Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/34

 20 celebrations or remembrances of striking occurrences. These dramas were composed by regular poets, hundreds of people took part in the performances, and if a drama was successful it was learnt and remembered by hundreds more. So that in the middle of the nineteenth century Mr. Gill was able to collect from his cultured converts a great number (probably the finest) of these plays. They were performed at night only, in time of peace, after preparations that sometimes took more than a year. They were played in groups, and some twenty would be played between sunset and sunrise by the light of fires and torches. They seldom extend beyond one or two hundred lines. They are as allusive as the odes of Pindar himself, and the explanation of many of the oldest could only be given by chiefs and priests who were constrained to become acquainted with the legends gathered about the religious functions which formed their daily duties or about the personal titles of their predecessors in office. That the Play of Captain Cook and Omai (made soon after their arrival in 1777) should be remembered a hundred years later is not surprising, though the accuracy of the native tradition as tested by Cook's own journals is noteworthy; but we have earlier instances proving the accuracy and scope of native tradition. At the end of the sixteenth century in the time of Shakespeare and Elizabeth, Tekaraka was exiled from Mangaia with his family and friends in two large double canoes, on the advice of the oracle-priest of the god Motoro. Nothing was known of the fate of these outlaws, until, after the conversion of the Hervey Islands, certain New Zealanders, Christians, were able to visit in peace a land that had always shown itself especially inhospitable to strangers. These Maoris brought the news of Tekaraka's landing in their own islands, where many persons traced their descent to him and where many places kept the old Mangaian names he brought there.

Nearly fifty years later, Iro, of the Tongan tribe, raised a