Page:The disappearance of useful arts.djvu/7

 111 islands, but now the canoes only suffice for journeys within the Banks group and are not even good enough to fulfil this purpose completely. The canoe of Mota cannot be trusted to take its people to the island of Merlav which forms the southern limit of the group. Further, Dr. Codrington records that at Lakon, a district of Santa Maria, one of the largest of the Banks Islands, the people for a time went without their canoes though, unlike the Torres islanders, they had relearnt the art.

It is clear that this disappearance or degeneration of the canoe is not due to modern European influence. The canoe had already disappeared in the Torres Islands when Dr. Codrington was in Melanesia and this was not long enough after the settlement of Europeans to allow the loss to be ascribed to this cause.

The other place in Oceania where we have evidence of the disappearance of the canoe is Mangareva (Gambier Islands). When this island was first visited by Beechey he found the people using large rafts capable of carrying twenty men, together with smaller craft of the same kind; and yet, as Friederici has pointed out, there is one fact which shows that these islanders had formerly possessed the canoe. The Mangareva people call their raft kiatu which is a widely distributed word in the Pacific for the outrigger of the canoe. We can be confident that this word indicates a direct relation between the Mangareva raft and the ordinary Polynesian canoe. Even if it would be rash to conclude that the raft is the direct descendant of the outrigger of an ancient canoe, we can be confident that the natives of Mangareva were once acquainted with the canoe but had it no longer