Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/220

162 once a year at least; in doing so the canoe is entirely taken to pieces and every plank examined. By this means they are always in good repair; the best of them are, however, very leaky, for as they use no caulking the water must run in at every hole made by the sewing. This is no great inconvenience to them, who live in a climate where the water is always warm, and who go barefoot.

For the convenience of keeping these pahies dry, we saw in the islands where they are used a peculiar sort of house built for their reception and put to no other use. It was built of poles stuck upright in the ground and tied together at the top, so that they make a kind of Gothic arch: the sides of these are completely covered with thatch down to the ground, but the ends are left open. One of these I measured was fifty paces in length, ten in breadth, and twenty-four feet in height, and this was of an average size.

The people excel much in predicting the weather, a circumstance of great use to them in their short voyages from island to island. They have various ways of doing this, but one only that I know of which I never heard of being practised by Europeans, and that is foretelling the quarter of the heavens from whence the wind will blow by observing the Milky Way, which is generally bent in an arch either one way or the other: this arch they conceive as already acted upon by the wind, which is the cause of its curving, and say that if the same curve continues a whole night the wind predicted by it seldom fails to come some time in the next day, and in this as well as their other predictions we found them indeed not infallible, but far more clever than Europeans.

In their longer voyages they steer in the day by the sun, and in the night by the stars: of these they know a very large number by name, and the cleverest among them will tell in what part of the heavens they are to be seen in any month when they are above their horizon: they know also the time of their annual appearance and disappearance to a great nicety, far greater than would be easily believed by an European astronomer.