30 The Ancient Hawaiian House. 



is distinct over each door; and the ridge seems more neatly finished than the rest of 

 the house thatch; the water comes to the platform and the waterward door has a steep 

 log ladder that onl}' bare feet could safely pass. In such a peaceful scene we can forget 

 the skeleton in the posthole: Fijian houses have no closets! 



The lower figure on the same plate shows a long house under the spreading 

 branches of a breadfruit tree, a house that distindlly shows eaves. This is in Waitovu 

 village ou the island of Ovalau. The rustic scene surely seems far from the cannibalism 

 of ancient times, and the fierce Fijian has as peaceful home as the indolent Tahitian. 



In Plate XIX tlic upper figure represents the palace of the king of Mbau, the 

 little island noted for the warlike character of its people, where Tanoa and his better 

 known son Thakombau lived. Tlie house has windows, — the first of this foreign inno- 

 vation we have seen in Fiji; and the cottage perched upon the neat fence is an equal 

 novelty. The way in which the ridgejaole is bound to the thatch is clearly shown, 

 especially in the smaller birilding. The fine canoe in the foreground shows that the 

 house is along the shore and not on the higher part of Mbau. As the Hawaiians, so 

 the Fijians hugged the shore, and in many of the Fijian islands it is difficult to travel 

 inland; all intercour.se is b}^ water. Less than a century before this picfture was taken, 

 such a canoe as that shown would have been launched b}- its savage owner on rollers 

 each a human l)eing! 



The lower figure shows a house of ordinary form built on the ground, and in 

 the absence of the protecting platform, the low stakes outside the door keep out the 

 pigs, a contrivance sometimes used by the Hawaiians in similar circumstances. The 

 young woman coming from the house has a ladder of bambn neatl}' bound together 

 with sennit, and her basket suggests an expedition for breadfruit. 



New Zealand Houses. — Although Tasman discovered New Zealand he never 

 landed there, and until Cook landed there a century and a quarter afterwards, the 

 civilized world knew nothing of the inhabitants except that they had murdered some 

 of Tasman's crew. Cook spent nearly a year about the group, but his report gives us 

 little information about the housebuilding. What is known as Cook's First Voyage 

 was edited by Dr. Hawkesworth from such material as he found in the journals of all 

 the officers of the expedition. In this we readr'^ 



Their houses are the most inartificially made of anjthing among them, being scarcelj' equal, 

 except in size, to an English dog-kennel ; they are seldom more than eighteen or twenty feet long, 

 eight or ten broad, and five or six high, from the pole that runs from one end to the other and forms 

 the ridge, to the ground ; the framing is of wood, generally slender sticks, and both walls and roof 

 consist of grass and hay, which, it must be confessed, is very tightly put together; and some are 



^^ Cook's First Voyage, III, 437. 



[214] 



