A MAORI SWIMMING BATH.

Globe, Volume V, Issue 594, 15 May 1876, Page 3

A MAORI SWIMMING BATH.

Arriving there we were transfixed with astonishment and amusement. The ground was as hard as stone, covered with a rocklike deposit of silica, which formed a sort of platform. As if scoped out of this were three almost circular basins, of about twelve feet in diameter, and immeasurably deep. The right and left pools were nearly boiling —the central basin fjust right for a dip. In this cauldron were forty-eight persons, “ hitched” on round the edges, shoulder to shoulder, and with heads just out of water, or sporting in the midst. We soon decided what to do : and immediately there were fifty persons instead of forty-eigbt, smiling and laughing, and shaking hands or rubbing noses in the water. They were all sorts and sizes, and all en costume d’archange. Some were old tattooed grandsires, some babies able to walk ; there were fathers of families, and mothers of the same ; young men and maidens, boys and girls, laughing together. The most perfect decorum and propriety was observed. Little brown babies nestled in their father’s arms; and the latter, to amuse us, pitched the little things in the midst, to show how they could swim. They would sink for a moment, and then disclose a little brown solemn face above the water, and strike out for their father’s arms again. I shall never now believe that children cannot learn to swim as soon as they can walk, or before.—From “A Week among the Maories of Lake Taupo,” in the Cornhill Magazine,