They have sonorous instruments, but they can scarcely be called instruments of music; one is the shell, called the Triton’s trumpet, with which they make a noise not unlike that which our boys sometimes make with a cow’s horn: the other is a small wooden pipe, resembling a child’s nine-pin, only much smaller, and in this there is no more music than in a pea-whistle. They seem sensible indeed that these instruments are not musical; for we never heard an attempt to sing to them, or to produce with them any measured tones that bore the least resemblance to a tune.

Voyaging Accounts