THEORY AND FANCY

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 59, 7 September 1926, Page 9

THEORY AND FANCY

JIBE AT SCIENTISTS.

(By Telegraph.)

(Special to "The Evening Post.")

AUCKLAND, This Day.

A contributor to the "Auckland Star," signing _himself "Tangiwai," makes merry at the expense of '' these puntlits or is it 'pandits,' in the dusty science of archaeology." He refers to Professor Keith, who, according to a London cable message, considers that the North Cape crockery and the Kaingaroa rock carvings are further evidence of the spread of Egyptian civilisation to the Pacific. The writer asks: "What exactly does the professor mean, and why link up that bit of crockery with the Kaingaroa carvings, which have nothing in the least Egyption about them? Does Professor Keith really imagine that the Egyptian sailors left that broken vase, or whatever it was, at North Cape? Yet that apparently is the construction, to be placed on his announcement." "Tangiwai" goes on to say that he is able to offer the true solution of the pottery mystery. He tells the story as follows:— "On sth August, 1892 —the date is fixed by evidence giv;en in a Magistrate's Court case a few weeks later— the well-known fore-and-aft schooner Jumping Jack was three miles off North Cape, bound from Kaipara to Auckland with a cargo of kauri gum, fungus, tanekaha bark, maize, and 'dead marines' for refilling. The skipper and his mate, who was his buxom and muscular •wife, were engaged in one of their periodical rows, following on a prolonged campaign of reducing tho stock of $he Punakituna Hotel to the just-men-tioned dead marines. In the customary course of such alcoholic quarrels, most of tho cabin furniture cither was reduced to a fearful wreck or was hove overboard. Captain Jibstay came bolting on deck this day pursued by missiles hurled by his furious Annie Maria, and one of these items used as a projectile was a funny old vase which the skipper had bought at an auction sale in Auckland on his previous trip. He kept his tobacco in it, and it was tightly corked. Smack went the vase on the head of the Maori at the wheel, and splash it dropped into the sea on its rebound. It floated away, and left tho after-guard of Jumping Jack at their matrimonial warfare, and that's just how the Egyptian relic eame to find a resting place on Muriwhenua sand."