286 REPORT— 1891. 



■obvious, from the course followed, that this was the reasou of 

 the long detour he made to the south of his proper course. 



Even the single canoes of the Maoris were sometimes of 

 great size : the remains of one were still to be seen at Hauraki 

 in 1855, which measured 110ft. long, and was capable of hold- 

 ing a hundred and fifty men and their pro^^sions on a coast- 

 ing voyage. 



The records of these ocean voyages, even in the days of 

 decadence of the people's knowledge of navigation, are so 

 numerous that there is no longer reason to doubt their powers 

 in this respect ; whilst, if we go back to the period of twenty to 

 thirty generations ago,- which I have indicated, we are forced 

 to the conclusion that they were actually in advance of some 

 nations calling themselves civilised, in their ability to traverse 

 large extents of the ocean, and not only that, but to find their 

 v.'ay about with a degree of certainty quite unexpected. The 

 fact that we find this homogeneous race living on almost every 

 known island of the vast Pacific is a sufficient proof of their 

 powers of navigation ; for we may, I think, discard the other 

 theory which has been proposed to account for their dispersion, 

 such as enunciated by Dumont d'Urville and Moerenhout — 

 viz., that of a submerged continent, of which the existing 

 islands are but the mountain-tops appearing above the waves, 

 and to which the people retired as the waters gradually arose 

 and swallowed ap their former homes. Examples without end 

 might be quoted to show the extent to which the Polynesians 

 were able to navigate their canoes to great distances, and of 

 their ability to find their way about over the ocean without 

 the aid of compass or log, guiding themselves by the sun, the 

 moon, or the stars — for all the principal ones of which they 

 had a name — or in cloudy weather directing their course by 

 the regular roll of the waves before the trade-wind. 



One of the captains of the Union Steamship Company told 

 me that he had seen in Fiji a rude chart used in their naviga- 

 tion, in which the constant movements of the seas driven before 

 the trade-wind were shown by parallel strings stretched on a 

 frame, and on these the positions of numbers of islands were 

 indicated in their relative positions by little pieces of wood. 

 The routes from island to island in many of the groups were 

 well known, and the starting-points had characteristic names. 

 For instance, there is a place on the east coast of New Zea- 

 land known to the Maoris as the starting-point for Hau-aiki, 

 their original home from which they immigrated here. In 

 Atm, Williams, in his "Missionary Enterprises,"* tells us 

 there was a starting-point from which departure was taken 

 for Karotonga ; and it was by leaving that place and following 



* " A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises," by llcv. John Williams. 

 London, 1846. Page 82. 



