LEGENDS OF SAMOA.

Auckland Star, Volume 55, Issue 2, 3 January 1924, Page 3

LEGENDS OF SAMOA.

A MYTHOLOGICAL BEING. GREAT SWIM FROM FIJI. (From Our Own Correspondent.) APIA, December 10. Jn the course of a most interesting lecture delivered at the Samoa Research Society at Apia, Mr. O. F. Nelson said the progenitors of the Samoan race no doubt had their origin in Asia. One legend was that of a mythological being with an eel's body and a man's head, who swam from Fiji to Samoa and here won the love of the daughter of two Samoans who had quarrelled with the eel-man's .Samoan parents and thereby occasioned their expatriation from .Samoa. The wonderfnl adventures of this strange monstrosity when pursuing the captors of his lady-love—the formation of swamps though the plenteousness of. his sweat; and various other incidentals of his career —recalled many parallels in Grecian mythology; in short, his doings mid characteristics amounted to an inversion of one aspect of the European legends of the sirens. The legend of how the cocoanut came to grow and be known was another quaint story, and the poetry inherent iv all legendary stories was aptly evident in the statement that when the Samoan drinks from his "nil! vai" (a water vessel t formed from an unbroken cocoanut> he always kisses the face of the adventurous one who gave him the tree which produces the face-marked nut.

The legend bearing upon nomenclature of the .Samoan islands and their many villages also was most interesting, | while tho sidelights thrown upon the'! subject of land boundaries and tlie difliculties of maintaining them unaltered from the bounds set by oral tradition ' showed that the Samoan (quite independently of European legal writings and practice) had established the wellknown legal doctrines of "user' , and "right of occupation" in Samoa.