In his letter of Friday 26 October, Robin Bell of Omanawa wrote in his insult to D Gordon, 'Polynesian sea farers travelled and conquered the largest ocean on earth when your people were paddling around in their oracles [sic] still believing the world was flat.”

It is of course ironic that in accusing early Europeans of ignorance, Robin Bell should proclaim his or her own. Firstly, from at least the 5th century BC the orthodox position of both European and Middle Eastern learning was that the Earth was a sphere. The claim that the Europeans thought the Earth was flat, still made by a very small number of ignorant people, is now known as 'the Myth of the Flat Earth”.

This 'myth” is discussed on numerous websites, so, unless a person cannot read, there is really no excuse for perpetuating it. Secondly, Robin Bell's claim that the sea faring peoples of Europe sailed in 'oracles” by which I hope he meant coracles, is equally erroneous. He or she must be the only person to believe that the Vikings, for example, who undertook many of their ocean faring voyages several hundred years before the main Maori migration to NZ, did so in small oval shaped boats designed specifically for use on rivers and lakes. Besides, if the Europeans were as dumb as Robin Bell wrongly asserts, it is unlikely that a few centuries later they would have produced navigational technologies (e g John Harrison's 18th century chronometer) and navigators (e g Captain Cook) not only to surpass, but to eclipse, all previous ones.

R.Rimmer, Welcome Bay.