62 THE CORAL LANDS OF THE PACIFIC. 



over its crushed victims ? The tradition continues : the women 

 and children who were gathering yaka were reduced to great 

 straits, having only salt water to drink ; but when they were 

 at the last extremity, ' one ' came to them and commanded 

 them to follow him ; they did so to a rock which he struck 

 with his stick, and from which good water immediately 

 flowed. The analogy with Moses and his rod here is obvious. 

 \\Tien the flood subsided, there were but few persons left 

 alive to re-people the land, and only such little animals as 

 Fiji now has. I endeavoured to elicit an opinion as to 

 who that ' one ' who drew water from the stone was, but could 

 obtain nothing definite, though it is evident that the individual 

 must have been regarded as at least possessing supernatural 

 power. 



I do not know whether any other writer on Polynesia has 

 noticed it, but I was informed by a 'beachcomber,' that in 

 some of the islands of the Low Archipelago, there is a tradition 

 of some of the ancestry of their people having gone over to or 

 returned from a big land to the East or more properly speak- 

 ing, over "West .., America. It is a fact that the skeletons 

 found in the caverns of Kentucky and Tennessee are wrapped 

 in feather cloaks, which was a custom of the Sandwich Islanders ; 

 while it is the opinion of most American antiquaries that the 

 best-defined specimens of art among the antiquities of Ohio and 

 Kentucky are of a decided Polynesian character. The diffi- 

 culties of the sea-passage between the Eastern groups and South 

 America is no greater than between the Sandwich and Society 

 Islands, and yet the identity of the inhabitants of the latter 

 places is undoubted. 



Mr. Ellis, in his ' Polynesian Eesearches,' says : 

 ' In the most remote and solitary islands occasionally dis- 

 covered in recent years, such as Pitcairn's, on which the 



