POLYNESIAN RELICS IN MELANESIA. 139 



of Navigators' Islands for that group had no deeper signification 

 than that he found his ships surrounded by a fleet of canoes. 



We know the type of these vessels. Discoverers have described 

 them in the accounts of their South Sea voyages ; sketches of them 

 there are a-plenty. I have seen the last in Samoa of the type of 

 double canoes with sails fit for ocean-going. We know that each 

 could carry its hundred or so of passengers, could eat up into the 

 wind and lay a course almost as close as the fore-and-afters which 

 are the American contribution to the marine. The one principal 

 defect in these vessels as the vehicles of long voyages was in the 

 victualling, and that defect produced a system of voyaging with- 

 out which we should be at an utter loss to prick their course upon 

 our charts. 



Each of these voyages was an Odyssey. Stocked with such food 

 and water as they could find the means to carry they coasted wher- 

 ever coasts were available to follow, and thus they voyaged until 

 the commissariat called for replenishing. Then they landed, they 

 established, albeit temporarily, food colonies until the land could 

 yield them a crop sufficient to carry them yet farther, until the same 

 ventral need established them yet again in a like food colony. 



These revictualling settlements are of the utmost moment in our 

 study. Three elements are primal in the establishing of each such 

 settlement. It must have a sufficient supply of water ; it must show 

 an encouraging area of soil fit for tilth; its autochthonous population 

 must be such that the voyagers might feel secure of maintaining 

 themselves and their families during the months of the crop period, 

 whether by superiority in numbers or by better skill in warlike arts 

 is immaterial. 



In general the supply of potable water would be found ample 

 wherever the two other conditions were satisfied. In the whole 

 western Pacific area there is a wide contrast between two types 

 of islands mingled in close juxtaposition. The large islands are 

 commonly high, great masses of volcanic extrusion with forbidding 

 shores and little productive soil in sight save in small patches in deep 

 bays. A race in whom the ethnic sense had reached such a high 

 stage of development as to send them forth in company as these 

 Proto-Samoans swarmed, would naturally expect that the large 

 population of a large island would assemble in concert at the point 

 of attack to repel the invader. The small islands are commonly 

 low; their acreage is greater up to the visible forest, this being an 

 important criterion, for visible possibilities of tilth point to a neces- 

 sary sojourn of but one crop season ; to clear the jungle for plantation 

 would require three and probably more seasons. The population of 

 a small island, even if aggressively hostile, would be more within the 

 control of the adventurers of a single vessel or small squadron. We 



