SOUTH SEA SAILORS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 120, 23 May 1928, Page 6

SOUTH SEA SAILORS.

There It a good deal to be said in favour of the decision to employ a Polynesian crew in the Government's pew motorship, the Maui Pomare, built for service between New Zealand and Polynesian inlands. It is well known that South Sea native sailors are better boatmen than Europeans in the work of landing bn surf-beaten shores and in handling Small craft in coral-reef waters. For more than half a century they have been employed alike in the missionary ships and in trailing vessels in preference to white sailors and it is only natural that they should be better adapted than Europeans to the peculiar needs of boating work in the tropics. Old schooner captains have told me that there are no better surfboat hands in the world than the natives of Niue Island and of Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands. The Maui Pomare is intended for the Nine and Samoa service, and at Niue there is no harbour, everything having to be handled by surfboat. The Maori-Polynesian is accustomed to the sea from his earliest days, and with a little training he becomes a capable sailorman and is quite as reliable in an emergency as the average white seaman under white officers. —J.C.