all was smooth and neat; and it was only on close inspection you could see that there was a join at all.  They had timbers, thwarts, and gunwale, to keep all tight; and over a few feet at the bow and the stern they had a deck, under which they could stow away anything.  The decked part at the bow was the seat of honour, and there you generally saw the chief of the travelling party sitting cross-legged, at his ease, while the others were paddling.

The width of a canoe varied from eighteen to thirty inches; the length, from fifteen to fifty feet.  But for an outrigger, it was impossible to keep such a long, narrow thing steady in the water.  The outrigger may be described, in any boat, by laying oars across at equal distances, say one right above a thwart.  Make fast the handle of each oar to the gunwale on the starboard side of the boat, and let the oars project on the larboard side.  To the end of each projecting oar make fast four small sticks running down towards the water, and let their ends also be fastened to a long thick piece of wood, sharp at the one end to cut through the water, and floating on the surface parallel to the boat.  This being done will give any one an exact idea of a Polynesian outrigger, by means of which long narrow canoes are kept steady in the water.

Some people who sketch and engrave from imagination, err in representing the natives of Samoa as pulling their short paddles, as the European boatman pulls his long oars.  The paddle is about four feet long, something like a sharp-pointed shovel; and when the natives paddle, they sit with their faces in the direction in which the canoe is going, “dig” in their paddles, send the water flying behind them, and forward the canoe shoots at the rate of seven miles an hour.  They have always a sail for their canoe, as well as paddles, to take advantage of a fair wind.  The sail is triangular, and made of matting.  When set, the base is up, and the apex down, quite the reverse of what we see in some other islands.  The mat sails, however, are giving place to cloth ones, made in the form of European boat-sails.

Some two or three generations back the Samoans built large double canoes like the Fijians.  Latterly they seldom built anything larger than a single canoe, with an outrigger, which might carry from fifteen to twenty people.  Within the last few years the native carpenters have tried their hand at boat-building, and it is astonishing to see how well they have succeeded in copying the model of an English or American whaleboat, sharp at both ends, or having “two bows,” as they call it.  Some of them are fifty feet long, and carry well on to one hundred people.  From stem to stern there is not a nail; everything is fastened in their ancient style, with cinnet plaited from the fibre of the cocoa-nut husk.  Cinnet is likely long to prevail in native canoe and boat-building.  Although it looks clumsy, it has the advantage of not rotting the wood like an iron nail.  It is durable also.  With care, and the sewing once or twice renewed, a Samoan canoe or boat will last ten or twenty years.