350 Essays. 
the uprights with durable supplejacks and vines from the forest, looked 
very formidable and was very strong. All its posts were surmounted with 
human figures as large as life, in puris naturalibus, elaborately though 
roughly carved out of solid wood, with faces in every conceivable or incon- 
ceivable state of distortion. Inside this was generally a second wooden 
fence, made like the outer one, but of lighter materials; within this were 
excavated earthworks. Sometimes the wooden fences, or some portions of 
them, were raised on earthworks; and sometimes they were made to over- 
g a cliff or side of a hill, as a chevaux de frise, presenting a low angle 
with the horizon. 
14. If there was much to admire in their house architecture and forti- 
. fication building, there was still more in their naval architecture; bearing 
in mind (as before) that they did all without the aid of iron or any metal; 
their solid and strong double canoes (wakaunua), long since extinct, and 
scarcely known even by name to the present generation ; their handsome, 
well-arranged war canoes, of which there are not many, and perhaps not a 
single first-class one left; their fishing and voyaging canoes, also with 
raised sides; * and their common canoes of several kinds and sizes, formed 
out of a single tree, and often of great length. A first-class war canoe, with 
all its many fittings—its hundred paddles, its handsome elaborately carved 
stem and stern, and all its many ornaments and decorations of feathers, 
rouge, and mother-of-pearl, was always the work of many hands throughout 
many years. Fully to complete one was indeed a triumph, in which many 
hearts would heartily join: so true it is,— 
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever!” 
Their largest canoes were rigged with two masts, and carried a large light 
triangular-shaped sail to each. Their smaller canoes had only one similarly 
shaped sail. Besides their canoes, they sometimes made use of rafts for 
crossing streams and inlets when the water was deep ; such, however, were 
only made for the occasion, of dry bulrushes, or the dry flowering stems of 
the flax plant, tied together in bundles with green flax. In some places (as 
about the East Cape, where there are no harbours), the natives made use of 
an open frame-like raft of light wood, on which they went out to sea for 
some distance ; and of late years have not unfrequently visited ships on such, 
carrying with them two or three baskets of potatoes. 
15. They also excelled in some few manufactures, more particularly in 
their textiles, in this respect far surpassing all the other Polynesians ; 
nature having bountifully given to them that most useful plant the New 
Zealand flax, or Phormium, which was very nearly to them what the cocoa- 
nut palm is to the Indian. 
' .. * Commonly called “war canoes” by the colonists. 
