uble canoe, each seventy feet long, high in the stern, and lashed
together, outrigger to outrigger. A stout, broad platform was held
firm between the canoes with many lashings of sennit, a strong, but
yielding, framework on which was a small house of straw where the
crew lived. We had no nails, but we used wooden pegs and thousands of
cocoanut-fiber ropes, so that everything, aloft and alow, was taut,
but giving in the toss of the sea.

"The pahi was eighty feet long, broad in the middle, very carefully
and neatly planked over inside, forming a rude bulkhead or inner
casing, and had a lofty carved stem rising into one or two posts,
terminating in a human form. It was in these vessels that we made the
long journeys from island to island, the migrations and the descents
upon other Polynesian peoples in war. Both the 'ar'ia and the pahi
were propelled by a huge 'i'e, or mat sail of pandanus-leaves shaped
like a leg of a fat hog. In modern times these great canoes were built
in Bora-Bora, the island the Hawaiians say they came from, and the
name of which means 'Land of the Big House Canoes.' With a good wind
we could sail a hundred and twenty miles a day in those vessels. We
would attend the fa'a-Rua, which we now call the ha'a-Piti, the wind
that blows both ways, for we waited for the northeast or southwest
trade-winds according to the direction we made for."

The chief lifted his glass of wine, and chanted:

"Aue mouna, mouna o Havaii!
Havaii tupu ai te ahi veavea!"

"Hail! mighty mountains, mountains of Havaii!
Havaii where the red, flaming fire shoots up high!"

Brooke had been to Lake Vaihiria, and suggested that I go. The
excursion had been long in my mind, for every time an eel was caught
or served some one exclaimed, "Aue! You should see the eels in
Vaihiria. But, be careful!"

The warning referred to the dangers of the climb, but also to a
mysterious menace of tupapaus, or ghosts. I had seen a canoe with the
head of an eel carved in wood, and had heard often a hesitant reference
to a legend of metempsychosis, of a human and eel transmigration. The
chief, after much persuasion, said that the clans of Mataiea had always
believed they were descended directly from eels; that an eel of Lake
Vaihiria had been the progenitor of all the people of the valley. A
vahine of another clan had been overcome by the eel's sorcery, as
Mother Eve by the serpent, which doubtless was an eel.

As the eel and