[Illustration:  MAORI AND CARVED BOW OF CANOE]

The labour and patience needed to maintain some degree of rude comfort and keep up any kind of organised society with the scanty means at their disposal were very great indeed.  The popular notion of the lazy savage basking in the sunshine, or squatting round the fire and loafing on the labour of his women, did not fairly apply to the Maori—­at any rate to the unspoiled Maori.  As seen by the early navigators, his life was one of regular, though varied and not excessive toil.  Every tribe, in most ways every village, was self-contained and self-supporting.  What that meant to a people intelligent, but ignorant of almost every scientific appliance, and as utterly isolated as though they inhabited a planet of their own, a little reflection will suggest.  The villagers had to be their own gardeners, fowlers, fishermen and carpenters.  They built their own houses and canoes, and made every tool and weapon.  All that they wore as well as what they used had to be made on the spot.  They did not trade, though an exchange of gifts regulated by strict etiquette amounted to a rude and limited kind of barter, under which inland tribes could supply themselves with dried sea-fish and sea-birds preserved in their melted fat, or northern tribes could acquire the precious greenstone found in the west of the South Island.

Without flocks and herds or domestic fowls, theirs was the constant toil of the cultivator.  Their taro and their kumara fields had to be dug, and dug thoroughly with wooden spades.  Long-handled and pointed at the end, these implements resembled stilts with a cross-bar about eighteen inches from the ground on which the digger’s foot rested.  Two men worked them together.  The women did not dig the fields, but theirs was the labour almost as severe of carrying on their backs the heavy baskets of gravel to scatter over the soil of the plantations.

Almost the only staple article of Maori vegetable food which grew wild and profusely was the fern or bracken (pteris aquilina var. esculenta), which indeed was found on every hill and moor and in every glade, at any rate in the North Island.  But the preparation of the fibrous root was tedious, calling as it did for various processes of drying and pounding.

Fishing involved not only the catching of fish, but the manufacture of seine nets, sometimes half a mile long, of eel-weirs, lines made of the fibre of the native flax, and of fish-hooks of bone or tough crooked wood barbed with human bone.  The human skeleton was also laid under contribution for the material of skewers, needles and flutes.