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Barstow.—On the Maori Canoe. 71 
Art. IV.—The Maori Canoe, By R. C. Barstow. 
[Read before the Auckland Institute, 10th June, 1878.) 
Tue time is fast approaching when the Maori will hear only of the weapons, 
garments, and utensils of his ancestors in traditional story— when the 
tomahawks, spears, paroas will have disappeared—a few meres remaining 
as decorations or indications of chieftainship— when native kakahus, in all 
their varieties, having ceased to be manufactured, will have perished, and 
when the stone toki, or axe, being indestructible, will remain to be wondered 
at, but not understood. 
Not only will these matters of every-day use be no more, but the grander 
works—their pas, their canoes, their ornamented whares will have decayed, 
and the few surviving fragments of pre-pakeha civilization will have to be 
sought for in our museums. 
It is a duty, then, devolving upon us to endeavour to preserve for the 
information of the future races, both white and Maori, such remnants of 
history as yet exist, and with this object I have persuaded Paora Tuhaere 
to lodge here some of the carvings belonging to the once well-known canoe, 
Toki-a-tapiri ; and as canoes of that class are now uncommon, I propose to 
give a short account of their construction, and a word or two as to their 
history. 
Our first accounts of these Islands, resulting from Tasman’s voyage to 
them, more than two centuries ago, brought into notice the canoes of the 
people; and naturally enough, for what the horse is to the Arab, the camel 
to the dweller in the desert, the canoe was to the inhabitant of New 
Zealand; a country abounding in. bays, harbours, creeks, rivers, and 
destitute of roads and beasts of burden. Water-carriage was a matter of 
prime necessity. In addition to which the dearth of quadrupeds caused 
fish to be much depended upon as an article of food. Our Waitangi treaty 
shows how highly the Maori prized his fisheries. But in Tasman’s time 
the canoes he saw were all double ; though Cook, who was so much longer 
on the coasts, if I remember rightly, much more frequently mentions single 
canoes than double ones, and this latter class must have gone out of fashion 
soon after Cook’s time; for I never heard even the oldest natives mention 
them as used in their own day, save temporarily, when two might be lashed 
together for the purpose of erecting a fighting-stage on the platform between 
them, so as to be able to overtop therefrom the stockade of some water- 
fronting pa. 
Canoes occupying such a leading position in native estimation, many 
of their legends and traditions have reference to them—even the mythical 
Ika-o-Maui, the first drawing up of this island from the oce, wi noti 
be accomplished without a canoe—the accounts of the seven 
