162 GENERAL ACCOUNT OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDS CH. vn 



once a year at least ; in doing so the canoe is entirely taken 

 to pieces and every plank examined. By this means they 

 are always in good repair; the best of them are, however, 

 very leaky, for as they use no caulking the water must run 

 in at every hole made by the sewing. This is no great in- 

 convenience to them, who live in a climate where the water 

 is always warm, and who go barefoot. 



For the convenience of keeping these pahies dry, we saw 

 in the islands where they are used a peculiar sort of house 

 built for their reception and put to no other use. It was 

 built of poles stuck upright in the ground and tied together 

 at the top, so that they make a kind of Gothic arch : the 

 sides of these are completely covered with thatch down to 

 the ground, but the ends are left open. One of these I 

 measured was fifty paces in length, ten in breadth, and 

 twenty-four feet in height, and this was of an average size. 



The people excel much in predicting the weather, a 

 circumstance of great use to them in their short voyages 

 from island to island. They have various ways of doing this, 

 but one only that I know of which I never heard of being 

 practised by Europeans, and that is foretelling the quarter of 

 the heavens from whence the wind will blow by observing 

 the Milky Way, which is generally bent in an arch either 

 one way or the other : this arch they conceive as already 

 acted upon by the wind, which is the cause of its curving, 

 and say that if the same curve continues a whole night the 

 wind predicted by it seldom fails to come some time in the 

 next day, and in this as well as their other predictions we 

 found them indeed not infallible, but far more clever than 

 Europeans. 



In their longer voyages they steer in the day by the sun, 

 and in the night by the stars : of these they know a very 

 large number by name, and the cleverest among them will 

 tell in what part of the heavens they are to be seen in any 

 month when they are above their horizon : they know also 

 the time of their annual appearance and disappearance to a 

 great nicety, far greater than would be easily believed by an 

 European astronomer. 



