On the 27th, Tubourai Tamaide, with a friend, who eat with a voracity that I never saw before, and the three women that usually attended him, whose names were TERAPO, TIRAO, and OMIE, dined at the fort: in the evening they took their leave, and set out for the house which Tubourai Tamaide had set up in the skirts of the wood; but in less than a quarter of an hour he returned in great emotion, and hastily seizing Mr. Banks’s arm, made signs that he should follow him. Mr. Banks immediately complied, and they soon came up to a place where they found the ship’s butcher, with a reaping-hook in his hand: here the Chief stopped, and, in a transport of rage which rendered his signs scarcely intelligible, intimated that the butcher had threatened, or attempted, to cut his wife’s throat with the reaping-hook. Mr. Banks then signified to him, that if he could fully explain the offence, the man should be punished. Upon this he became more calm, and made Mr. Banks understand that the offender, having taken a fancy to a stone hatchet which lay in his house, had offered to purchase it of his wife for a nail: that she having refused to part with it upon any terms, he had catched it up, and throwing down the nail, threatened to cut her throat if she made any resistance: to prove this charge the hatchet and the nail were produced, and the butcher had so little to say in his defence that there was not the least reason to doubt of its truth.

Voyaging Accounts