FIJI-NEW ZEALAND EXPEDITION 249 
and their friends and relatives decided to abandon their home in 
Hawaiki and found a new race in the land so vividly described by 
the returning wanderers of some twelve generations before. Even 
former enemies were induced to join them in the great adventure. 
Their canoes, sixty or eighty feet long, hollowed out of mighty 
logs, their sides elevated by ponderous sideboards, thwarts skill- 
fully bound in with sennit, sails of closely woven mats, ropes of 
fibers from their native plants and painted with iron oxide mixed 
with shark’s oil, were carefully overhauled. 
And so from Rarotonga and neighboring islands a noble fleet 
of perhaps a dozen double canoes able to accommodate a thousand 
persons assembled for the great migration from Hawaiki. In them 
they placed their women and children, seeds and roots of their 
most valued plants, coconut, taro and yam, berries, edible gourds 
and plantain; wild fowl and dogs, their only animal food in those 
days, perhaps even the island rats to eke out the supply. 
At last all was ready; sacrifices had been made to propitiate 
their gods, and strange incantations by their medicine men had 
revealed the omens favorable to success. Surely the like of this 
migration can hardly be duplicated in all history, an undertaking 
of unparalleled audacity which resulted in the birth of a nation! 
Each canoe had one, sometimes two, professional star-gazers to 
lend the aid of their knowledge of navigation. It is said that they 
knew and had names for at least three hundred stars, and used 
them to mark the seasons and to guide them over the trackless 
waste of the broad South Seas. 
Again following the path of the setting sun, which at that sea- 
son was southwest, by day, and the stars and familiar constella- 
tions by night, this epoch-making odyssey passed over the loneliest 
sea on earth. (We passed over the same track and saw but one 
lone ship during the whole voyage!) A few fiying-fish sprang up 
now and then before the on-rushing prows of the canoes; now and 
then a shark, or perhaps a school of porpoises accompanied them; 
now and then a lonely albatross, or a few petrels. The tropic 
clouds hung low on the horizon by day, and the splendor of the 
southern stars hung over them by night. There were many days 
of steady calm which gives the Pacific its name, a few, perhaps of 
storm with mighty billows thundering up from the Antarctic, 
home of the wildest seas in all the world! 
These people were but savages according to our notions, ecan- 
nibals according to tradition; but they were men of splendid 
