The vices and diseases introduced among these unhappy people annually swell the ordinary mortality of the islands, while, from the same cause, the originally small number of births is proportionally decreased.

Thus the progress of the Hawaiians and Tahitians to utter extinction is accelerated in a sort of compound ratio.
I have before had occasion to remark, that I never saw any of the ordinary signs of a pace of sepulture in the valley, a circumstance which I attributed, at the time, to my living in a particular part of it, and being forbidden to extend my rambles to any considerable distance towards the sea.

I have since thought it probable, however, that the Typees, either desirous of removing from their sight the evidences of mortality, or prompted by a taste for rural beauty, may have some charming cemetery situation in the shadowy recesses along the base of the mountains.

At Nukuheva, two or three large quadrangular 'pi-pis', heavily flagged, enclosed with regular stone walls, and shaded over and almost hidden from view by the interlacing branches of enormous trees, were pointed out to me as burial-places.

The bodies, I understood, were deposited in rude vaults beneath the flagging, and were suffered to remain there without being disinterred.