knew no intoxicant. But he afterwards found that they were able to get drunk on the juice of a plant called _ava ava_ (the well-known _kava_ pepper vine, referred to on p. 64). But the vice of drunkenness was almost confined to the chiefs and the nobility, and was forbidden to the women. Banks gives the following interesting description of how a Tahitian gentleman would eat a meal:--