everything upon the Freewill Islands that we could have brought away.
A few pieces of old iron hoop presented to one of the natives threw
him into an ecstasy little short of distraction." At Otaheite the
people were found generally well-behaved and honest; but they were
not proof against the fascinations of iron. Captain Cook says that
one of them, after resisting all other temptations, "was at length
ensnared by the charms of basket of nails." Another lurked about for
several days, watching the opportunity to steal a coal-rake.

The navigators found they could pay their way from island to island
merely with scraps of iron, which were as useful for the purpose as
gold coins would have been in Europe. The drain, however, being
continuous, Captain Cook became alarmed at finding his currency
almost exhausted; and he relates his joy on recovering an old anchor
which the French Captain Bougainville had lost at Bolabola, on which
he felt as an English banker would do after a severe run upon him for
gold, when suddenly placed in possession of a fresh store of bullion.

The avidity for iron displayed by these poor islanders will not be
wondered at when we consider that whoever among them was so fortunate
as to obtain possession of an old nail, immediately became a man of
greater power than his fellows, and assumed the rank of a capitalist.
"An Otaheitan chief," says Cook, "who had got two nails in his
possession, received no small emolument by letting out the use of
them to his neighbours for the purpose of boring holes when their own
methods failed, or were thought too tedious."

The native methods referred to by Cook were of a very clumsy sort;
the principal tools of the Otaheitans being of wood, stone, and
flint. Their adzes and axes were of stone. The gouge most commonly