ABSTRACT
IN ISLAND IDIOM sea could be equated with sky. Ships and men broke through at the horizon, ships to be re-caulked and sent on their way or ritually destroyed but replaced, men to be sent on their voyaging way or killed or to marry women of the land and become absorbed. Land might be seen as a human or a deity stretched face-downwards. From Fiji to the Marquesas Islands the corpse for sacrifice was known ika, fish, possibly from the parallel manner of division when ritually consumed. In Gilbertese conceptualisation of the baurua Te Kaburoro, a vessel produced people. Whole families came from the sawdust from her construction. After launching, a woman rose out of this fast-sailing baurua’s wake. 1 And some vessels that had carried land-seekers remained in mind long after being hauled ashore and dismantled, the timber in deck and houses removed to make the first temporary shelter behind the beach or on stilts on the shore-fringing reef where eventually, in places like the Lau lagoon of Mala, artificial islets gave an additional dimension to relatively complicated coastlines as means of escape from malarial mosquito and man.
