Apr 19, 1792 Home Providence Log Apr 21, 1792
Revised Aug 26 2021
Pots
Yesterday 264
111
Total 375
Calms with light Easterly Breezes. Thermometer from 78 to 81 Degrees.
Employed Caulking the Starboard Bends. Salting Hogs. Unbending Sails, Washing Ship, and Clearing Hawse.
Moderate Supplies of Hogs Breadfruit, Cocoa Nutts and Plantains, but as much as we are in need of.
Every thing is now going on well at our Post, and the Natives behave in a very orderly and good natured manner. I have now my Shed for the Plants completed, and the Botanists accustomed to the Work. 111 Pots of Plants were Potted to Day.
I had another Visit from the Young King, and made some presents to him. I could do nothing to induce him to come on board, or to get off his Man's Shoulders, where he rides as easy as any of us would do upon a Horse. About 20 or 30 Young Men attended him, and he shifts from one to the other without the least inconvenience as they become tired. I cannot get Tynah, or any one to tell me the exact time when he will be permitted to Walk (any other way) than by saying when he is a Man. At Home he runs about as other Boys.
It is about the same time that Tynah will perform the ceremony of Oammo or Oammoah to all his Children, and become free to feed himself. I have given an Account of this in my last Voyage Page 271 [actually 217] which I cannot improve.
Whatever Men are taken in their Wars, are killed. They share the same Fate with those who fall in the Battle, and remain on the Field. Their Eyes are taken out, one is presented to their God Oro, and the other to the Erreerahigh, and the Man is then put into a Grave and buried. In presenting the Eye to the King, it is put on a leaf, and the person who presents it, on being near him, calls aloud Ham,ma,mah my. The King then Gapes wide, and the Ceremony ends. He does not even touch the Eye, much less to eat, or smell to it.
Ham,ma,mah signifies to Gape, we may turn the Phrase therefore to – Threaten to Devour – or Gape to me.
The Men belonging to the Matilda who have lived at Oparre brought me word, that they had seen a White Man at times who would not speak English to them, but had spoken at one time to a Boy of theirs, and therefore they suspected he might be one of the Bountys People. They asserted also, that he had been attempting to disfigure himself by tying a String around his head across his Nose to flatten it. They told me the Story clear and distinct. The Oparre People denied the fact. All our Friends there, declared there was no such Person, and I was beginning to suspect their fidelity, when Iddeeah said perhaps they mean Taow. The affair was now unravelled, and like a Sailors Story, there was not a word of Truth in it. For the Person was an Otaheitean, but one of those lapses of Nature, it is not possible to account for, his Skin and hair being White; & is the same person I have spoken of in my last Voyage. Strange it is that these Seamen were not content in representing the case to me as the appearance of the Man had impressed on their Mind; but they would willfully add to it, that he had conversed with the Boy. Such is the determined desire of most Seamen to tell unbounded falsehoods, that I fear their fancy often misleads them in cases of the most serious consequence.
Apr 19, 1792 Home Providence Log Apr 21, 1792