Among many of the islands of the Southern Ocean the boats are simple wooden canoes, pointed at either end, and propelled through the water with the paddle; but the barks of the true Polynesians are more elaborate and ingenious. They frequently are double, with a raised platform or quarter-deck; and are invariably provided with an outrigger, an article seemingly of Malay origin. So essential, indeed, is the latter deemed for safe navigation, that the most remarkable characteristic recognised by the Tahitians, when Captain Cook’s vessels first revealed to them the wonders of European civilisation, was the want of the indispensable outrigger. Throughout the mythology of oceanic Polynesia, Mawai, the upholder of the earth, and the revealer of the secrets of the future, plays a prominent part. In one of his prophecies, Mawai foretold that a ship such as had never been seen before, a canoe without outriggers, should in process of time come out of the ocean. But to the mind of a Tahitian, an ocean canoe without an outrigger was so impossible a thing that they laughed their prophet to scorn: whereupon Mawai launched his wooden dish on the waters, which swam without outrigger, and the Tahitians thenceforward looked for the strange marvel of the outriggerless canoe. Cook’s ship was regarded as the fulfilment of Mawai’s prediction, and still English vessels are frequently called Mawai’s canoes. The mythic prophecy seems in reality one of those vague traditions of ancestral intercourse with other members of the human family, such as, among the Aztecs, led to the belief that the ships of Cortes had returned from the source of the rising sun with Quetzalcoatl, the divine instructor of their forefathers in the arts of civilisation.