Our commander could not avoid expressing it as his real opinion, that it would have been far better for these poor people, never to have known our superiority in the accommodations and arts which render life comfortable, than after once knowing it, to be again left and abandoned to their original incapacity of improvement.

If the intercourse between them and us should wholly be discontinued, they cannot be restored to that happy mediocrity, in which they lived before they were first discovered.

It seemed to Captain Cook, that it was become, in a manner, incumbent upon the Europeans to visit these islands once in three or four years, in order to supply the natives with those conveniences which we have introduced among them, and for which we have given them a predilection.

Perhaps they may heavily feel the want of such occasional supplies, when it may be too late to go back to their old and less perfect contrivances; contrivances which they now despise, and which they have discontinued since the introduction of ours.

It is, indeed, to be apprehended, that by the time that the iron tools, of which they had become possessed, are worn out, they will have almost lost the knowledge of their own.