A
thousand canoes of enthusiastic natives welcomed Cook back to the sunny
islands of the Pacific. Before the explorer {197} could anchor,
natives were swimming round the ship like shoals of fish. When Cook
landed, the whole population prostrated itself at his feet as if he had
been a god. It was a welcome change from the desolate cold of the
inhospitable north.
Situated midway in the Pacific, the Sandwich Islands were like an oasis
in a watery waste to Cook's mariners. The ships had dropped anchor in
the centre of a horn-shaped bay called Karakakooa, in Hawaii, about two
miles from horn to horn. On the sandy flats of the north horn was the
native village of Kowrowa: amid the cocoanut grove of the other horn,
the village of Kakooa, with a well and Morai, or sacred burying-ground,
close by. Between the two villages alongshore ran a high ledge of
black coral rocks. In all there were, perhaps, four hundred houses in
the two villages, with a population of from two to three thousand
warriors; but the bay was the rallying place for the entire group of
islands; and the islands numbered in all several hundred thousand
warriors.
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