Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. A PICTURESQUE PEOPLE. /CAPTAIN COOK estimated the population of these islands to be not less than four hundred thousand, and that Hawaii alone contained considerably over one hundred thousand inhabitants. These people were not savages, as we are apt to apply the term, but barbarians of a milder and more progressive type. In personal appearance they were generally above medium stature, well formed, with muscular limbs, frank countenance, and features often resembling the Europeans. An early writer in describing them said : " Their gait is graceful and sometimes stately. The chiefs in particular are tall and stout, and their personal appearance is so much superior to the common people that some have imagined them a distinct race. This, however, is not the fact ; the great care taken of them in childhood, and their better living, have probably occasioned thedifference. Their hair is black or brown, strong, and frequently curly ; their complexion is neither yellow like the Malay nor red like the American Indian, but a kind of olive and sometimes reddish brown. Their arms and other parts of the body are often tattooed, but, except in one of the islands (Kauai), this is by no means as common as in many parts of the southern sea." They belonged to a branch of the Polynesian race, which was undoubtedly of Aryan stock, migrating at a remote period from Asia Minor through India, Sumatra, and Java to the Southern Pacific Islands, from thence advancing slowly northward to New Zealand, Samoa, Tahiti, and Hawaii. These facts are well substantiated by the close affinity of the names of localities, men, and physical objects, with the general construction of the several languages, so that a person mastering one can easily understand the others. Early accounts of the pe...