OF THE SOUTH SEAS 347 



on wood in Easter Island by some of the Polynesians 

 there half a century ago would denote there had been 

 intercourse with the people who had made them, and 

 who were not the Polynesians. 



Once in Samoa, and finally at home there, after their 

 Fiji disaster, they had gone adventuring, or the canoe 

 drift of unfortunates caught by wind and tide had 

 brought populations to all the other Polynesian islands, 

 and principally to Tahiti. This island in the center of 

 Polynesia, and especially favored by nature, had been a 

 source of growth and distribution of the race, the Pau- 

 motus. New Zealand, and probably the Marquesas, and 

 Hawaii having been stocked from it, the language de- 

 veloping furthest in it, and customs, refinements, and 

 leisure reaching their highest pitch in the marvelous cul- 

 ture, savage though it was, which astounded the Euro- 

 peans. Yet all these people remained curious as to 

 what might be beyond the distance, and a hundred years 

 ago were fitting out exploring expeditions to search for 

 Utupu, a Utopia from which the god Tao introduced 

 the cocoanut-tree. They looked to the westward for 

 the mystic land of their forefathers, as from Ireland to 

 India the happy isles of the west was a myth. The 

 mariners of Erin had long seen the Tir-n'an-Oge just 

 beyond the horizon. 



The Tahitians had a legend of the god Maui, that 

 "he brought the earth up from the depths of the ocean, 

 and when mankind suffered from the prolonged absence 

 of the sun and lived mournfully in obscurity, with no 

 ripening fruits, Maui stopped the sun and regulated its 

 course, so as to make day and night equal, as they are 

 in Tahiti." 



