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HISTORY OF MARINE ARCHITECTURE.

times two of them are joined together, but this is not common. The carvingupon t’ne stern and head, ornaments of the inferior boats, which seem to beintended wholly for fishing, consists of the figure of a man, with a face as uglyas can be conceived, and a monstrous tongue thrust out of the mouth, withthe white shells of sea ears stuck in for eyes ; but the canoes of the superiorkind, which seem to be their men of war, are magnificently adorned withopen work, and covered with loose fringes of black feathers, which had a mostelegant appearance; the gunwale boards were also frequently carved in agrotesque taste, and adorned with tufts of white feathers placed upon a blackground.

“ The paddles are small, light, and neatly made; the blade is of an oval shape,or rather of a shape resembling a large leaf pointed at the bottom, broadest in themiddle, and gradually losing itself in the shaft; the whole length being about sixfeet, of which the shaft or loom, including the handle, is four, and the blade two ;by the help of these oars they push on their boats with amazing velocity.

“ In sailing they are not expert, having no art of going otherwise than beforetlie wind ; the sail is of netting, or mat, which is set up between two poles thatare fixed upright upon each gunwale, and serve both for masts and yards, tworopes answering the purpose of sheets, and were consequently fastened aboveto the top of each pole ; but clumsy and inconvenient as this apparatus is, theymake good way before the wind, and are steered by two men, who sit in thestern, with each a paddle in his hand for that purpose.”

These warlike people, inhabiting a quarter of the globe as distant almost aspossible from that quarter which, in the earlier ages of the world, was theemporium of all science, appear, in many respects, to have caught the same chainof ideas : a strong and additionally convincing proof that the human mindis, in many points, particularly those which relate to mechanics, swayedand directed by the same chain of thought. Admitting this fact, it cer-tainly, however, is not a little curious, that the inhabitants of a country situatedin the Southern Atlantic, and with whom there is not, by the most imperfecttradition, the smallest trace of any European intercourse having everexisted, or even with the continent of India itself, should have adopted somany points, as well relating to ornament as to use, which, were the caseotherwise, might be considered as actual imitations managed with no contemp-tible share of ingenuity, not only of the most ancient principles of marinearchitecture, but of those which are of much more modern, and indeed of

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