adly provisioned, and they cooked their food carefully and
well, chiefly by steaming in ovens lined with heated stones. Without
tea, coffee, sugar, alcohol or tobacco, they had also but seldom the
stimulant given by flesh meat. Their notorious cannibalism was almost
confined to triumphal banquets on the bodies of enemies slain in
battle. Without the aid of metals or pottery, without wool, cotton,
silk or linen, without one beast of burden, almost without leather,
they yet contrived to clothe, feed and house themselves, and to make
some advance in the arts of building, carving, weaving and dyeing.

[Illustration: MAORI AND CARVED BOW OF CANOE]

The labour and patience needed to maintain some degree of rude comfort
and keep up any kind of organised society with the scanty means at
their disposal were very great indeed. The popular notion of the
lazy savage basking in the sunshine, or squatting round the fire
and loafing on the labour of his women, did not fairly apply to the
Maori--at any rate to the unspoiled Maori. As seen by the early
navigators, his life was one of regular, though varied and not
excessive toil. Every tribe, in most ways every village, was
self-contained and self-supporting. What that meant to a people
intelligent, but ignorant of almost every scientific appliance, and
as utterly isolated as though they inhabited a planet of their own,
a little reflection will suggest. The villagers had to be their own
gardeners, fowlers, fishermen and carpenters. They built their own
houses and canoes, and made every tool and weapon. All that they wore
as well as what they used had to be made on the spot. They did not
trade, though an exchange of gifts regulated by strict etiquette
amounted to a rude and limited kind of barter, under which inland
tribes could supply themselves with dried sea-fish and sea-birds
preserved in their melted fat, or northern tribes could acquire the
precious greenstone found in the west of the South Island.

Without flocks and herds or domestic fowls, theirs was the constant
toil of the cultivator. Their taro and their kumara fields had to be
dug, and dug thoroughly with wooden spades. Long-handled and pointed
at the end, these implements resembled stilts with a cross-bar about
eighteen inches from the ground on which the digger's foot rested. Two
men worked them together. The women did not dig the fields, but theirs
was the labour almost as severe of carrying on their backs the heavy
ba