Once our logs were at Faatemu, Taura was for giving a feast and resting for a day or two. But I urged haste, recalling my uncle's words to the chief. Then the logs were laid out in the shade, close to the village, and one man set to work on each, fashioning a canoe with axe and adze. Day after day the builder chopped, while the chips flew and the form of the canoe emerged--the curve of sheer, the rounded bilge, the sharp lines of bow and stern. Sometimes a man stood off, squinting at his handiwork with one eye closed--judging the symmetry of the slender hull. When the outside was roughly chopped to shape, the log was turned over and the builder began to hollow out the inside with his adze. At last, when the walls of wood were of the required thickness, the process of finishing began: a slow and laborious rubbing with hard bits of coral, and a final smoothing with the rough skin of a stingray's tail, tacked to a wooden block. Then a pair of narrow planks of hibiscus were sawn out to make the raised gunwales, six inches high and of the same thickness as the sides of the canoe. After long scraping and repeated trials, these gunwales were made to fit so perfectly that no crack of light appeared when they were set in place. At intervals of about a foot, holes were drilled in the gunwales and corresponding holes in the dugout-sides beneath. The planks were joined at stem and stern and lashed to the canoe with cinnet--strong cording made of the braided fibre of the coconut. Now, save for its outrigger, the canoe was finished. Round-bottomed and very narrow for their length, the native canoes would capsize at once were it not for their outriggers--light slender logs which float in the water alongside at a distance of four or five feet, attached to the hull by a pair of transverse poles. When Captain Cook first sailed among the islands, the natives marveled at the great canoe which remained upright without an outrigger--more wonderful by far, in their eyes, than the white man's cannon, or muskets, or axes of steel. "_Aué!_" they exclaimed, in astonishment. "_E vaa ama oré!_"--a canoe without an outrigger! We made our outriggers of light _purau_ wood, twenty feet long, five or six inches thick, and pointed at the forward end. The attaching poles were of iron wood--_casuarina_ is the name of the beautiful, pale-foliaged tree--lashed across the gunwales fore and aft, the bow pole rigid, the rear one curved and flexible. At Taura's suggestion, I gave orders that all the outriggers and their fittings be assembled, and the canoes tested in the water before they were taken apart to be loaded aboard the Tara. Thanks to the chief, they were ready some days before the schooner came in sight, and our diving-goggles, made in the evenings by the old men of the village, were finished and waiting at the store.