Industrial Biography | Page 7

for several days,
watching the opportunity to steal a coal-rake.
The navigators found they could pay their way from island to island
merely with scraps of iron, which were as useful for the purpose as
gold coins would have been in Europe. The drain, however, being
continuous, Captain Cook became alarmed at finding his currency
almost exhausted; and he relates his joy on recovering an old anchor
which the French Captain Bougainville had lost at Bolabola, on which
he felt as an English banker would do after a severe run upon him for
gold, when suddenly placed in possession of a fresh store of bullion.
The avidity for iron displayed by these poor islanders will not be
wondered at when we consider that whoever among them was so
fortunate as to obtain possession of an old nail, immediately became a
man of greater power than his fellows, and assumed the rank of a
capitalist. "An Otaheitan chief," says Cook, "who had got two nails in
his possession, received no small emolument by letting out the use of
them to his neighbours for the purpose of boring holes when their own
methods failed, or were thought too tedious."
The native methods referred to by Cook were of a very clumsy sort; the
principal tools of the Otaheitans being of wood, stone, and flint. Their
adzes and axes were of stone. The gouge most commonly used by them
was made out of the bone of the human forearm. Their substitute for a
knife was a shell, or a bit of flint or jasper. A shark's tooth, fixed to a
piece of wood, served for an auger; a piece of coral for a file; and the
skin of a sting-ray for a polisher. Their saw was made of jagged fishes'
teeth fixed on the convex edge of a piece of hard wood. Their weapons
were of a similarly rude description; their clubs and axes were headed
with stone, and their lances and arrows were tipped with flint. Fire was

another agency employed by them, usually in boat-building. Thus, the
New Zealanders, whose tools were also of stone, wood, or bone, made
their boats of the trunks of trees hollowed out by fire.
The stone implements were fashioned, Captain Cook says, by rubbing
one stone upon another until brought to the required shape; but, after all,
they were found very inefficient for their purpose. They soon became
blunted and useless; and the laborious process of making new tools had
to be begun again. The delight of the islanders at being put in
possession of a material which was capable of taking a comparatively
sharp edge and keeping it, may therefore readily be imagined; and
hence the remarkable incidents to which we have referred in the
experience of the early voyagers. In the minds of the natives, iron
became the representative of power, efficiency, and wealth; and they
were ready almost to fall down and worship their new tools, esteeming
the axe as a deity, offering sacrifices to the saw, and holding the knife
in especial veneration.
In the infancy of all nations the same difficulties must have been
experienced for want of tools, before the arts of smelting and working
in metals had become known; and it is not improbable that the
Phoenician navigators who first frequented our coasts found the same
avidity for bronze and iron existing among the poor woad-stained
Britons who flocked down to the shore to see their ships and exchange
food and skins with them, that Captain Cook discovered more than two
thousand years later among the natives of Otaheite and New Zealand.
For, the tools and weapons found in ancient burying-places in all parts
of Britain clearly show that these islands also have passed through the
epoch of stone and flint.
There was recently exhibited at the Crystal Palace a collection of
ancient European weapons and implements placed alongside a similar
collection of articles brought from the South Seas; and they were in
most respects so much alike that it was difficult to believe that they did
not belong to the same race and period, instead of being the implements
of races sundered by half the globe, and living at periods more than two
thousand years apart. Nearly every weapon in the one collection had its
counterpart in the other,--the mauls or celts of stone, the spearheads of
flint or jasper, the arrowheads of flint or bone, and the saws of jagged
stone, showing how human ingenuity, under like circumstances, had

resorted to like expedients. It would also appear that the ancient tribes
in these islands, like the New Zealanders, used fire to hollow out their
larger boats; several specimens of this kind of vessel having recently
been dug up in the valleys of the Witham and the Clyde, some