The hair is almost universally black, and rather coarse: the men have beards, which they wear in many fashions, always, however, plucking out great part of them, and keeping the rest perfectly clean and neat. Both sexes also eradicate every hair from under their arms, and accused us of great uncleanliness for not doing the same. In their motions there is at once vigour and ease; their walk is graceful, their deportment liberal, and their behaviour to strangers and to each other affable and courteous. In their dispositions, also, they seemed to be brave, open, and candid, without either suspicion or treachery, cruelty or revenge; so that we placed the same confidence in them as in our best friends, many of us, particularly Mr. Banks, sleeping frequently in their houses in the woods, without a companion, and consequently wholly in their power. They were, however, all thieves; and when that is allowed, they need not much fear a competition with the people of any other nation upon earth. During our stay in this island, we saw about five or six persons, like one that was met by Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander on the 24th of April, in their walk to the eastward, whose skins were of a dead white, like the nose of a white horse; with white hair, beard, brows, and eye-lashes; red, tender eyes; a short sight, and scurfy skins, covered with a kind of white down; but we found that no two of these belonged to the same family, and therefore concluded, that they were not a species, but unhappy individuals, rendered anomalous by disease. It is a custom in most countries where the inhabitants have long hair, for the men to cut it short, and the women to pride themselves in its length. Here, however, the contrary custom prevails; the women always cut it short round their ears, and the men, except the fishers, who are almost continually in the water, suffer it to flow in large waves over their shoulders, or tie it up in a bunch on the top of their heads. They have a custom, also, of anointing their heads, with what they call _Monoe_, an oil expressed from the cocoa-nut, in which some sweet herbs or flowers have been infused: as the oil is generally rancid, the smell is at first very disagreeable to a European; and as they live in a hot country, and have no such thing as a comb, they are not able to keep their heads free from lice, which the children and common people sometimes pick out and eat; a hateful custom, wholly different from their manners in every other particular; for they are delicate and cleanly almost without example; and those to whom we distributed combs soon delivered themselves from vermin, with a diligence which showed that they were not more odious to us than to them.