The articles of their food have been enumerated already; the principal, which to them is what bread is to the inhabitants of Europe, is the roots of the fern which grows upon the hills, and is nearly the same with what grows upon our high commons in England, and is called indifferently fern, bracken, or brakes. The birds, which sometimes serve them for a feast, are chiefly penguins and albatrosses, with a few other species that have been occasionally mentioned in this narrative.
Having no vessel in which water can be boiled, their cookery consists wholly of baking and roasting. They bake nearly in the same manner as the inhabitants of the South Seas, and to the account that has been already given of their roasting, nothing need be added, but that the long skewer or spit to which the flesh is fastened is placed sloping towards the fire, by setting one stone against the bottom of it, and supporting it near the middle with another, by the moving of which, to a greater or less distance from the end, the degree of obliquity is increased or diminished at pleasure.
To the northward, as I have observed, there are plantations of yams, sweet potatoes, and coccos, but we saw no such to the southward; the inhabitants, therefore, of that part of the country must subsist wholly upon fern root and fish, except the scanty and accidental resource which they may find in sea-fowl and dogs; and that fern and fish are not to be procured at all seasons of the year, even at the sea-side, and upon the neighbouring hills, is manifest from the stores of both that we saw laid up dry, and the reluctance which some of them expressed at selling any part of them to us when we offered to purchase them, at least the fish, for sea stores. And this particular seems to confirm my opinion, that this country scarcely sustains the present number of its inhabitants, who are urged to perpetual hostilities by hunger, which naturally prompted them to eat the dead bodies of those who were slain in the contest.
Water is their universal and only liquor, as far as we could discover, and if they have really no means of intoxication, they are, in this particular, happy beyond any other people that we have yet seen or heard of.
As there is, perhaps, no source of disease, either critical or chronic, but intemperance and inactivity, it cannot be thought strange that these people enjoy perfect and uninterrupted health. In all our visits to their towns, where young and old, men and women, crowded about us, prompted by the same curiosity that carried us to look at them, we never saw a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers that we have seen naked did we once perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or any marks that an eruption had left behind. At first, indeed, observing that some of them when they came off to us were marked in patches with a white flowery appearance upon different parts of their bodies, we thought that they were leprous, or highly scorbutic; but upon examination we found that these marks were owing to their having been wetted by the spray of the sea in their passage, which, when it was dried away, left the salts behind it in a fine white powder.
Another proof of health, which we have mentioned upon a former occasion, is the facility with which the wounds healed that had left scars behind them, and that we saw in a recent state; when we saw the man who had been shot with a musket-ball through the fleshy part of his arm, his wound seemed to be so well digested, and in so fair a way of being perfectly healed, that if I had not known no application had been made to it, I should certainly have enquired, with a very interested curiosity, after the vulnerary herbs and surgical art of the country.
A farther proof that human nature is here untainted with disease, is the great number of old men that we saw, many of whom, by the loss of their hair and teeth, appeared to be very ancient, yet none of them were decrepit; and though not equal to the young in muscular strength, were not a whit behind them in cheerfulness and vivacity.
CHAP. X.
OF THE CANOES AND NAVIGATION OF THE INHABITANTS OF NEW ZEALAND: THEIR TILLAGE, WEAPONS, AND MUSIC: GOVERNMENT, RELIGION, AND LANGUAGE: WITH SOME REASONS AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF A SOUTHERN CONTINENT.
The ingenuity of these people appears in nothing more than in their canoes: they are long and narrow, and in shape very much resemble a New England whale-boat: the larger sort seem to be built chiefly for war, and will carry from forty to eighty, or an hundred armed men. We measured one which lay ashore at Tolaga: she was sixty-eight feet and a half long, five feet broad, and three feet and a half deep; the bottom was sharp, with straight sides like a wedge, and consisted of three lengths, hollowed out to about two inches, or an inch and a half thick, and well fastened together with strong plaiting: each side consisted of one entire plank, sixty-three feet long, ten or twelve inches broad, and about an inch and quarter thick, and these were fitted and lashed to the bottom part with great dexterity and strength. A considerable number of thwarts were laid from gunwale to gunwale, to which they were securely lashed on each side, as a strengthening to the boat. The ornament at the head projected five or six feet beyond the body, and was about four feet and a half high; the ornament at the stern was fixed upon that end, as the stern-post of a ship is upon her keel, and was about fourteen feet high, two feet broad, and an inch and a half thick. They both consisted of boards of carved work, of which the design was much better than the execution. All their canoes, except a few at Opoorage or Mercury Bay, which were of one piece, and hollowed by fire, are built after this plan, and few are less than twenty feet long: some of the smaller sort have outriggers, and sometimes two of them are joined together, but this is not common. The carving upon the stern and head ornaments of the inferior boats, which seemed to be intended wholly for fishing, consists of the figure of a man, with a face as ugly as can be conceived, and a monstrous tongue thrust out of the mouth, with the white shells of sea-ears stuck in for the eyes. But the canoes of the superior kind, which seem to be their men-of-war, are magnificently adorned with open work, and covered with loose fringes of black feathers, which had a most elegant appearance: the gunwale boards were also frequently carved in a grotesque taste, and adorned with tufts of white feathers placed upon a black ground. Of visible objects that are wholly new, no verbal description can convey a just idea, but in proportion as they resemble some that are already known, to which the mind of the reader must be referred: the carving of these people being of a singular kind, and not in the likeness of any thing that is known on our side of the ocean, either “in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters that are under the earth,” I must refer wholly to the representations which will be found of it in Plate XV.
The paddles are small, light, and neatly made; the blade is of an oval shape, or rather of a shape resembling a large leaf, pointed at the bottom, broadest in the middle, and gradually losing itself in the shaft, the whole length being about six feet, of which the shaft or loom including the handle is four, and the blade two. By the help of these oars they push on their boats with amazing velocity.