But I had an opportunity to see them paint or print their _tapa_, or bark cloth, an occupation in which they employ a great deal of care and patience.

The pigments they use are derived from vegetable juices, prepared with the oil of the cocoa-nut.
Their pencils are little reeds or canes of bamboo, at the extremity of which they carve out divers sorts of flowers.

First they tinge the cloth they mean to print, yellow, green, or some other color which forms the ground: then they draw upon it perfectly straight lines, without any other guide but the eye; lastly they dip the ends of the bamboo sticks in paint of a different tint from the ground, and apply them between the dark or bright bars thus formed.

This cloth resembles a good deal our calicoes and printed cottons; the oils with which it is impregnated renders it impervious to water.

It is said that the natives of _Atowy_ excel all the other islanders in the art of painting the tapa.
The Sandwich-islanders live in villages of one or two hundred houses arranged without symmetry, or rather grouped together in complete defiance of it.