They had been cannibals up to this time, but upon peace being made they renounced man-eating altogether, and when tribes or individuals had quarrels, they fought with light sticks, and the dispute was decided in favour of the party who drew first blood.

Unlike the New Zealanders, the Maiorioris have neither songs nor chants; but they have a sort of dance, in performing which they flourished short sticks round their heads.

One of their principal ancestors was named Kahu, the captain of the canoe Okahu.

Their modes of disposing of the dead were peculiar. In some instances the corpses were placed upright between young trees, and then firmly bound round with vines, and in course of time they became embedded in the wood itself; sometimes they were placed in hollow trees. Several skeletons have lately been discovered by Europeans, in trees which they were cutting up for fire- wood, etc. In other cases the corpses were placed on small rafts constructed of the dry flower stems of the flax; water, food, fishing lines, etc., were then placed by them, and they were set adrift and carried out to sea by the land breeze. Not long ago an American whaler discovered one of these rafts with a corpse seated in the stern, many miles from land. Not knowing that it had been sent adrift purposely, the captain had a rope attached to it, and towed it into Whangaroa Harbour, much to the annoyance of the natives.

An old sealer, Jack Coffee, who has been living at the Chathams since 1832, informed me that he found the Maiorioris very numerous when he first went there, and that on one occasion he counted over a thousand men on the beach going to Waitangi. He was on the Island when the Ngatiawa and Ngatimutunga went down from New Zealand. He says they treated the inoffensive Maiorioris with great cruelty, but not so barbarously as is generally supposed. They killed and ate great numbers because they would not submit, but fled to the woods, from whence they issued occasionally to steal the crops and to break the canoes of their conquerors. For these petty acts of retaliative aggression, the offenders who happened to be caught were killed and eaten.

When the Maiorioris entirely submitted to the rule of their conquerors, they were treated with much more consideration.

In 1839, an epidemic carried off great numbers of the Maiorioris, sometimes as many as forty dying in a single day.

This epidemic was, no doubt, identical with the great plague of influenza which, in the same year, committed such ravages in New Zealand. Probably one-half of the Maiorioris died from this cause; a third, perhaps, were slain by the cruel Ngatiawa and Ngatimutunga; and thus the rapid diminution of the unfortunate Chatham Islanders may be accounted for.

The foregoing notes may hereafter be found incorrect in some respects as