As we withdrew from this singular never-to-be-forgotten people's festival, and were on our way to our boats, the entire merry multitude assembled on the slope in front of the tents, and to show, it may be supposed, that they were not unacquainted with the usages of other countries, gave, with genuine English good-will, three rousing hurrahs in honour of the departing guests!
The study of the language and history of the traditions, habits, and morals of the aborigines of New Zealand, must necessarily be of special interest on account of our presumed acquaintance with the race they are descended from, and the important conclusions thence deducible as to the settlement of Polynesia at large.
A Maori legend relates that their first progenitors came in seven canoes from the island of Hawaiki (i. e. cradle of the race), one of the Sandwich Islands, 4000 miles to the N.E. of New Zealand.[30] These canoes had outriggers to prevent foundering, and were called Amatiatia, whereas those they now use, which are also of very simple construction, are named Wakka, and have evidently borrowed their form from the dried seed of the New Zealand honey-suckle (_Rewarewa_). The first canoe that came from Hawaiki was named Arawa. It brought over Honmaitawiti, Tamakekapua, Toi, Maka, Hei, Jhenga, Tauninihi, Rongokako, and others, and these were the first settlers from whom the New Zealanders are descended.
One of the earlier authors respecting these isles of the Antipodes, Richard Taylor, the missionary, relates that in 1840 there was living in the village of Para-para, on the road from Kaitaia to Doubtless Bay, an aged New Zealand chief named Hahakai, who was thoroughly conversant with the history of his native land, and used to enumerate twenty-six generations since the first arrival on the island of the ancestors of his tribe. Taylor is of opinion, however, that a number of these generations must be considered as divinities, and that hardly more than fifteen generations or five hundred years can have elapsed since the first vagrants from the north settled in New Zealand.[31] At that period they knew neither the custom of Taboo (the sanctity and inviolability of all things) nor cannibalism, both of which customs they first began to practise in their adopted country. As the aborigines before the arrival of the Europeans possessed no written language, these traditions were usually handed down from father to son, while one or more relatives of the more influential families of each tribe were duly set apart to study their traditions, as well as their laws (_tikanga_) and religious ceremonies. The persons thus educated supplied for them the place of annals, books of laws, or written precedents.