70 ON THE ORIGIN AND MIGRATIONS OP THE POLYNESIAN NATION. 



Part III. 



I now proceed to the third and last department of our inquiry, 

 viz., to show that the same singular manners and customs, 

 altogether unlike those of the rest of mankind, are observable 

 alike among the wilder tribes, both of the Indo-Americans and 

 the Polynesians. 



Before mentioning any of these, I would remark upon the great 

 resemblance in bodily form that has been observed by intelligent 

 travellers, in comparing one of these tribes of mankind with 

 the other. Speaking of the Indians of Acapulco in Mexico, on 

 the Pacific coast, Captain Basil Hall, RIST., thus writes : — " Their 

 features and colour partake somewhat of the Malay character ; 

 their foreheads are broad and square ; their eyes small, and not 

 deep-seated; their cheek-bones prominent, and their heads covered 

 with black sti-aight hair ; their stature about the medium standard, 

 their frame compact and well made."* 



One of the most remarkable peculiarities in the manners and 

 customs of nations is their different modes of disposing of the 

 dead. On one of my voyages to England, in the year 1839, our 

 good ship having sprung a leak a few days after leaving this port, 

 we had to run for repairs to the Bay of Islands, in New Zealand, 

 where we lay about ten days, shortly before the colonization of 

 the New Zealand group had commenced. During my stay I 

 visited the cemetery of the Bay of Islands tribe, situated close to 

 the native village of Kororarika. There were no graves, however, 

 to be seen in the cemetery ; the dead bodies having each been 

 wrapped up in mats, and laid upon trestles raised a few feet from 

 the ground, and left to putrefy in the open air. During the fol- 

 lowing year, before my return to the Colony, I happened to visit 

 the exhibition of American Indian curiosities of a Mr. Catlin, an 

 American gentleman, of a very enthusiastic and adventurous 

 character, who had been travelling for many years among the wild 

 Indians of that country, and with whose family I had in the mean- 

 time become acquainted in New York ; his wife, whom he had 

 left behind him in the United States, having been entrusted to 

 my care on her passage across the Atlantic to rejoin her husband 

 in London. On one of my visits to Mr. Catlin's exhibition in the 

 Egyptian Hall, London, I happened to see an interesting drawing, 

 or rather painting, whicli he had made on the spot, of the native 

 village of the Mandan tribe of Indians in Missouri, and I was greatly 

 struck at observing that the cemetery of the village had precisely 

 the same singular appearance as that of the New Zealand native 

 cemetery I had seen a few months before at Kororarika, in the 



* Captain Basil Hall's Voyage to South America, vol. ii., page 175. 



