54 
POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
canoes, whatever might be the size or quality, they 
considered an outrigger essential to their remaining 
upright upon the water, and consequently could not 
believe that a canoe without one would live at sea. 
The absence of this has ever appeared to the South 
Sea Islanders one of the greatest wonders connected 
with the visits of the first European vessels. At one 
of the Harvey Islands, where the natives had never seen 
a vessel until recently visited by a Missionary, when 
the boat was lowered down to the water, and pushed 
off by the rowers from the ship’s side, the natives 
simultaneously and involuntarily exclaimed—^^It will 
overturn and sink, it has no outrigger.” 
The chiefs and others, to whom Maui delivered his 
prophecy, were also convinced in their own minds, 
that a canoe would not swim without this necessary 
balance, and charged him with foretelling an im¬ 
possibility. He persisted in his predictions, and, in 
order to remove their scepticism as to its practicability, 
launched his umete, or oval wooden dish, upon the 
surface of a pool of water near which he was sitting, 
and declared that in the same manner would the ves¬ 
sel swim that should arrive. 
We have not been able to ascertain the period of 
their history during which this prediction was de¬ 
livered. It was preserved among the people by oral 
tradition, until the arrival of Captain Wallis’s and 
Cook’s vessels. When the natives first saw these, they 
were astonished at their gigantic size, imposing appear¬ 
ance, and the tremendous engines on board. These 
appearances induced them first to suppose the ships 
were islands inhabited by a supernatural order of beings, 
at whose direction the lightnings flashed, the thunders 
