18 
THE TWO PACES WHICH PEOPLED POLYNESIA. 
Nga-ti-ma-moe, their fear now being in some measure trans- 
ferred to the Europeans straggling about the mountains in 
search of gold; some parties of whom have occasionally 
surprised them, and plundered their abodes. 
The Ware Kauri, or Chatham Isles, were up to a very late 
date entirely inhabited by a portion of this dark race, until 
the Maori found his way there by the aid of whalers and 
subjected them to his rule, destroying many of them, some, 
however, still survive ; they are greatly reduced in number, 
and probably do not amount to a hundred ; they are called 
Moriori, but are more generally known as the Kiri waka 
papa, or bare sides, also by the term of Paraki war a, a 
corruption of the English word, black fellow. Formerly 
they went naked, and their houses, if such they could be 
called, were only made by a few poles reared together 
over a circular pit, two or three feet deep, covered in with 
sods, thus forming a cone-shaped hut, with a very small 
hole on the north side, just large enough for a man to creep 
in, which was closed by a bundle of sedge or other substance, 
probably, this was the simplest form of human habitation we 
are acquainted with, unless it be the Gunyeh,* which is merely 
a screen formed of a few sheets of bark, to afford shelter 
from cold winds or rain ; in those miserable holes they sat 
huddled together, with their children between their knees, 
for warmth. 
It is, however, remarkable that such a degraded race could 
make canoes in a most ingenious way from the Rimu, a 
sea-weed with large flat leaves, which were converted into 
tubes, by making a small orifice through the outer skin 
of one side, and then inflating the intervening space, 
and stopping up the opening ; they thus became large air 
* The Australians have the same word for a cave, which is used for a 
house ; in fact, caves are occasionally occupied as houses throughout New 
Zealand, and would be more generally so, were it not for fear of the frequent 
earthquakes. The Maori traditions of their greatest enemies or Taniwa, 
represent them as living in holes underground, in fact make them to have been 
troglodytes, and this seems to have been a characteristic feature of the black 
race, and like them, the Maori thought their gods appeared as spiders, flies, 
moths and beetles. 
