three or four times a week, a procession of eight or ten of them passing at a distance, with streamers flying, and a great number of small canoes attending them, while many hundreds of people run a-breast of them along the shore.  They generally rowed to the outward point of a reef which lay about four miles to the westward of us, where they stayed about an hour, and then returned.  These processions, however, are never made but in fine weather, and all the people on board are dressed; though in the other canoes they have only a piece of cloth wrapped round their middle.  Those who rowed and steered were dressed in white; those who sat upon the awning and under it in white and red, and two men who were mounted on the prow of each vessel were dressed in red only.  We sometimes went out to observe them in our boats, and though we were never nearer than a mile, we saw them with our glasses as distinctly us if we had been upon the spot.

The plank of which these vessels are constructed, is made by splitting a tree, with the grain, into as many thin pieces us they can.  They first fell the tree with a kind of hatchet, or adze, made of a tough greenish kind of stone, very dexterously fitted into a handle; it is then cut into such lengths as are required for the plank, one end of which is heated till it begins to crack, and then with wedges of hard wood they split it down:  Some of these planks are two feet broad, and from fifteen to twenty feet long.  The sides are smoothed with adzes of the same materials and construction, but of a smaller size.  Six or eight men are sometimes at work upon the same plank together, and, as their tools presently lose their edge, every man has by him a cocoa-nut shell filled with water, and a flat stone, with which he sharpens his adze almost every minute.  These planks are generally brought to the thickness of about an inch, and are afterwards fitted to the boat with the same exactness that would be expected from an expert joiner.  To fasten these planks together, holes are bored with a piece of bone that is fixed into a slick for that purpose, a use to which our nails were afterwards applied with great advantage, and through these holes a kind of plaited cordage is passed, so as to hold the planks strongly together:  The seams are caulked with dried rushes, and the whole outside of the vessel is paid with a gummy juice, which some of their trees produce in great plenty, and which is a very good succedaneum for pitch.

The wood which they use for their large canoes, is that of the apple-tree, which grows very tall and straight.  Several of them that were measured, were near eight feet in the girth, and from twenty to forty to the branches, with very little diminution in the size.  Our carpenter said, that in other respects it was not a good wood for the purpose, being very light.  The small canoes are nothing more than the hollow trunk of the bread-fruit tree, which is still more light and spongy.  The trunk of the bread-fruit tree is six feet in girth, and about twenty feet to the branches.