which they made the lengthy voyages we shall read about shortly, were of the same description.
Other accounts obtained in Samoa say that the alia was a Tongan design originally, and that the Samoans copied it from them. Again, it is said that the Tongans derived their model of the canoe from Fiji, which brings us back to this: that it probably originated with the ancestors of Maori and Rarotongan. The ancient canoe of the Samoans was called a soatau, and was made out of the large trunk of a tree; it was connected with the ama or outrigger by five 'iato or arms. The ama-tele or va'a-tele was also a large canoe of ancient times. Descriptions of these canoes are not now to be obtained; but, in connection with the extensive voyages of the Polynesians in former times, it is something to know the names of them, and that there were such craft, though it seems probable that the Samoans were not such great voyagers as other branches of the race. In the Rev. J. B. Stair's most interesting paper on "Samoan Voyages,"[1] he has assumed all through that the voyages therein related were made by Samoans. It will appear later on that these people were not Samoans—properly so called— but the ancestors of Maoris and Rarotongans, who formed, as I believe, a distinct migration into the Pacific, and who, at the times of those voyages, were in occupation of the coastal lands of Samoa.
There is still in existence at Atiu Island, Cook group, one of the large pai (Maori pahi) used in the voyages made by the people to neighbouring groups. And two were in existence in Samoa in 1897. Ellis[2] describes some of the large double canoes of the Tahitians as in use in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as being each 50 to 70 feet long, 2 feet wide and 4 feet deep, also the war canoes
- ↑ Journal Polynesian Society, vol. iv, p. 99.
- ↑ Polynesian Researches, vol. p. 164 et seq. First edition 1829.
