The Manus were a people of the water, building their houses on piles over the lagoon and drawing their entire subsistence from fishing and sea-trade, and their spirit world included beings held to own the deep sea beyond the reef. Sources record these sea-spirits only thinly and give them no securely attested proper names, distinguishing them from the ancestral ghosts and from the localized place-spirits of reef and rock. They stand for the animate and hazardous sea on which Manus life depended.