This opinion can only be corroborated by extending our investigation to the other departments of narrative art. Whatever other merits one might discover in primitive poetry, its strength does certainly not lie in invention. When the songs contain any narrative element at all, it refers to some simple experience of the day. Travel, hunting, and war afford the themes for the simplest epical poems as well as for the most primitive dramatic recitals.[203] And any event of unusual occurrence will of course be made use of by the poets. Travellers who have learned to understand the languages of the natives they sojourn with have often observed that their own persons have been described in impromptu songs.[204] Sometimes these songs have a satirical tendency;[205] sometimes they are composed as glorifications of the white man.[206] But there is no need to assume either of these tendencies in every case. The mere fact of his being a strange and new thing qualifies the European as a fitting subject for the primitive drama and poetry. And on the same grounds all the marvels of civilisation—the rifles, steamers and so on—will often be described in poetry.[207] In the savage mind these unknown facts will easily give rise to the most marvellous interpretations. For an instance of such apparently fantastic products of poetic imagination, which in reality have their origin in an unavoidable misconstruction of an unknown reality, we need only refer to the description of Captain Cook’s ships in the Hawaii song, which has been taken down by M. de Varigny. The ships themselves are spoken of as great islands, their masts are trees, the sailors are gods, who drink blood (_i.e._ claret), and eat fire and smoke through long tubes (_i.e._ pipes), and carry about things which they keep in holes in their flanks.[208] It is but natural to assume that—if researches on the origins of the subjects were possible—the seeming richness of invention in many similar poems could be accounted for by the deficient observation and the faults of memory in uneducated man. And by such researches the importance of actual experience would be substantiated even with regard to the art of barbaric nations. As to the songs of the lower savages, to which we have to restrict our attention at present, it is, as shown by the above adduced examples, unnecessary to appeal to this explanation.