448 Transactions. 



How came these scattered, folk to possess common customs, mytlis, and, in 

 some cases, genealogies to a certain point, to know the names of many 

 lands they had not seen for long centuries 1 How came the Hawaiian to 

 speak of his old-time voyages to Tahiti, and relate the deeds of ancestors 

 ,of the New Zealand Maori ; the Samoan to relate his exploration of the 

 Paumotus ; the Tongarevan to maintain his descent from immigrants from 

 New Zealand ? Why do Moriori and Hawaiian claim the same gods ; the 

 Tahitian describe voyages made to Aotearoa of the Maori ; and the Maori 

 of these isles recoimt his ocean wanderings from Tahiti, Samoa, and Raro- 

 tonga to New Zealand ? 



The answer to these queries is that all these widely separated peoples 

 are descendants of common ancestors, of the Pohoiesian Vikings, of the 

 Maori voyagers — the bold sea-rovers who broke through the hanging sky 

 in times long past away, who fretted the heaving breast of Hine-moana 

 with the wake of their swift canoes, who ranged over every quarter of the 

 vast Pacific, and marked off the sea roads for all time. 



For the Maori is truly a Polynesian, the Polynesians are essentially 

 Maori, and no ethnological quibbles can separate them. This fact lightens 

 our task of describing Maori vessels and Maori voyagers, though it increases 

 the scope of the paper. It teaches us to look abroad for the origin of the 

 Maori canoe as seen here ; it compels us to follow the ara tnoana, or sea 

 roads, traversed by the Maori voyager in the days when the Romans held 

 Britain. In those voyages we shall cross the famed sea-ridge, the back- 

 bone of Hine-moana, and look upon the wonders of the deep. We shall 

 pass through great areas of the '' many-isled sea," and range northward 

 until strange stars rise above the sea horizon ; we will seek the rising sun, 

 even unto the land of strange gods. Southward will we go until we view 

 frozen seas and drifting white islands, and the hand of Para-weranui lies 

 heavy upon us, and westward to far-distant lands where strange black folk 

 dwell. 



For the Maori voyager was no fair-weather sailor, nor was he content 

 to hug the shores of his home-land. He boldly crossed wide seas beneath 

 changing skies, and rode out the fierce ocean gale ; or went down to death 

 in the embrace of Hine-moana. But when our voyager was following 

 distant sea roads he was not a New-Zealander — he was a Polynesian of the 

 Pacific isles. After he settled in New Zealand his voyages were apparently 

 confined to expeditions to the Cook and Society Groups — say, from fifteen 

 to eighteen hundred miles distant. • - 



As late as the time of Toi, who flourished thirty generations ago, the 

 Maori of New Zealand did not exist, for Polynesians had not yet settled in 

 these isles. He made his voyages hither as a Polynesian of the northern 

 isles, in the carvel-built Tahitian prototype of the Maori seagoing canoe 

 known to us. AU of which leads up to the statement that one caimot 

 study the Maori canoe, or the Maori as a voyager, without including in 

 one's purview the canoes and voyagers of Polynesia. 



The Vessels of the Voyagers. 



Two forms of vessels have been used by Polynesians in their deep-sea 

 voyages — the double canoe and the single canoe provided with an outrigger. 

 Both t}^es were employed by voyagers to New Zealand, the latter being 

 probably the most favoured. The double canoe, though apparently pos- 

 sessing more stability than the outrigger, was not so handy in rough seas ; 

 it was somewhat cumbrous, and liable to meet disaster under such conditions. 



