The Canoe Spiral had probably a Different Origin
from the Tattooed Spiral

(1) Was it from tattooing that the beautiful openwork carving of the canoes and house-lintels took its model? Undoubtedly there is great likeness between the designs of the two arts. But it is to be noted that the human figure or face, neither directly or indirectly, neither distortedly nor conventionally, enters into the one art, whilst it is the basis and groundwork of the other. Not merely does the human form take a definite place in every bargeboard and lintel of a house, and in every bow-piece of a canoe, often distorted or conventional, still clearly a human figure, but the subsidiary coil and scroll-work that fill up the spaces between the figures and surround them, take the same outline in a crude and vague way. In the Maori tattooing, even in the broader spaces of the body, there is never found any item of the human face or form, although a face or bust is quite common in the tattooing of Easter Island and other parts of Polynesia. The scroll-work of the two differs completely, excepting in the use of the spiral.

(2) If tattooing was an inspiration for the designs of the wood-carver, there must have been some other; and this, as far as the canoe is concerned, we can naturally find in the forms that ropes take, either as binding material or as coiled page 192or sprawling over the platforms or the bottom of a canoe. Even the spirals can be accounted for in this way more easily than from the tattooing spiral or the fern frond. For it is, unlike these, a double, or interlocking, spiral, such as one would get by doubling a rope, and then coiling the double; whilst the intertwisted figures between the two spirals of the bow and the various spirals of the stern, even when they simulate a human form, are as manifestly rope-patterns, exactly like the withy patterns found engraved on the ancient stone monuments of the British Isles, imitations of primeval basketry. A maritime people like the Polynesians and their predecessors could find no more appropriate design for their canoe carved work than the coiling or intertwisting rope, which they so often used in navigation, and which, made of cocoanut fibre, was accounted sacred in the islands. It is true that the Maoris call the canoe-spiral pitau, evidently from the tree-fern frond. But their metaphors and analogies do not carry one far towards the origin of their implements or customs, and they are not much more fitted to give an accurate explanation of a phenomenon that is prehistoric than the Wiltshire gentleman or scholar or peasant is to explain the origin of Stonehenge.