While all this has been doing, some of his attendants have been employed in beating bread-fruit with a stone pestle upon a block of wood; by being beaten in this manner, and sprinkled from time to time with water, it is reduced to the consistence of a soft paste, and is then put into a vessel somewhat like a butcher's tray, and either made up alone, or mixed with banana or _mahie_, according to the taste of the master, by pouring water upon it by degrees and squeezing it often through the hand.

Under this operation it acquires the consistence of a thick custard, and a large cocoa-nut shell full of it being set before him, he sips it as we should do a jelly if we had no spoon to take it from the glass.

The meal is then finished by again washing his hands and his mouth.

After which the cocoa-nut shells are cleaned, and everything that is left is replaced in the basket.' Captain Cook adds, 'the quantity of food which these people eat at a meal is prodigious.

I have seen one man devour two or three fishes as big as a perch; three bread-fruits, each bigger than two fists; fourteen or fifteen plantains or bananas, each of them six or seven inches long, and four or five round; and near a quart of the pounded bread-fruit, which is as substantial as the thickest unbaked custard.