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Ch. xliii.] deifting of canoes to vast distances. 



467 



able, since tliey are togetlier 120 miles in length by 60 in 

 breadth, and abound in food fit for the support of man. 



Drifting of canoes to vast distances. — Yer j few of the nume- 

 rous coral islets and volcanos of the A^ast Pacific, capable of 

 sustaininp^ a few families of men, have been found unten- 



anted ; and we have, therefore, to enquire whence and by what 

 means, if all the members of the great human family have 



had one common source, could those savages have migrated. 

 Captain Cook, Mr. Forster, and others, have remarked that 

 parties of savages in their canoes must have often lost their 

 way, and must have been driven on distant shores, where 

 they were forced to remain, deprived both of tJie means and 



of the requisite intelligence for 



returning to their 



own 



country. Thus Cook found on the island of Wateoo three in- 

 habitants of Otaheite, who had been drifted thither in a canoe, 

 although the distance between the two isles is 650 miles. 

 In 1696, two canoes, containing thirty persons, who had left 

 Ancorso, were thrown by contrary winds and storms on the 

 island of Samar, one of the Philippines, at a distance of 800 

 miles. In 1721, two canoes, one of which contained twenty- 

 four, and the other six persons, men, vfomen, and children, 

 were drifted from an island called Parroilep to the island of 

 Guaham, one of the Marians, a distance of 200 miles.^ 



Kotzebue, when investigating the Coral Isles of Eadack 

 at the eastern extremity of the Caroline Isles, became ac- 

 quainted with a person of the name of Kadu, who was a 

 native of Ulea, an isle 1,500 miles distant, from which he had 

 been drifted with a party. Kadu and three of his country- 

 men one day left Ulea in a sailing boat, when a violent storm 

 arose, and drove them out of their course : they drifted 

 about the open sea for eight months, according to their 

 reckoning by the moon, making a knot on a cord at every 

 new moon. Being expert fishermen, they subsisted entirely 

 on the produce of the sea ; and when the rain fell, laid in as 

 much fresh water as they had vessels to contain it. ^ Kadu,^ 

 says Kotzebue, ' who was the best diver, frequently went down 

 to the bottom of the sea, where it is well known that the 



^'^ Malte-Brun's Geography, vol. iii. p. 419. 



n H 2 



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