Volume 1

An account of the natives of the Tonga islands, in the south Pacific ocean. With an original grammar and vocabulary of their language / Compiled and arranged from the extensive communications of Mr. William Mariner, several years resident in those islands. By John Martin.

  • Mariner, William, 1791-1853.
Date:
[etc., etc.] 1827
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of the natives of the Tonga islands, in the south Pacific ocean. With an original grammar and vocabulary of their language / Compiled and arranged from the extensive communications of Mr. William Mariner, several years resident in those islands. By John Martin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which the Tonga people had learned from the island of Nuha. None of the oldest natives could give any account of their first discovery of the Fiji islands, but say they went to those islands before the Fiji people came to them; perhaps their canoes were drifted there by strong easterly winds Since Captain’s Cook’s time, a certain chief at the island of Tonga, * where all the principal chiefs at that time resided, and whose name was Tooi Hala Fatai, having by former visits contracted the warlike habits of the Fiji islanders, became tired of the peaceful and idle life he led at home, and was therefore determined to repair again to those islands, in company with a number of youngmen of the same unquiet disposition. They were pleased with the Fiji maxim, that war and strife were the noble employments of men, and ease and pleasure worthy to be courted only by the weak and effeminate. Tooi Hala Fatai ac- cordingly set sail with his followers, about 250 in number, in three large canoes, for the island of Laemba; not to make an attack upon the place, but to join one party or the other, and rob, plun- der, procure canoes, kill the natives, and in short to do any thing that was, according to their no- tions, active, noble, and glorious. To give an in- stance of the spirit of these young men, while yet at the island of Tonga, they on one occasion, dur- ing the night, undermined a storehouse of yams, cloth, mats, &c. and working their way up into * It must l)o observed that Tonga is the name of one of the largest of this cluster of islands, and that itgives name to all these islands taken collectively, as a capital town sometimes gives name to a country; and that it must he received in this latter sense wherever the words “ island ef” are not used before it.