ng done will give any one an exact idea
of a Polynesian outrigger, by means of which long narrow canoes are
kept steady in the water.

Some people who sketch and engrave from imagination, err in
representing the natives of Samoa as _pulling_ their short paddles, as
the European boatman pulls his long oars. The paddle is about four
feet long, something like a sharp-pointed shovel; and when the natives
paddle, they sit with their faces in the direction in which the canoe
is going, "_dig_" in their paddles, send the water flying behind them,
and forward the canoe shoots at the rate of seven miles an hour. They
have always a sail for their canoe, as well as paddles, to take
advantage of a fair wind. The sail is triangular, and made of matting.
When set, the base is up, and the apex down, quite the reverse of what
we see in some other islands. The _mat_ sails, however, are giving
place to cloth ones, made in the form of European boat-sails.

Some two or three generations back the Samoans built large double
canoes like the Fijians. Latterly they seldom built anything larger
than a single canoe, with an outrigger, which might carry from fifteen
to twenty people. Within the last few years the native carpenters have
tried their hand at boat-building, and it is astonishing to see how
well they have succeeded in copying the model of an English or
American whaleboat, sharp at both ends, or having "two bows," as they
call it. Some of them are fifty feet long, and carry well on to one
hundred people. From stem to stern there is not a nail; everything is
fastened in their ancient style, with cinnet plaited from the fibre of
the cocoa-nut husk. Cinnet is likely long to prevail in _native_ canoe
and boat-building. Although it looks clumsy, it has the advantage of
not rotting the wood like an iron nail. It is durable also. With care,
and the sewing once or twice renewed, a Samoan canoe or boat will last
ten or twenty years.

They did not paint their canoes, but decorated them with rows of white
shells (_Cypraea ovula_) running along the middle of the deck at the
bow and stern, and also along the upper part of the outrigger. Now and
then they had a figure-head with some rude device of a human figure, a
dog, a bird, or something else, which had from time immemorial been
the "coat-of-arms" of the particular village or district to which the
canoe belonged. A chief of importance must also have one, or perhaps
two, large shells in his canoe