CHAPTER XXIII.
THE TIMES OF THE MAORIS.
1. The Maoris.—So far as we know, the original inhabitants of New Zealand were a dark-skinned race called Maoris, a people lithe and handsome of body, though generally plain of features: open, frank and happy in youth, grave and often melancholy in their older years.
They numbered forty thousand in the North Island, where the warmth of the climate suited them, but in the South Island there were only two thousand. They were divided into tribes, who fought fiercely with one another; cooked and ate the bodies of the slain, and carried off the vanquished to be slaves. They dwelt in houses sometimes neatly built of wooden slabs, more often of upright poles with broad grass leaves woven between them. The roofs were of grass, plaited and thatched.
To these abodes the entrances were only some two or three feet high, and after crawling through, the visitor who entered at night would see the master of the house, his wives, his children, his slaves, indeed all his household, to the number of twenty or thirty, lying on mats in rows down either side, with their heads to the walls and their feet to the centre, leaving a path down the middle. In these rooms they slept, with a fire burning all night, till, what with the smoke and the breaths of so many people, the place was stifling. The roofs were only four feet higher than the ground outside, but, then, inside, the earth was hollowed a foot or two to make the floor so that a man could just stand upright.
These houses were gathered in little villages, often pleasantly situated beside a stream, or on the sea-shore; but sometimes for defence they were placed on a hill and surrounded by high fences with ditches and earthen walls so as to make a great stronghold of the kind they called a “pah”. The trenches were sometimes twenty or thirty feet deep; but generally the pah was built so that a rapid river or high precipices would defend two or three sides of it, while only the sides not so guarded by nature were secured by ditches and a double row of palisades. Within these enclosures stages were erected behind the palisades so that the fighting men could hurl stones and spears and defy an attacking party.
A Maori Dwelling.
2. Maori Customs.—Round their villages and pahs they dug up the soil and planted the sweet potato, and the taro, which is the root of a kind of arum lily; they also grew the gourd called calabash, from whose hard rind they made pots and bowls and dishes. When the crops of sweet potato and taro were over they went out into the forest and gathered the roots of certain sorts of ferns, which they dried and kept for their winter food. They netted fish and eels; they caught sharks with hook and line and dried their flesh in the sun. To enjoy these meals in comfort they had a broad verandah round their houses which formed an open and generally pleasant dining-room, where they gathered in family circles bound by much affection for one another. The girls especially were sweet and pretty; their mild manners, their soft and musical voices, the long lashes of their drooping eyes, with the gloss of their olive-tinted skins made them perfect types of dusky beauty. Grown a little older they were by no means so attractive, and then when married they deeply scored their faces by the process of tattooing.