They did not appear to have among them any government or subordination: none was more respected than another; yet they seemed to live together in the utmost harmony and good fellowship. Neither did we discover any appearance of religion among them, except the noises which have been mentioned, and which we supposed to be a superstitious ceremony, merely because we could refer them to nothing else: they were used only by one of those who came on board the ship, and the two who conducted Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander to the town, whom we therefore conjectured to be priests. Upon the whole, these people appeared to be the most destitute and forlorn, as well as the most stupid of all human beings; the outcasts of Nature, who spent their lives in wandering about the dreary wastes, where two of our people perished with cold in the midst of summer; with no dwelling but a wretched hovel of sticks and grass, which would not only admit the wind, but the snow and the rain; almost naked; and destitute of every convenience that is furnished by the rudest art, having no implement even to dress their food: yet they were content. They seemed to have no wish for any thing more than they possessed, nor did any thing that we offered them appear acceptable but beads, as an ornamental superfluity of life. What bodily pain they might suffer from the severities of their winter we could not know; but it is certain, that they suffered nothing from the want of the innumerable articles which we consider, not as the luxuries and conveniencies only, but the necessaries of life: as their desires are few, they probably enjoy them all; and how much they may be gainers by an exemption from the care, labour and solicitude, which arise from a perpetual and unsuccessful effort to gratify that infinite variety of desires which the refinements of artificial life have produced among us, is not very easy to determine: possibly this may counterbalance all the real disadvantages of their situation in comparison with ours, and make the scales by which good and evil are distributed to man, hang even between us.

Voyaging Accounts