Their manners are affable and engaging; their step easy, firm, and graceful; their behaviour free and unguarded; always boundless in generosity to each other, and to strangers; their tempers mild, gentle, and unaffected; slow to take offence, easily pacified, and seldom retaining resentment or revenge, whatever provocation they may have received.

Their arms and hands are very delicately formed; and though they go barefoot, their feet are not coarse and spreading.
'As wives in private life, they are affectionate, tender and obedient to their husbands, and uncommonly fond of their children: they nurse them with the utmost care, and are particularly attentive to keep the infant's limbs supple and straight.

A cripple is hardly ever seen among them in early life.

A rickety child is never known; anything resembling it would reflect the highest disgrace on the mother.
'The Otaheitans have no partitions in their houses; but, it may be affirmed, they have in many instances more refined ideas of decency than ourselves; and one, long a resident, scruples not to declare, that he never saw any appetite, hunger and thirst excepted, gratified in public.
It is too true that, for the sake of gaining our extraordinary curiosities, and to please our brutes, they have appeared immodest in the extreme.

Yet they lay this charge wholly at our door, and say that Englishmen are ashamed of nothing, and that we have led them to public acts of indecency never before practised among themselves.