r level
of barbaric culture. They lived in comfortable houses ornamented with
carved work and with scrolls painted in red and white on the posts and
beams. Their villages were fortified with earthworks, palisades, and
trenches, and surrounded by large gardens planted with sweet potatoes,
taro, and melons.[17] "They excel in tillage," says Captain Cook, as
might naturally be expected, where the person that sows is to eat the
produce, and where there is so little besides that can be eaten: when we
first came to Tegadoo, a district between Poverty Bay and East Cape,
their crops were just covered, and not yet begun to sprout; the mould
was as smooth as in a garden, and every root had its small hillock,
ranged in a regular quincunx, by lines, which with the pegs were still
remaining in the field.[18] They understood the arts of irrigating their
gardens[19] and of manuring them so as to render the soil light and
porous and therefore better suited for the growth of the sweet potato,
their favourite food. For this purpose they used sand, and in the
Waikatoo district, where the root was formerly much cultivated, deep
excavations, like the gravel pits of England, may still be seen, from
which the natives extracted sand to fertilise their gardens.[20]
Moreover, they cultivated various species of native flax and used the
fibre for the manufacture of garments, first scraping it and drying it
in the sun, then steeping it in water, and afterwards beating it with
wooden mallets. Thus prepared the flax was dyed black or reddish brown
and woven into cloth with broad borders of neat and varied patterns. The
stronger and coarser fibres were made into string, lines, and cordage of
all sorts.[21] The Maoris also built large and magnificently adorned
canoes,[22] in which they made long voyages; for example, they invaded
and conquered the Chatham Islands, which lie to the eastward across the
open sea about five hundred miles distant from the nearest coast of New
Zealand.[23] In hunting they had little opportunity to shine, for the
simple reason that in their country there were no beasts to hunt except
rats;[24] even birds they could not shoot, because they had no bows and
arrows to shoot them with,[25] but they made some amends by catching
them in ingeniously constructed snares.[26] They caught fish both with
nets, some of which were of enormous size, and with hooks made of bone
or shell.[27] They displayed great skill and infinite patience in