A week or so ago I bought a book from Oxfam, Macclesfield which had a short
piece in it about a breed of dog in Tahiti which had died out shortly before
Captain Cook arrived there. However the other day I found this image on
Wikipedia. The book I bought , `The Golden Haze` by Roderick Cameron (Readers
Union, 1964, pp 103 - 104 ) says this: " `Hogs` writes Forster, `are part of the
riches of the Tahitians and would appear to be entirely the property of the
chiefs. `
Pigs were never so plentiful in the islands as to be common food.
Dogs, on the other hand,were. These were a special breed, kept solely for
eating. The race has died out completely and no one knows what they looked
like (emphasis my own. Then what about these Wikipedia images?) They were
small and pretty, says Bougainville (this could refer to Louis Antoine de
Bougainville a French navigator,explorer and military commander, 1729-1811 ) and
, according to Forster, ( I do not know the identity of this person) very
stupid; the most dull animals imaginable. They do not seem to have the least
advantage in point of sagacity over our sheep, which are commonly made the
emblems of silliness...It is odd, but no pictorial representation of these dogs
exist.They varied a good deal in size, ranging from that of a lap-dog to a
large spaniel. Their heads were broad and their snouts pointed, the eyes were
very small, ears upright and their rather long and wiry hair of different
colours , mostly white or brown. `They seldom if ever barked but howled
sometimes, and were shy of strangers to a degree of aversion." I found an
interesting snippet in the Evening Tribune (San Diego) of July 18th 1929 that
Cook,in his description of Tahiti in 1769, mentions that the dogs of Tahiti were
strict vegetarians.Cook visited Tahiti on many occasions, his visit in 1769 was
the one where he observed the transition of the planet Venus.
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