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Houses, Canoes, and Carving in Polynesia and
North-west America

(19) And here we touch on one of the most striking resemblances between the cultures of the two regions. The Haidahs and the Nootkas, though they follow the American Indians in the construction of their summer dwellings, making them lodges of poles covered with skins or mats, build their permanent and winter houses more like the Maoris; these are rectangular, with huge ridge-pole and sloping roof, grotesquely carved wall-posts and central pillars, side-planks tied together, the entrance at one end, as a rule the only exit for the smoke of the fire, which is generally in a hole in the centre of the floor, and the floor covered with mats, on which the residents squat by day and sleep by night. But the feature that impressed most early travellers in the North Pacific was the luxuriance of the carving, resembling, and yet surpassing that of the Maoris in elaboration. The inner walls are covered with fantastic human figures, and so, too, are posts in front of or between them, the figures being crowded from top to bottom, so that the features and the limbs are broadened or distorted out of the human. The same luxuriance of carving is seen on all their weapons and implements and utensils. But in the north this is executed not merely in wood, but frequently in stone; the Maori prefers wood, although his ear and neck ornaments are carved in the hardest of all stones, jade, and ancient carved steatite vessels have been found in New Zealand. In Polynesia proper, the carving is feebler and less artistic than in British Columbia or New Zealand. The result is that, even though in the lace-like arabesque of some of their carved work the Maoris surpass all but the most advanced artistic nations, the general level of Polynesian carving is held to be lower than that of the Haidahs and Nootkas, who revel in repro-page 58ducing grotesquely the figures of men and animals. In human sculpture they and the Maoris are about equal. They delight in broad distortions of the features and the limbs, as if they looked at men through an uneven magnifying glass. There is nothing exact or true in their sculpture, though they both attempt to give realism to the eyes by the use of discs of gleaming haliotis shell. And the use of the eye, not only in the human figure, but in other ornamentation, is a common feature of both regions.

(20) But it is on their canoes that they lavish their finest and most elaborate carving, especially on the prows and the sterns, which are in both regions raised into an upstanding curved post. There is generally the outline of some monstrous figure, either animal or human, to give the solid core to the finer lace-like carving. The haliotis shell is again introduced with effect. But, quite apart from their art-work, the two regions, New Zealand and British Columbia, agree in adhering to the dugout, both large and small. The Maori once preferred the double canoe, and some, if not all, of the six canoes were of this truly Polynesian type. But in their new country they completely abandoned it, as well as the outrigger canoe, even though their coasts were stormy. This latter has its genesis on the surf-beaten open shores of South Asia, and especially of India, and developed into the double canoe in the Pacific. And in the islands the canoe is generally built high from a solid bottom by planks bound together with sinnet or cocoanut cord. But in New Zealand even the huge war-canoe was dug out of a single tree trunk, with only one plank, or at most two, to raise the sides; and in this it agrees with the huge canoe of the North-west coast of America.

(21) The megalithic pioneers evidently found their way from the North Pacific into Polynesia, and finally into New Zealand, the cul-de-sac of the Pacific, in huge single dugout page 59canoes, without outrigger; whilst the South Asiatic immigrants found their way into the same regions in half-dugout, half-plank-built canoes, made steady by outriggers, and afterwards by duplication. The ultimate dominance of the former in New Zealand was doubtless greatly aided by the extensive world-old forests that covered the islands. The North Pacific people who migrated into the Hawaiian Archipelago along the line of islets and reefs that stretch north-west from the group towards Japan had a far longer gap of unisleted ocean to cross from the coast of Asia; and when they got to their ultimate land-area, they found less gigantic trees and smaller forests; and hence the final predominance in this group of the Polynesian canoe, plank-built and outrigger or double. The tribes that went northwards and eastwards from the Japanese Archipelago could coast along islands or the mainland all the way, taking shelter at night or in storm, by the Kurile chain, Kamschatka, and the Aleutian chain. This is probably the reason the Aleutians and the British Columbians have kept to the huge single dugout canoe, and the reason why, unlike the Polynesians and the Maoris, they never used sail, but always paddled. The general resemblance of both the North Pacific and the Maori far-voyaging single canoe to the ship of the Scandinavian vikings, with its ornamented prow and stern, is not to be rejected as meaning nothing ethnologically after we have followed the megalithic track across from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and seen traces of fair-haired and blue-eyed peoples all the way, and the contrast between these ships and the bark canoes of the Arctic, races and of the American Indians has equal significance.