164 CLUB TYPES OF NUCLEAR POLYNESIA. 
stopping for a tale of the whale fishery at Matafele, for a hasty cast of a 
pebble at the tree shrine at Matautu, possibly for a bowl of kava at 
Vaiala, and so along to Moota or even to Matafagatele of the glisten- 
ing sands, proud in the possession of such a club as never before his 
return was carried in Samoa even by a chief. Yet before he could 
realize his dream, even before he had had the time to complete his club 
by making the hole through the lug whereby it might be suspended by 
a becket of sennit, the chance of his voyage led him to Santa Cruz. 
One does not associate the thought of gentle traffic with that savage 
island; no Samoan would ever give up peacefully such a club to men 
whom he could not trust with arms in their hands; there is blood upon 
the club beyond any doubt. 
A pair of notably similar pieces represented on Plate VIII in figures 
b and c may be ascribed indifferently to one or other of two eminently 
peaceful trades, for they are clearly of Maori origin, both credited to 
Fiji and one upon the authority of Voy. One of these trades was the 
spread of the Gospel according to the tenets of that one of the Protes- 
tant sects which has most firmly established itself among the Fijians. 
In the division of the field of evangelization the Wesleyan communion 
claimed for its own possession the archipelagoes of Tonga and Fiji. 
The port from which these emollient expeditions set out was in the 
Australian colonies, generally Sydney or Melbourne. When none but 
sailing vessels were available for the service as mission tenders, the 
voyage was somewhat roundabout in order to take advantage of the 
prevailing winds, and New Zealand was found to be on the most direct 
route to the islands. There were Wesleyan missions to be served in 
New Zealand as well. In consequence of this fact of navigation, the 
mission tenders were commonly manned by Maori converts, who thus 
were brought into contact with the peoples of Nuclear Polynesia. A 
little later than the establishment of the Wesleyan missions, about the 
sixties of the nineteenth century, there was a somewhat brisk trade in 
tropical fruits between Auckland and Levuka, which remained until 
1880 the principal port in Fiji, and many Maori were employed as 
sailors upon the light and speedy vessels which engaged therein. The 
mission service and the fruit trade provided the channel through which 
articles of Maori provenience might be collected in Fiji. The decora- 
tion on the grip of one of these pieces is shown in figure 59; that of the 
other is so much of the same general character that it did not appear 
necessary to take a rubbing. 
The whale trade, destructive of the whales, was as innocent upon men 
as any contact of rude savages with rude sailors may be; the trade in 
bananas and oranges with New Zealand entailed no moral obliquity. 
But the last group of the erratics in this collection leads to the mute 
evidences of a trade which equaled, if indeed it did not surpass, all the 
iniquity and more than the shame of the Middle Latitudes and the 
