After establishing a fort, the mutineers degenerated into raiding local villages to kidnap women,[5] and left after two months.
[8][9][10] One Protestant minister when visiting a congregation on Tubuai on January 3, 1824, wrote that several islanders were still suffering from a devastating illness.
Within this family, Austral is classified as part of the Tahitic branch of the Polynesian languages, making it closely related to Tahitian and Māori.
Another cause of Austral's dwindling number of speakers has been the community's gradual language shift to the more widely spoken (and closely related) Tahitian.
The Rurutu and Ra'ivavae dialects, for example, have only eight consonant phonemes, making it relatively difficult to understand even for speakers of Tahitian, another Polynesian language.