MIGRATION DRIFT AND ERRATICS. 163 
ments, the few inches of soft iron, represented such wealth to a race 
ignorant of metals that its vernacular designation takawaz has come to 
signify treasure of any sort. In this custom of the whale trade cul- 
ture began to be mixed. Thus and from this cause Hawaiian material 
is met with on the Alaskan coasts and islands; even in the mountains of 
the western United States the name Owyhee still persists in its archaic 
spelling in varied geographical use. It is thus and from this cause that 
this northern material is found in Santa Cruz and the Solomons. 
When familiar with the conditions of such seafaring there is no 
difficulty in reconstructing the story of each of these objects. 
Some kanaka boatman on shore leave in Alaska was attracted by the 
little figurine. Possibly it appealed to his art sense; quite as likely, for 
the whale trade considerably antedated the introduction of Christianity, 
it may have seemed to him a god which it would be worth any man’s 
while to have for his very own. One never wholly comprehends what 
actuates the savage mind, enormously strong for a time and then turn- 
ing fickle. At any rate, such must have been the source of the carved 
ivory, and of such sort its portage away from the place of its origin. If 
a god, perchance he was in a journey; peradventure he slept; for Baal 
is not the only god in history who has proved recreant to his wor- 
shiper. Perhaps the attraction ashore in the southern Solomons was 
sufficient to induce the kanaka seaman to part with that which once 
he had treasured. There is dark and bloody ground in the western 
Pacific; there was in the beginning of our knowledge of Melanesia, 
there is to-day despite the emollient influences of high commissioners 
and gunboats and punitive expeditions. It may have been that the 
statuette so worked upon the cupidity of Solomon Islanders that they 
took it from the sailor, probably took the sailor himself the way of all 
flesh in those regions, which is the way of meat. It is thus that a 
simple explanation is found for the presence in the Solomons of a bit of 
Alaskan culture, an erratic. 
So also is the story of the narwhal-ivory billet club, yet with a differ- 
ence. In the former instance Alaska furnished both the material and 
the finished object; in this the material alone is Alaskan, the art is 
Polynesian. It was surely a Samoan sailor who first came into posses- 
sion of this horn of the unicorn of the sea and saw at once how well 
fitted it was to the exercise of his handicraft. It is easy to picture him 
in the lazy hours of cruising with no more pressing occupation than 
waiting to be stirred into activity by the hail from the crow’s nest of 
‘Arr she blows and ’arr she breaches!’’ ‘The hours of idleness go 
industriously past as he busies himself with holystone and shagreen to 
rub the twists out of the stalk of ivory, and with the sheathknife as he 
carves the lug upon its end in his own country fashion. He follows the 
art of the Samoan tufuga and fills his toilsome idleness with pleasant 
dreams of strutting along the Apia beach from Sogi and Savalalo, 
