Next morning, on entering the forests, they found there had been heavy rain during the night, though none of it had reached them at the distance of about two hundred yards. They traversed the woods by a compass, keeping in a direct line for the peak; and, finding a beaten track nearly in their course, were enabled on the second day to advance about fifteen miles. At night they rested under the shelter of a fallen tree, and early next morning recommenced their journey. It was soon discovered, however, that the difficulties they had hitherto encountered were ease itself compared with those against which they were now to contend. To persons unaccustomed as they were to walk, a journey of so great a length would, under any circumstances, have been a grievous task. But they were impeded in their movements by heavy burdens; their path was steep, broken, and rugged; and the farther they proceeded the more dense and impenetrable did the thickets become. At length, it became evident that the enterprise must be abandoned; and with those unpleasant feelings which accompany baffled ambition, they returned by the way they had gone to the ships.
In less than a fortnight after their arrival at Hawaii, the discoverers, by their impolitic, or rather insolent behaviour, had contrived to irritate the savage natives almost to desperation. They saw themselves and, what perhaps was more galling, their gods treated with silent contempt or open scorn; while their wives and daughters were contaminated by the brutal lusts of the sailors. How far these circumstances were within the control of Captain Cook, or, in other words, to what degree of blame he is liable for what took place, it is not our present business to inquire. But assuredly, unless we choose wholly to reject the testimony of Ledyard, our great navigator seems, during the last few days of his life, to have been urged by a kind of fatality into the commission of actions highly despotic and unjustifiable in themselves, and, under the circumstances in which they were performed, little short of insane. The mere idea of converting the fence and idols of the morai—objects sacred to them, however contemptible in our eyes—into firewood, argues a reprehensible disregard of the feelings of the natives. His offer of two hatchets to the priest in payment reminds one of Captain Clapperton’s promise of a couple of guns, a few flasks of powder, and some rockets to Sultan Bello, as the price of his _putting down_ the slave trade. But when the priest refused the proffered payment, not so much on account of its preposterous inadequacy,—of which, however, savage as he was, he must have been fully sensible,—because in his eyes no price was an equivalent for articles to destroy which would be sacrilege, to proceed with a strong hand in the work of destruction, profaning the spot which contained the ashes of their ancestors, and throwing down and bearing away the images of their gods;—this was an outrage which the tamest and most enslaved race would have found it difficult to endure.