Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/277

Rh he describes the preparation of a dish of poi in a wooden trough with hot stones. What the Polynesian notion of a pudding is, as to size, may be gathered from the account of two missionaries who arrived at the island of Rurutu, and were received by a native who paddled out to meet them through a rough sea, in a wooden poi-dish, seven feet long and two and a half wide.

I fear that the Tahitian recipe for making poi must spoil the good old story of Captain Wallis's tea-urn. A native who was breakfasting on board the Dolphin saw the tea-pot filled from the urn, and presently turned the cock again and put his hand underneath, with such effects as may be imagined. Captain Wallis, knowing that the natives had no earthen vessels, and that boiling in a pot over a fire was a novelty to them, and putting all these things together in telling the story, interpreted the howls of the scalded native as he danced about the cabin, and the astonishment of the rest of the visitors, as proving that the Tahitians "having no vessel in which water could be subjected to the action of fire, . . . . had no more idea that it could be made hot, than that it could be made solid." No doubt the natives were surprised at hot water coming out of so unlikely a place, but the world seems to have accepted both the story and the inference without stopping to consider that hot water could not be much of a novelty among people to whom boiled pudding was an article of daily food. Captain Wallis's story (as is so commonly the case with accounts of savages) may be matched elsewhere. "And we went now," says Kotzebue, in the account of his visit to the Radack islands, "to Rarick's dwelling, where the kettle had already been set on the fire, and the natives were assembled round it, looking at the boiling water, which seemed to them alive." Yet on another island of the same chain it is remarked that the mogomuk is made by drying the root of a plant, and pressing the meal into lumps; when it is to be eaten, some of this is broken off, stirred with water in a cocoa-nut shell, and boiled till it swells up into a thick porridge ("und kocht ihn, bis er zu einem dicken Brei aufquillt,") etc.