Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/140

128 voyages set in, and it would seem probable that during this 200 years the first immigrants settled themselves in New Zealand.

Of the other islands of the Pacific which were first settled at this time, we have so little information as to their histories that nothing can be stated with certainty. It is probable that Easter Island was colonised about this period, and that the Marquesas received accessions to the population, if they were not for the first time then occupied, which I think is most probable. We have seen from a former page that at forty generations ago (or in 850) the Tahitian groups had people living on them, and most likely they were colonised at about the period of Ui-te-rangiora's voyages, or in 650.

All of the voyages indicated above, and others to be referred to later on, may cause surprise at their extent, but they were made in the tropical regions of the world, with numerous islands on the way, at which the voyagers could rest and replenish their stores. But I now come to one made by this daring navigator, Ui-te-rangiora, in his celebrated canoe Te Ivi-o-Atea, which outshines all the others, and shows him to have been a man worthy of taking his place amongst many of our own most fearless navigators of ages long subsequent to the seventh century. In the history of Te Aru-tanga-nuku, who in his time was also a great voyager, we find the following: "The desire of the ariki Te Aru-tanga-nuku and all his people on the completion of the canoe, was to behold all the wonderful things seen by those of the vessel Te Ivi-o-Atea in former times. These were those wonderful things:—the rocks that grow out of the sea, in the space beyond Rapa ; the monstrous