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Inside the shell of the cocoanut is white meat, and inside of that is a kind of milk. The natives eat the meat of the nut as we would bread, and drink the milk, so the cocoanut is like bread and milk. From the hair on the nut they make rope and string and cloth and everything that we would make with cotton or silk or wool.From the cocoanut shells they make the cups, saucers, and all other dishes they use. From the leaves of the tree they make short skirts, which are all the clothing they wear. From the leaves they also make the roofs to their houses. Their houses often have no sides—they have roofs of leaves held up by poles made of the cocoanut-tree, and a floor which is raised a few feet off the ground.
When the native tribes had fights with other native tribes they would eat those whom they killed. Missionaries went out to teach them to be Christians, and at first the cannibals ate the missionaries, but many of the natives became Christians and almost all have stopped eating people. The missionaries thought the women were not dressed properly, so they made them wear long dresses called “Mother Hubbards,” because they looked like the dress that Mother Hubbard in the nursery book wore. When the native women go to town they wear these dresses, but when they are in the country or want to climb a tree for food, they wrap the dresses around their necks. When the white people went to these islands they took their diseases with them, and the natives, who had never had such diseases before, caught them and many died. They did not seem able to get well even from measles.
The natives live an easy life. They have no money, but they want none, for they have nothing to buy. They do no work, and if they want anything to eat, all they have to do is to climb a tree and get a cocoanut. This is easy, for the trees usually slant, and I have seen boys start at the ground and run up a tree as you might run up a sliding-board.
An Englishman named Captain Cook was the first person to explore these islands and write about them, so one group of islands is named after him.
White men became interested in these islands because they found that the cocoanut meat could be sold in their countries for good prices, so they put the natives to work gathering cocoanuts. It was not necessary to pay them with money, because money meant nothing to them.
