250 IOWA STUDIES IN NATURAL HISTORY 
bodies, unsurpassed bravery, abounding faith in themselves and 
their gods, risking all that they held dear in this one heroic ad- 
venture that they might find a home in a hitherto unpeopled land. 
What a theme for the inspired poet and painter is this! A story 
unsurpassed, it seems to me, in all that stirs the blood and in- 
flames the imagination! 
At last, reduced almost to utter starvation, exhausted to the 
limit of human endurance, they landed in the home of their dreams 
and took possession of the promised land. 
All Maoris trace their lineage to one or other of the great canoes 
whose names are to them what the Mayflower is to the New Eng- 
lander. Hach family has a ‘‘genealogical stick’? with prominent 
projections on one side, each of which stands for a generation. 
Every true Maori can name his forefathers as represented by the 
projections, beginning with his own father and going back as many 
as twenty-six generations, ending with the name of a great canoe, 
one of the brave fleet which sailed away from Hawaiki some six 
hundred years before. 
The immigrants prospered in this new world, the original set- 
tlers separated, each family or clan having abundant choice of 
location, and spread over a good portion of North Island; later 
they crossed Cook’s Strait to South Island. As the clans grew 
stronger they came into conflict with each other and war arose 
with pillage and reprisal. They quickly overcame the weaker 
Moriori whom they encountered here and there and reduced them 
to servitude although they seem to have intermarried freely. 
Thus they lived and multiplied for several centuries, and de- 
veloped the surprising art which was in abundant evidence when 
the first whites came to New Zealand, an art which amazes every 
visitor to the museums in the New Zealand of the present. 
It seems that Abel Tasman was the first European to reach this 
country, arriving in 1642. He anchored near Tasman Bay in the 
west coast of South Island where the town of Nelson is now, but 
he appears to have sailed away without landing. It was not until 
127 years later that the famous navigator, Captain Cook, anchored 
in Poverty Bay, North Island. The natives, however, were sus- 
picious and his attempts to establish contact with them met with 
no suecess. He then spent some six months in surveying the en- 
tire coast of both North and South Island, and met the natives 
on various occasions, learning a good deal about them, as a perusal 
of his published narrative shows. He gave them some pigs which 
