Chapter 13

"There was a day, perhaps, two thousand years ago, when the Paumotus lay lonely and uninhabited, spread out like a vast net, a thousand miles long and four hundred miles across, to catch the canoes of wanderers who had missed the higher and richer islands to the west. The Polynesians were daring seamen, but their methods of navigation were of the most primitive sort--by the stars, the clouds, the trade wind, and the flight of birds. Hundreds of their great double canoes with clumsy sails of matting must have left S…