CoLENSO.^O;i the Vegetable Food of the Ancient New Zealanders, 9 



near to their taro plantations, and sometimes on the outsides of woods and 

 thickets. 



In those plantations all worked ahke : the chief, the lady and the slave ; 

 and all, while so engaged, were under a rigid law of minute ceremonial re- 

 strictions, or taboo, which were invariably observed. Fortunately for them, 

 the modern unnecessary and expensive indulgence, or evil, of tobacco was 

 wholly unknown ! And there was nothing of a similar time-consuming 

 nature known to them to have taken its place. It was a pretty sight to see 

 ar chief and his followers at work in preparing the ground for the planting 

 of the kumara. They worked together, naked, (save a small mat or frag- 

 ment of one about their loins), in a regular line or band, each armed with a 

 long-handled narrow wooden spade (koo), and like ourselves in performing 

 spade labour, worked backwards, keeping rank and time in all their move- 

 ments, often enlivening their labour with a suitable chaunt or song, in the 

 chorus of which all joined. 



If it were a pleasing sight to notice the regularity of their working, it 

 was a still more charming one to inspect their plantations of growing crops: 

 1. The kumara plants, springing each separately from its own little hemi- 

 spherical hillock — just the size and shape of a small neat mole-hill. 2. The 

 taro plants (each one beautiful in itself) rising from the plain carefully 

 levelled surface, which was sometimes even strewed with white sand brought 

 from a distance, and patted smooth with their hand ; * and 3. the hue, in 

 its convex bowl-shaped pits, or " dishes," as Cook calls them. The whole 

 tout ensemble was really admu-able ! The extreme regularity of their plant- 

 ing, the kumara and the taro being generally set about two feet apart, in 

 true quincunx order, with no deviation from a straight line when viewed in 

 any direction, (to effect this they carefully use a line or cord for every row 

 of kumara in making up the httle hillocks into which the seed-tuber was 

 afterwards warily set with its sprouting end towards the north) ; the total 

 absence of weeds, the care in which all was kept — even to the sticking into 

 the ground, when required, leafy and yielding branches of manuka — Lepto- 

 spermum scoparium, (owing to the high westerly winds, or to the situation 

 being rather exposed), and last, though in their eyes by no means the least, 



* " Leaving Te Kawakawa and travelling south by the seaside, I passed by several of 

 the taro plantations of those natives. These plantations were large, in nice condition, 

 and looked very neat, the plants being planted in true quincunx order, and the ground 

 strewed with fine white sand, with which the large pendulous and dark-green shield- 

 shaped leaves of the plants beautifully contrasted ; some of the leaves measuring more 

 than two feet in length — the blade only. Small screens formed of the young branches of 

 Leptospernmm scoparium, to shelter the young plants from the violence of the winds, inter- 

 sected the grounds in every direction." — Excursion in N.Z., in 1841 : — " Tasmanian 

 Journal of Science," Vol. 11., p. 217. 



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