and
seventy feet long, and would carry 100 men.

Thus they were by no means uncivilised, but their condition was in some
respects most barbarous. In person they were dirty, and in manners proud
and arrogant. They were easily offended, and never forgave what they
considered as an injury or insult. This readiness to take offence and to
avenge themselves caused the neighbouring tribes to be for ever at war.
They fought with great bravery, slaughtered each other fiercely, and ate
the bodies. Sometimes they killed their captives or slaves in order to
hold a cannibal feast.

According to their own traditions they had not been always in these
islands. Their ancestors came from afar, and each tribe had its own
legendary account. But they all agreed that they came from an island
away to the north in the Pacific, which they called Hawaiki, and there
is little doubt but that some hundreds of years ago their forefathers
must in truth have emigrated from some of the South Sea Islands. Whether
they found natives on the islands and killed them all, we cannot now
discover. There are no traces of any earlier people, but the Maoris in
their traditions say that people were found on the islands and slain
and eaten by the invaders.

One tribe declared that long ago in far-off Hawaiki a chief hated
another, but was too weak to do him harm. He fitted out a canoe for a
long voyage, and suddenly murdered the son of his enemy. He then escaped
on board the canoe with his followers and sailed away for ever from his
home. This legend declared how after many adventures he at length
reached New Zealand. Another legend relates that in Hawaiki the people
were fighting, and a tribe being beaten was forced to leave the island.
Sorrowfully it embarked in two canoes and sailed away out upon the
tossing ocean, till, directed by the voice of their god sounding from
the depths below them, they landed on the shores of New Zealand.

How many centuries they lived and multiplied there it is impossible to
say, as they had no means of writing and recording their history.

#3. Tasman.#--The earliest we know of them for certain is in the journal
of Tasman, who writes under the date of 13th December, 1642, that he had
that day seen shores never before beheld by white men. He was then
holding eastward after his visit to Tasmania, and the shore he saw was
the mountainous land in the North Island. He rounded what we now call
Cape Farewell, and anchored in a fine b