The ideas of these people respecting property were either very vague, or very different from those of their visiters. Whatever they saw pleasing to the eye in the possession of the white men, without considering whether or not it was intended for them, they immediately appropriated to themselves; probably from the belief that these munificent strangers, who bestowed upon them so many wonderful things, were a kind of good genii, who, in their own case, stood in no need of such articles. Cook did not understand this simplicity. He attached the idea of a thief to every person who touched what did not belong to him, and punished these ignorant savages with the same rigid justice, if we may so apply the term, which he would have shown towards a hardened offender at the Old Bailey. In one instance even the justice of his conduct may be questioned. One of the chiefs stole some peacocks from the ships, and Cook arrested, not the offender, but the king, whom he kept in custody until the culprit came forward engaging to restore the birds. This was an absurd exercise of power, which could not fail considerably to abate the respect of the natives for the civilized portion of mankind. From Tongataboo the expedition sailed to Tahiti, where they arrived on the 14th of August. Here Ledyard employed his leisure, which appears to have been considerable, in studying the character and manners of the inhabitants; and upon these points his opinions generally agree with the received notions respecting those people. In sailing northward from this group they discovered the Sandwich Islands, where they remained ten days; and then, steering still towards the north, arrived without accident in Nootka Sound, where they cast anchor in nearly five hundred fathoms of water. Ledyard was now on his native continent, and, though more than three thousand miles from the place of his birth, experienced on landing something like a feeling of home. The inhabitants he found to be of the same race with those on the shores of the Atlantic. In stature they are above the middle size, athletic in their make, and of a copper colour. Their long black hair they wear tied up in a roll on the top of the head, and, by way of ornament, smear it over with oil and paint, in which they stick a quantity of the down of birds. They paint their faces red, blue, and white, but refused to reveal the nature of their cosmetics, or the country whence they obtained them. Their clothing principally consists of skins, besides which, however, they have two other kinds of garments, of which one is manufactured from the inner bark of trees, and resembles our coarser cloths; the other made chiefly from the hair of white dogs, and wrought over with designs representing their mode of catching the whale, which our traveller considered the most ingenious piece of workmanship he anywhere saw executed by a savage. All their garments, like those of the Hindoos, are worn like