The food of the common people in all these islands consisted entirely of vegetables: pork, and the flesh of dogs, which was particularly esteemed, being exclusively reserved for the use of the great. This taste seems strange, but as the dogs destined for the table were fed wholly upon bread-fruit, cocoa-nuts, and other vegetables, their flesh was but little inferior to English lamb, and might well pass for a delicacy in a country where beef, mutton, and venison were unknown. The general drink was water or the milk of the cocoa-nut, but on festive occasions they prepared an intoxicating beverage called Kava from the root of a species of pepper. Both men and women were dressed in Tapa, a kind of white cloth, which was not woven, but made like paper, of the macerated fibres of the bark of the Chinese mulberry and bread-fruit trees spread out and beaten together. The lower classes wore but a scanty covering of this material, while the nobles were amply attired in long and flowing garments, stained with various colours. When even the rude Australian shows some desire to decorate his ugly person by sticking a bone through his nostrils, or by bedaubing his filthy body with paint, we cannot wonder at the taste for ornament displayed by the more polished South Sea Islanders. Elegant chaplets, of gaily-coloured feathers, adorned their raven hair, and flowers in the ears gratified at once the eye by their lively hues, and the smell by their delicious perfume. The custom of tattooing so frequent among the Malays, and even among the Negroes and American Indians, was nowhere so universally and so elaborately practised as among the South Sea islanders. Each group had its particular patterns, each rank was differently marked. The instrument used for this painful operation was a kind of comb, the teeth of which were struck just through the skin, after which the punctures were rubbed with a kind of paste made of soot and oil which left an indelible stain.