DON MARTIN DE MAYORGA, the name given by the Spaniards to a cluster of islands in the South Sea, discovered on the 27th of February 1781 by Don F. A. Maurelle, a celebrated pilot of that nation.
Those islands are described by him as abounding with tropical fruits and roots, as highly cultivated, and as inhabited by a people considerably polished. The fertility of the land, says he, is such, that its cultivation cannot fail to promise a favourable harvest. Every where are seen an endless number of cocoa-nut trees, beautiful banana trees ranged in lines with the greatest order, and numerous plantations of potatoes, of which he describes some as fifteen feet in length, and of the thickness of a man's thigh. He admired the order with which every thing was disposed. No weeds were suffered to grow between the plants; and their roads were kept in repair with a diligence deserving imitation by the most civilized nations.
Their government appears from his account to be despotic. The sovereign, who is called the Tubou, is held in the highest veneration by his subjects, whose lives and properties are at his disposal. Under him there is an order of nobles called Equis, who, though they shrink into insignificance in the presence of the Tubou, have great authority over the people. These people are said by Maurelle to be of great muscular strength and large stature, the ordinary height of the men being six feet or six feet four inches, while many of them are much taller. It would appear, too, that they delight in gymnastic exercises; for when the Tubou, by whom he had been treated with great hospitality, wished to amuse him and his ship's company, he exhibited to them feats of wrestling and boxing, and that as well by the women as by the men.
Though these people put the greatest confidence in the Spaniards, and frequently staid whole nights on board the frigate, they had yet the common inclination of savages to steal. "Every time they came on board (says our author), clothes, iron-work, whatever fell in their way, they considered as lawful prize. They drew out through the port holes, or the windows, whatever
Dracena, Drains. was within their reach. They thieved even to the very chain of the rudder. I made my complaints to the king; he gave me permission to kill whomsoever I should detect in the act; and I was assured he had himself discovered and punished with death the authors of the complained of theft. Our vigilance was necessarily called into action; we surprised the islanders striving to tear away the new rudder chains; we fired a pistol at them, one of them fell dead on the occasion, and this was an awful lesson for those who were either on board or alongside of the frigate; they said to themselves, or to one another, chito (robber) fama (death)."
They make of the bark of trees a kind of cloth not unlike that which has been brought from other islands in the South Sea; and our author describes the women as being peculiarly neat both in their dress and in their persons. They had their mantles or loose garments adjusted in neat plaits and folds, and becomingly attached by a knot over the left shoulder. They wore garlands or wreaths on the head, and chaplets of large glass beads round their necks; the hair was pleasingly disposed in tresses, and the whole person perfumed with an oil of an agreeable odour; above all, the skin was so exquisitely clean, that they would not have suffered the smallest particle of dust to remain upon it a moment.
In this archipelago Don Maurelle found a safe harbour, to which he gave the name of El Retugio; and which he places in South Lat. 18° 36' and W. Lon. 177° 47' 45" of Greenwich.