This is a picture (from D'Alleva) of a mourning dress from the Society Islands: 'Barkcloth, wood, shell, turtleshell, coconut shell, feathers, fiber, pigment, 76¼ x 36¼ (194 x 92 cm). Collected on Captain Cook's second Pacific voyage of 1772-75.'

"In the highly stratified societies of Polynesia, rituals of birth, marriage, and death for the elite were often more elaborate than for commoners and involved a variety of exclusive artistic practices. One remarkable elite tradition was the funerary ritual for the very high-ranking men and women in the Society Islands, in which the costumed chief mourner appeared.

The mourner paraded through the district after the mummified body had been displayed on a special bier for some time. All fled before him, for the chief mourner carried a shark-tooth weapon and had license to harm anyone he caught. His attendants, covered with soot and body paint, raced through the village, attacking everyone they met. The procession of the chief mourner marked the end of the mourning period, when the bones of the deceased were removed from the funerary bier and buried or preserved as relics.

Early sources do not record the meaning of this distinctive costume. Parallels with other Pacific art traditions and Tahitian petroglyphs suggest that the mask and breastplate together may represent the ancient 'ship of the dead' motif.

Found in the arts of the Southeast Asian mainland, Indonesia, and the Philippines, this motif depicts the soul of the deceased traveling to the spirit world by ship.

On the mourning dress, the curved breastplate represents the ship, while the vertical shell mask represents an abstract human figure surrounded by a halo." (D'Alleva)

I have cited this to show that there presumably existed a 'ship of the dead' in the mythology of Easter Island too.

However, the late night ship in the four calendars cannot reasonably be a ship of the dead. At midnight the new day begins and during a.m. the newborn sun is growing, which must mean that a ship appearing between midnight and dawn should be a symbol for the pregnant woman who will give birth at dawn.

Maybe south of the equator a ship of the dead will be a ship of life? Or maybe a ship of the dead implies a (succeeding) ship of life? Birth cannot be without death.

The pregnant wife of Hotu Matu'a sails with him and gives birth at Anakena, and her name is Vakai (vaka-i).

The final -i cannot be a preposition, therefore the probable explanation is that we should read -î, the meaning of which is explained by Vanaga as:

"Full; ku-î-á te kete i te kumara, the bag is full of sweet potatoes. 2. To abound, to be plentiful; ki î te îka i uta, as there are lots of fish on the beach. 3. To start crying (of a baby): i-ûi-era te ma-tu'a ku-î-á te poki mo tagi, he-ma'u kihaho, when a mother saw that her baby was starting to cry she would take it outside."

Vakai then becomes the 'canoe' which is full (of life) - like Noah's ark.

The explorers sent out to the island beforehand by Hotu Matu'a saíled in a canoe called Oraorangaru:

"The explorers reach Easter Island in a 'canoe' (vaka). The name of their craft is given as Oraorangaru 'saved from the billows' (Brown 1924:40) or Te Oraora-miro 'the living-wood' (ME:58).

The Routledge reference 'Each (man went) on a piece of wood' (RM:278) also seems to refer to the name of the canoe.

As far back as 1934, the name was no longer understood. I favor the following explanation: The difficulty in interpreting the name of the canoe of the explorers arises from the name segment oraora. To being with, the compound form oraora ngaru should be analyzed in comparison with other Polynesian compounds, such as MAO. pare-ngaru 'that which fends off the waves' (i.e., the hull of the boat), TAH. tere-'aru 'that which moves through the waves' (i.e., riding the waves on a board).

There are several possible translations for oraora as the reduplication of ora. Te Oraora Miro can be translated as 'the pieces of wood, tightly lashed together' (compare TAH. oraora 'to set close together, to fit parts of a canoe') and be taken to refer to the method of construction of the explorer canoe, while Oraora Ngaru means 'that which parts the water like a wedge', or 'that which saves (one) from the waves, that which is stronger that the waves'." (Barthel 2)

The double-canoe in Tuesday may be understood as a living vehicle, first by reason of the lively movements of Mars across the sky and secondly by the possible connection with the Polynesian myth about the Stranger King who crosses the salty waves to come ashore and renew the genome of the island.

The canoes are not left-right symmetric, a feature which is congruent with the predawn night canoes in the four day calendars.

On the other hand, a ship of the dead may be depicted late in the perennial calendars of G and K:

Ga7-3	Kb4-8

The canoes are not left-right symmetric, but in Kb4-8 the more convex side is at right instead of at left as in all the other canoe glyphs we have studied.

The triple vertexes at right should be understood as darkness (as in the inside of a hare paega, I guess).

The five vertexes inside the canoe (pointing in the opposite direction to the three at right) presumably refer to the five extracalendrical nights in the gap between one year and the next. In the 'canoe' of the dead as depicted in the mourning dress there are five shell plates.

I think we should accept that there are two ships in the Easter Island mythology, a ship of the dead and a ship of life.

Death preceding life is what the calendars of H, P and Q tell us about, night comes before day. In A, on the other hand, day comes before night. All four calendars for the 'day' have a ship of life, but none - as far as I can read - has a ship for the dead.

However, a ship of the dead is a concept quite close to the concept of 'a broken canoe awash in the surf' (a dead chief). In Keiti we found multiple occurences of variants of GD45 (ihe tau avaga) preceding GD48 (vaka), e.g.:

GD73 perhaps is to be read as a combination of GD45 and a variant of GD35 ending in a 'bony' Y-shaped hand:

glyph type	components
GD73	GD45	GD35

This interpretation may be reinforced by e.g. Db3-107:

There is also an example with parallel glyphs:

Ha5-10	Pa4-52

The meaning of GD73 could be a combination of a dead broken body + a spirit rising to the sky.  GD73 appears at the close of the day, as if to tell us that sun is leaving us for the spirit world in the dark (Y):