162 GENERAL ACCOUNT OF SOUTH SEA ISLANDS cu. vir 
once a year at least; in doing so the canoe is entirely taken 
to pieces and every plank examined. By this means they 
are always in good repair; the best of them are, however, 
very leaky, for as they use no caulking the water must run 
in at every hole made by the sewing. This is no great in- 
convenience to them, who live in a climate where the water 
is always warm, and who go barefoot. 
For the convenience of keeping these pahies dry, we saw 
in the islands where they are used a peculiar sort of house 
built for their reception and put to no other use. It was 
built of poles stuck upright in the ground and tied together 
at the top, so that they make a kind of Gothic arch: the 
sides of these are completely covered with thatch down to 
the ground, but the ends are left open. One of these I 
measured was fifty paces in length, ten in breadth, and 
twenty-four feet in height, and this was of an average size. 
The people excel much in predicting the weather, a 
circumstance of great use to them in their short voyages 
from island to island. They have various ways of doing this, 
but one only that I know of which I never heard of being 
practised by Europeans, and that is foretelling the quarter of 
the heavens from whence the wind will blow by observing 
the Milky Way, which is generally bent in an arch either 
one way or the other: this arch they conceive as already 
acted upon by the wind, which is the cause of its curving, 
and say that if the same curve continues a whole night the 
wind predicted by it seldom fails to come some time in the 
next day, and in this as well as their other predictions we 
found them indeed not infallible, but far more clever than 
Europeans. 
In their longer voyages they steer in the day by the sun, 
and in the night by the stars: of these they know a very 
large number by name, and the cleverest among them will 
tell in what part of the heavens they are to be seen in any 
month when they are above their horizon: they know also 
the time of their annual appearance and disappearance to a 
great nicety, far greater than would be easily believed by an 
European astronomer. 
