Before this excursion, some of us had been of opinion, that these people were addicted to an unnatural passion, because they had endeavoured to entice some of our men into the woods; and, in particular, I was told, that one who had the care of Mr. Forster’s plant bag, had been, once or twice, attempted. As the carrying of bundles, &c. is the office of the women in this country, it had occurred to me, and I was not singular in this, that the natives might mistake him, and some others, for women. My conjecture was fully verified this day: for this man, who was one of the party, and carried the bag as usual, following me down the hill, by the words which I understood of the conversation of the natives, and by their actions, I was well assured that they considered him as a female; till, by some means, they discovered their mistake, on which they cried out, _Erramange! Erramange!_ It’s a man! It’s a man! The thing was so palpable that every one was obliged to acknowledge, that they had before mistaken his sex; and that, after they were undeceived, they seemed not to have the least notion of what we had suspected. This circumstance will show how liable we are to form wrong conjectures of things, among people whose language we are ignorant of. Had it not been for this discovery, I make no doubt that these people would have been charged with this vile custom. In the evening I took a walk, with some of the gentlemen, into the country on the other side of the harbour, where we had very different treatment from what we had met with in the morning. The people we now visited, among whom was our friend Paowang, being better acquainted with us, showed a readiness to oblige us in every thing in their power. We came to the village which had been visited on the 9th. It consisted of about twenty houses, the most of which need no other description than comparing them to the roof of a thatched house in England taken off the walls and placed on the ground. Some were open at both ends; others partly closed with reeds; and all were covered with palm thatch. A few of them were thirty or forty feet long, and fourteen or sixteen broad. Besides these, they have other mean hovels, which, I conceived, were only to sleep in. Some of these stood in a plantation, and I was given to understand, that in one of them lay a dead corpse. They made signs that described sleep, or death; and circumstances pointed out the latter. Curious to see all I could, I prevailed on an elderly man to go with me to the hut, which was separated from the others by a reed fence, built quite round it, at the distance of four or five feet. The entrance was by a space in the fence, made so low as to admit one to step over. The two sides and one end of the hut were closed or built up in the same manner, and with the same materials, as the roof. The other end had been open, but was now well closed up with mats, which I could not prevail on the man to remove, or suffer me to do it.