who are now decently clothed in garments made after the European fashion, produced from cotton grown in their own gardens, spun by their own children, and woven in the islands. One of the chiefs of the island of Rarotonga, as stated by the missionaries, never wears any other dress than that woven in the island. They have been taught also to cultivate the sugarcane, which is indigenous, and to make sugar, and some of them have large plantations, employing at times forty men. They supply the ships with this useful article, and, at some of the islands, between fifty and sixty vessels touch in a single year. The natives of the islands send a considerable quantity away; I understand that one station sent as much as forty tons away last year. In November last a vessel of ninety tons burthen, built in the islands, was sent to the colony of New South Wales laden with Tahitian-grown sugar. Besides the sugar they have been taught to cultivate, they prepare arrow-root, and they sent to England in one year, as I was informed by merchants in London, more than had been imported into this country for nearly twenty previous years. Cattle also have been introduced and preserved, chiefly by the missionaries; pigs, dogs, and rats were the only animals they had before, but the missionaries have introduced cattle among them. While they continued heathen, they disregarded, nay, destroyed some of those first landed among them; but since that time they have highly prized them, and by their attention to them they are now so numerous as to enable the natives to supply ships with fresh beef at the rate of threepence a pound. The islanders have also been instructed by the missionaries in the manufacture of
