Only a great heap of shapeless coral stones now remains of the Marae of Mahaiatea, which has been used as a quarry for nearly a century, so that we cannot tell how exact Cook’s report was, but both he and Banks were as a rule so accurate and so matter-of-fact that one feels safe in accepting all they said. Nearly thirty years afterward, when the missionaries came in the ship "Duff," they not only took measurements but made a sketch which is engraved in their narrative, and shows the pyramid still almost perfect. They found its length to be two hundred and seventy feet, or three feet more than Cook made it, and its width ninety-four feet, which is seven feet in excess of Cook’s measurement. According to their account and the sketch, the pyramid had not eleven but ten steps, the lowest six feet and the other nine about five feet high, which gives a total height of about fifty feet, instead of forty-four. Even in Egypt such a pile would have taken a respectable, place among the small pyramids, but in the South Seas, where continuous labor was hardly possible to obtain or to enforce, and where stone architecture was uncommon, such a monument excited as much astonishment as the famous stone figures of Easter Island or the ruins in Central America would have done.

The Marae of Mahaiatea, which the books so often mention as the Marae of Amo and Purae, not only cost our family a crown, but also very nearly its existence. Banks’s narrative grows in interest as it goes on, and the next paragraph comes painfully near us.

"About a hundred yards to the west of this building was another court or paved area, in which were several Ewhattas, a kind of altar raised on wooden pillars about seven feet high; on these they offer meat of all kinds to the gods. We have thus seen large hogs offered; and here were the skulls of about fifty of them, besides those of dogs

Indigenous Histories