Yet the Fijians are by no means deficient in the mercantile instinct. In some districts side by side with the solevu a regular system of trade by barter was practised. At Lekutu in Mbau the townspeople were in the habit of bartering fish and salt with the hill people for vegetable produce. There were regular market-places, and the barter took place at fixed intervals. At Kandavu a single household or tribal sept having a store of bark-cloth, or some other commodity, would invite the possessors of some coveted article to trade with them, and
on the appointed day would visit their village and hand over their property in exchange for cooked food as well as the wares they needed. Similar practices prevailed in Western Vitilevu between the natives of the coast and the mountaineers; these customs were called tango or veisa.
The growing use of money has been developed side by side with a system of traffic in native produce, not only with European buyers, but among the natives inter se. Natives of the coast districts of Tailevu, who are required periodically to take contributions of food to Mbau on the occasion of some ceremonial without expecting any remuneration, at the same time carry on a regular trade with their chiefs at Mbau, hawking vegetables or fowls from house to house for money or its equivalent in European articles. Thus they draw a clear line of distinction between lala and barter.
CHAPTER XXI
NAVIGATION AND SEAMANSHIP
Whatever may have been the origin of seagoing ships, the evolution of the outriggered canoe is not difficult to trace. We may imagine a savage in remote antiquity standing on the banks of a river and watching logs of wood from a mountain forest floating swiftly down the current. His home lies down-stream. There is no path, for the banks are overgrown with a tangled mass of thorny creepers. This log will pass his village doors. He wades out and intercepts it. With one arm cast about it he is borne by the current right to his door without an effort. The women filling their jars at the water's edge applaud his originality. But when he next tries the experiment an alligator comes unpleasantly near his legs. He tries to haul himself astride of the log; it turns round with him. A bamboo is floating close at hand; he seizes it, and finds that by holding it athwart the log he can steady himself on his perch. But the bamboo, being too narrow to offer resistance to the water, tends to sink until he rests the end upon a floating branch. But on his next aquatic journey, remembering that the bamboo tired the arms and kept slipping off the branch, he takes a vine with him, and lashes the bamboo to log and branch. This leaves his hands free to use another bamboo to keep the head of his craft down-stream by poling on the bottom. He even punts it laboriously to land at the village, and ties it up for use in crossing the river on the morrow. He has taken the first step towards building a craft of his own. The thin end of the log cleft the water better than the other. He chips the end to a point. There are tribes that stop at this point. The catamarans of Eastern
New Guinea are merely three shaped logs lashed together, and depend for their buoyancy upon the displacement of the solid wood. A chance experiment shows that a hollow log is more buoyant, besides having the advantage of providing a dry resting-place for the feet. The discoverer of this phenomenon widens the natural hollow with fire, lashes his cross-ties to a smaller log, also sharpened at the ends, and he has made a Fijian canoe. The next steps are easy. By trying to propel it up-stream with a bamboo too short to reach the bottom he discards the pole for a slab of bark, and he has invented the paddle. To use the wind in the estuary to the best advantage he props a slab of bark on a stick and steadies it with a stay of vine. On his next voyage he takes a mat with him, staying his mast to the outrigger, the bow and the stern. Going about on the other tack the pressure of the wind bearing on the outrigger sinks it and capsizes the canoe, teaching him by painful experience that he must turn his sail inside out, and keep the outrigger always to windward. He has now devised the most complicated, the swiftest, and in many respects the most beautiful sailing machine in existence—the sailing canoe. The raising of the sides, and the decking of the bow and stern are expedients that need no deductive process.
