Source and Migration of the Polynesian Race.
In my endeavors to throw some light upon the olden times of the Hawaiian people and—to use a nautical expression—to “underrun” their historical cable, two questions have ever presented themselves at the very beginning of all inquiry,—two sphinxes at the entrance—barring the way and bewildering the traveler. They are: 1st. Whence came the Polynesian family of tribes in the Pacific? 2d. What relation do the Polynesian tribes bear to each other, as contemporary or successive rejetons from an original source, or as descendants from the descendants?
Purely physical criteria refer the Polynesian family to the great Malaysian race, but throw no light upon the question of priority between the families composing this race. On the philological grounds, however, advanced by Dr. Rae of Hana with special reference to this subject, and according to the origin and descent of language set forth by Professor Max Müller, I am led to believe that the Polynesian family is vastly older in time than the Malay family, properly so called: that is to say, the Polynesian separated from the mother stock long before the Malay. At what period in the world’s history the separation took place, it is now impossible to define. The language can here be our only guide. We find then in the Polynesian dialects numerous words strongly allied to the Sanskrit; not only in the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and as developed in the literature of the Hindus, but to the monosyllabic and dissyllabic roots of the Sanskrit, to the older, more primitive, form of speech, when the simple roots served for verbs, names and adjectives, a form of speech still retained throughout the Polynesian dialects. I am thus led to infer that the separation of the Polynesian and Sanskrit, or rather Aryan, families of speech, must have occurred before the latter took on the inflections which have since become so prominent a characteristic of all their descendants.
After reading Professor Müller’s “Lectures on the science of language” there can be little doubt that the Sanskrit of the Vedas is centuries older than the time of Solomon; that centuries more must be allowed for the development and formation of the Sanskrit, as in the Vedas, before we reach the time when the Sanskrit or its great great ancestor was spoken in that simplicity which it at one time possessed, when that and the Polynesian stood together as cognate dialects of a still older speech. We know now that the Celtic, Latin, Greek, Teutonic, Zend, Slavonic and Sanskrit were parallels, or nearly so, dialects of an older form of speech, and that they are not descended from one another. But that older form of speech, from which they sprung, has already assumed a system of inflections which has remained a genealogical and hereditary characteristic of these branches ever since, and by which their relationship has been traced back to that older form of which there is no record extant, and for which history has no name. To that older form I am inclined to believe that the Polynesian stood in the relation of an elder brother or an uncle.
Words may be imported into another language by conquest, commerce or intercourse, [[223]]without thereby indicating any generic relationship, either close or distant. Such words are simply adopted, and become instantly subjected to the particular form and rules which govern every other word in that language. A language may thus be overloaded with foreign words, yet, while its pronouns, articles and prepositions remain, they stand as living protests against the invasion of words, and point with no uncertain light, through the night of ages, to the origin and parentage of the captive tongue.
When, therefore, we find in the Polynesian dialects not only several of the Sanskrit pronouns and prepositions, but also the very roots from which these words sprung,—not as dead unintelligible articulations of speech, but as living sense-bearing words,—I am logically led to believe that the connection between the two languages is generic, not accidental; that the ancestor of the Sanskrit was at one time as simple and rude of speech as the Polynesian has remained ever since; and that at that time the two, and others besides, though with different dialectical proclivities, spoke one common tongue and started in different directions from the same officina gentium.
If I were permitted to indicate the route of the Polynesian family, after it separated from its Aryan cousins in the highlands of middle Asia, I would say that it descended into Hindostan; that in course of time it was followed by the Tamul family from the northeast who drove the former out of India and were in their turn driven into the lower part of the Peninsula by the now Sanskrit speaking Aryans. When driven out of the Peninsula the Indian Ocean received the wanderers. Of the transit through India, and of the length of the sojourn there, no record or trace exists, unless the Polynesian goddess Hina,[1] or Sina, as it is pronounced in some dialects, bear some relation to the land of Hind or Sind, as it was called by the Sanskrit and Zend speaking peoples.
The next traces of the Polynesian family, after their expulsion from Hindustan, are found in two very different directions; in the Battas, Buguis and Iduans of the Malay Archipelago to the east, and in the Malgasse of Madagascar to the west. When they arrived in these new habitats, and how long they remained unmolested in the former, can now only be a matter of mere conjecture. It is fair to conclude, however, that they continued on their eastward route while yet their language retained its original, liquid purity, and before the Batta, Bugui and other remnants assumed the harder, consonantal terminations of words, with which the Malay dialects are strongly impregnated, and which are entirely foreign to the primitive Polynesian dialects as found in the Pacific.
In the Malay language there are two words to designate an island, nusa and pulo. Nusa, however, seems to have been by far the older expression, and pulo only obtained at a comparatively later time when the Malay branch proper of the Polynesian family became the predominant people in the Asiatic Archipelago. In none of the Polynesian dialects does the word pulo occur to designate an island. I infer hence that its adoption and use in the Malay Archipelago is subsequent to the departure of [[224]]the Polynesians for the Pacific. The word nusa as an appellative of an island occurs in several instances among the Pacific-Polynesian groups: among the Paumotus, Marquesas, Tokolau or Union and de Peyster’s groups, and also in the Viti Archipelago, which has received the nomenclature of a great number of its islands from Polynesian sources. It always occurs in compound words as names of islands; e.g., Nuku-hiwa (Marqu.); Nuku-Nono (Union Gr.); Nuku-fetau (de Peyster’s); Nuku-tawake and Nuku-ti-pipi (Paumotu). In the Hawaiian group no island or islet, that I am aware of, bears that appellation, but in the Hawaiian legends the land from which their ancestors came, and which they are frequently said to have visited, is called Nu’u-mehelani—the Nu’u being a contraction of the Nuku of the South Pacific dialects.
When I said above that the Polynesian family were probably driven out of Hindostan by the Tamul family, and found a refuge in the Asiatic Archipelago, some remnants of the family undoubtedly remained on the mainland; for we find in the traditionary annals of Sumatra, that the Malays proper derive themselves from Hindostan, whence they arrived at Palembang under the leadership of a son of the Rajah of Bisnagour. Such an emigration, and others like it, doubtless started the older Polynesians further eastward. And as they went, they gave their names to places, bays, headlands, and islands, many of which names have remained to this day and mark the resting places where they stopped, the route by which they traveled. One of the Moluccas is called “Morotai.” Now this is a purely Polynesian name, by which one of the Hawaiian Islands is called (Molokai-a-Hina), recalling thus not only the name of a former habitat, but also the birth-place of their ancestors. In the Histoire de la Conquête des Isles Moluques, by d’Argensola, vol. III (Amsterdam, 1706), we are told that the Moluccas were formerly called “Sindas” by Ptolomy, especially Amboyna, Celebes and Gilolo,—Molokai-a-Hina refers itself then at once to Morotoy de los Sindas according to the early Spanish navigators.
In the island of Timor there is a place and bay called Babao. The name occurs again in Vavao, one of the Tonga or Friendly Islands, and in Mature-wawao on the Acteon Islands of the Paumotu group. One of the Loyalty Islands is called Lifu. That name occurs again in “Fefuka,” one of the Hapai group in the Friendly Islands. It occurs also in “Lehua,” one of the Hawaiian Islands. On the Island of Uea, another of the Loyalty group, is a headland called to this day by the Papuan or Melanesian inhabitants the “Fa’i-a-Ue,” but this is a purely Polynesian word which rendered in the Hawaiian dialect would be “Pali-a-Ua,” or, as there may be a doubt as to the proper orthography, “Tai-a-Ue” (house or dwelling of Ua), a word readily intelligible to a Polynesian, but without sense or meaning to a Papuan. In Celebes and in Borneo are two independent states, inhabited by Buguis and Dyaks, called “Ouadjou” or “Ouahou” (according to French and English orthography), proto-names of the Hawaiian island “Oahu.” The traditions of the Tonga Islands point to a land in the northwest called “Pulatu,” as their fatherland, and whither their spirits returned after death, the residence of their gods.
The absence, however, in the Polynesian language of any name for, or of any image or memory of, the ox, the horse, the sheep, would seem indirectly to indicate that that separation took place before these animals were domesticated by the mother-stock [[225]]and its other descendants, or that they were living at the time of separation in a country where those animals were unknown.
History is almost equally mute as to the place where this separation took place. Some faint traces alone remain, in the names of headlands and islands, of the routes by which they entered the Pacific, and some of the Polynesian traditions point to a land in the northwest, called “Pulo-to” as their fatherland and whither their spirits returned after death. Mr. Domeny de Rienzi, in his Océanie, affords many plausible reasons for assuming that Borneo is the father-land and starting point of the Polynesian family, and that it springs from the Daya or Dyak root. If so, the separation took place before the Daya language took on the consonantal endings to so many of its words.
How the separation took place there can be little doubt about. Wars and famine have in the past as in the present even impelled mankind to seek in distant climes that security and abundance which were denied them at home.
Assuming therefore—and there are but small grounds for doubting the correctness of the general proposition—that the ancestors of the Polynesian family were driven out from their original home in the Asiatic Archipelago by their cousins german or, rather, nephews, the present Malay tribes, properly so called, there were two passages by which they might escape into the unknown (if they were unknown) wastes of the Pacific: either by the Gilolo Passage or by Torres Straits. I am inclined to believe that the greater stream came by Torres Straits, though others might have come and undoubtedly did come by the Gilolo Passage, and that they dwelt some time on the Loyalty Islands before they were driven further on by the Papuan race which now occupies them. My reason for so thinking is that the names of these islands and some of their prominent headlands, even in the mouth of its present inhabitants, are purely Polynesian names, and thus indicate the prolonged if not previous presence of the race that named them. From the Loyalty isles they undoubtedly touched at and occupied portions of the Viti Archipelago, which have ever since remained a debatable ground between the Papuan and the Polynesian races. Hence to the Samoan group in the northeast, and to the Tonga group in the southeast, the transition was easy; and these I believe to have been the first permanent habitats of the Polynesian family in the Pacific. Whether these two groups were settled simultaneously or successively, or the one from the other, would require more special knowledge of their respective traditions, legends, songs and language to decide, than I possess. And from one or the other of these groups the other Polynesian islands have been peopled surely. I am inclined to believe, however, that the Samoan, or Navigator’s Islands were the first permanent footholds which the Polynesians obtained in the Pacific. My reason for so thinking is this: In the Daya dialects—among the Battas, Idaans, Buguis, and Soulas, or rather Houlas, the s is a component part of the language. The only Polynesian dialect which has preserved the s in the same words and in the same places of a word is the Samoan. All other dialects have substituted an aspirate for the sibilant,—h, k or t. In the same manner the ng is a consonant sound in the Daya, Bugui and Batta dialects. It is the same in the Samoan; and although still retained in the Tonga, Hervey and New Zealand groups, it is but sparsely used and decreasing in frequency in the Tahiti, Paumotu and Marquesan groups, and disused entirely in the Hawaiian group; p and k being its general substitutes. [[226]]
Other indications of the relationship of the Polynesian and Aryan races are not wanting to those who are more competent than I am to pursue the comparison. The Greek “Ouranos” is evidently a congener or descendant of the Polynesian Rangi or Lani (Heaven). I am inclined to think that the name of “Siwa,” one of the Hindu Trimurti, owes its origin or finds its explanation in the Polynesian word “hiwa,” primarily “dark-colored, black or blue,” secondly “sacred” as a sacrificial offering—though I am unable to say why the dark-colored, black or blue should have been considered sacred, unless we take the Anglo-Saxon “Hefen” or “Heofen,” the elevated firmament, the heaven, the dark-blue sky, as an explanation offered by a cognate dialect. In the Samoan, “Siwa,” in the Tahitian, “Heiwa,” signify dancing; but in all the Polynesian dialects the idea of sacredness underlies and characterizes the derivative meanings. Thus Nuku-Hiwa (one of the Marquesas Isls.), undoubtedly meant originally “the dark, or sacred island,” Fatu-Hiwa, “the sacred rock or stone;” and in Hawaiian we find the same expression in Puaa Hiwa, “the sacred hog” offered in sacrifices. In the Hindu Trimurti the figure of Vishnu is represented in a black or blue color, and thus we find that the same idea of sacredness was by the Sanskrit speaking Hindus attached to that color, as by the Polynesian tribes. The Hindu gods “Varuna” and “Vhani” find their etymological solution and origin in the Polynesian (Tah.) “Varua” and in the Haw. “Uhane,” both signifying “spirit,” a ghost. In the Sanskrit “Saka” was a distinctive appellation of kings, chiefs and lords. I am not aware that any such single word in the Polynesian dialects expresses that meaning, but we find it in a compound form in the Marquesas dialect as “Haka’iki,” Haka-a-iki, a chief. The Polynesian word “ariki” (chief) itself, undoubtedly springs from the same root as the Latin “rego,” to rule,—the Gothic “reiki,” dominion,—the Saxon “rie,” noble, (see comparative catalogue of words in the Polynesian and Aryan families of speech).
I am, further, disposed to believe that the Polynesian family left India before the Brahma religion attained its full development among the Sanskrit speaking Aryans. There undoubtedly were certain modes of thought, certain customs, common to both, but I have reason to believe that they were anterior to the establishments of Brahmanism, [The Polynesians were not acquainted with the Hindu Trimurti. They had a Chamurti, if I may use the expression, a quaternity of gods—Kane, Ku, Kangaloa and Lono or Ro’o, the latter however being the son of Kangaloa, and some others who were born of Po, the night, chaos, but their attributes were indefinite and promiscuous,] and their worship did not harden into a religious system or cult until long after their settlement in the Pacific. They retained the original idea of the Suttee, for with them it was not limited to the wives of a deceased, but embraced the dearest and best beloved friends of either sex; and instead of being obligatory it was optional among the relatives and friends, and only obligatory upon the slaves and dependants. Their division of castes show no derivation from the Brahman arrangement. The latter, at first, consisted probably only of three, the Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas; the Sudras being a subsequent division: the Polynesians placing the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste, the ariki first; the Brahmans, the priesthood, the kahuna second; and the menehune or makaainana, the Vaisyas, the commonalty or plebs last. It is natural, and more conformable to the development of the actual society of savage people, that valor or manhood [[227]]should assert and assume the preeminence of rank over that of intelligence, and I hence conclude that the Polynesian division was older than the Sanskrit.
How long the Polynesian family remained in the Asiatic Archipelago ere it debouched in the Pacific, there is no means of forming even a conjecture. We only know that it must have left before its remaining congeners and cousins, in the course of the phonetic corruption of a once common tongue, commenced to add consonants to the endings of their words, or to eliminate vowel sounds, thus bringing two consonants together. Its reminiscences of that period are not many, with the exception of the identification of names of places. Its practice of tatooing (tatau) was either brought with it from India, or was adopted there. “Milu,” the Polynesian (Haw.) Pluto, god of the infernal regions, below the sea, where departed spirits went, according to some traditions, calls to mind Mount Miru (Gounoung se Miru), the sacred mountain in Java and first settlement of the Hindus in that island under Tritestra or Aji-Saka, about A.D. 76, although the name of the mountain may be as properly found in the Hawaiian adjective Milu, grand, solemn. The anthropophagism of some of the Polynesian tribes did probably receive its earliest development and confirmation during their sejour in the Malay Archipelago, and it is yet practiced by those of their kin who remained, such as the Battas, the Idaans and others. When they left India this horrible practice had probably not gone farther than the drinking the blood of a slain enemy, a practice common with the Rajpoots in northwestern India and some other of the older, if not aboriginal, tribes of that country.
I believe however that the Polynesian family did not leave the Asiatic Archipelago before Brahmanism had been introduced there. And although the Polynesians never adopted either Brahmanism or Buddhism as a creed, yet they carried with them and retained among their traditionary lore not a few of the ideas to which Brahmanism gave birth and circulation. The earth being created from an egg, referred to by Ellis as a Hawaiian tradition, is a Brahmin dogma. The different versions of the flood, current among the Polynesian tribes, north and south, had their probable origin in the Brahmin legend of Satyuorata, the seventh Manu, who alone with his family escaped the deluge that destroyed the rest of mankind.
The story of the fountain of youth and life—the “wai-ola-loa a Kane”—if not of Brahmin origin, was widely upheld by them, and was well known—mutatis mutandis—to the Polynesians. The arrangement of the calendar into twelve months of thirty days, with an intercalary month points strongly to a Brahmin-Malay original. The use of the betel or areca nut, though practised by many of the Papuan tribes and probably introduced among them by the neighboring Malays, or vice versa, is unknown to the Polynesian family. How old that custom may be among the Malays I have no means of ascertaining; but I infer that the Polynesians left for the Pacific before it was adopted. The resemblance and conformity of usages, customs and modes of thought, between the Polynesians and the Dayas, Battas, Buguis and other tribes still living in the Malay Archipelago, and which I look upon as remnants of the Polynesian family, are too many and too striking not to indicate a close relationship, a common origin, and a lengthened period of residence in the same place, to give time for their development and spread. [[228]]
In the L’Univers or Océanie by G. L. Domeny de Rienzi this subject and its bearing upon the relationship of the Polynesian and the present Daya tribes and their connections in Malaysia is fully and well treated. The Malays and Javanese, who arrived in the archipelago at a later date than the above tribes, also attest their priority by calling them the “Orang Benoa,” aborigines of the country.
Another indication of the Polynesians leaving the Malay Archipelago after the establishment of a Hindu empire and Brahmanism in that archipelago, seems to me to be found in the name “Sawaii,” “Hawaii,” “Havaiki,” as it is differently called in different Polynesian dialects. The word Hawaiki, used by the New Zealanders, the Tongas, the Hervey, some of the Paumotu and, I think the Northern Marquesas, is undoubtedly the oldest form of the word, that form—with the dialectical difference of s and h—which the Polynesians brought with them from Malaysia. But Hawaiki is identical with Djawa-iki or Jawa-iki (little Java) the j or dj sound being convertible into h, as evidenced in the names of other places and words common to the Polynesian and Malay tongues. Previous to the establishment of the Hindus in Jawa, that island was called Nusa-Kindang,[2] as reported in Javanese annals; after that establishment the name was changed to Nusa-Jawa. That event is by Javanese annals fixed at about 76 A.D. Those Hindus came from the country of Kling or Talinga on the west coast of India, and were probably of the Malay stirps, great-grand-nephews, so to say, of the long antecedent Polynesians. It was but natural that in their new habitats in the Pacific the latter should employ the nomenclature of their former homes, as we actually find it to have been the case in numerous instances.
Having then ascertained with a considerable degree of probability, as I think, that the early Polynesians, who settled in the Pacific, came from India through the Malay Archipelago, passing out by the Gilolo Passage or by Torres Straits, and most likely the latter, the question may arise, how came they to push past the entire Papuan Archipelago, some thousands of miles into the Pacific, before they established themselves in their new homes? That question involves a consideration of the origin and habitats of the Papuan race which I do not feel competent to engage in. This much, however, can be established; that at some remote period the Papuans inhabited the islands of the Malay Archipelago as far west, at least, as Borneo and probably extended up into Anam, Siam and Burma; that as the Malayo-Polynesian race advanced to the eastward, the Papuans were driven before them, either out of the islands altogether, or into the interior of the larger ones, where remnants of them still are found. Thus expelled from, or conquered in the Malay Archipelago, the Papuan furnished them an asylum and a home, unless we assume that they had already spread so far east before they came into hostile contact with the Hindu-Polynesians in the west. When, therefore, the latter were in their turn crowded out by the encroachments of the later Hindu-Malayans, and left from various points of the archipelago—from Sumatra to Timor—entering the Pacific in quest of new abodes, they found their ancient foes in superior force along their route, and unable to effect permanent settlements along the Papuan islands, they were obliged [[229]]to push on eastward until the Polynesian islands, at that time uninhabited, afforded them that shelter and rest which in vain they had sought on the Papuan coasts.
That their first attempt at permanent settlements, after a precarious and unsuccessful sejour at the Loyalty Isles, was at the Viti or Fiji Islands there can be little doubt. The number of Polynesian names by which these islands and places in them are called, even now, by the Papuan inhabitants, argues, if not wholly a priority, at least a permanence of residence, that can not well be disputed. The mixture of the two races, especially in the southeastern part of the Viti Archipelago, indicates a protracted stay and an intercourse of peace as well as of war. But after some time—how long can not now be expressed in generations or in centuries—the Papuans succeeded in driving the Polynesians out of their group, and then, if they had not before, they occupied the island groups still further eastward, simultaneously or successively. Of that intercourse, contest and hostility between the Papuan and Polynesian races on the southwest fringe of the Pacific there are several traditionary reminiscences among the Polynesian tribes, embodied in their mythology and connected with their earliest data, or retained as historical facts pointing to past collision and stimulating to further reprisals. The Tonga Islands have a tradition, recorded by Mariner, that Tangaloa, one of their principal gods, had two sons, of which the elder was called Tupo, the younger, Vaka-ako-uli. The first was indolent and shiftless, the other industrious and prosperous. Jealousy induced the former to kill the other. Then Tangaloa called the older brother and the family of the younger before him and thus addressed the latter: “Your bodies shall be fair, as the spirit of your father was good and pure; take your canoes and travel to the eastward and all good things attend you.” And to the older brother the offended god thus spoke: “Thy body shall be black, as thy soul is wicked and unclean; I will raise the east wind between you and your brother’s family, so that you cannot go to them, yet from time to time I will permit them to come to you for the purposes of trade.” When we consider that from earliest times the Tonga Islanders have kept up a constant intercourse with the Viti group, either warlike or commercial, it is not difficult to apply the tradition or to point the moral.
That the hostility in the early days of Polynesian settlement in the Pacific was remembered by other tribes as well as the Tonga, and looked upon as a national vendetta, may be inferred from a remark made by Quiros in his account of the expedition of Mendana (1595), while at the island of Santa Christina (Tahuata) in the Marquesan group. He says:—I quote from Voyage de Marchand, vol. I, p. 227,—that the natives, having observed a negro on board of the admiral’s ship among the Spaniards, said that to the south of their island there was land inhabited by black men; that they were their enemies; that they used the bow and arrow; and that the big war-canoes then lying in the bay of Madre de Dios, were destined and being fitted to make war upon them. Quiros, not then knowing the existence of the Viti group, discredited their story of the black men. The specialty, however, of their using the bow and arrow points them out as the Papuans of the Viti group, to whom that weapon was and is familiar, while by the Polynesians generally it is never or seldom used for purposes of war.
Whether the Marquesans at that time actually carried on so distant a warfare as between their group and the Viti, may or may not be called in doubt; but the fact, that [[230]]they were acquainted with the existence of the Papuan race in the Pacific, as distinct from their own, and with their peculiar weapon of war, and that that acquaintance was one of ancient and intense hostility, I think cannot be doubted.
In a recent work,[3] Wallace argues very ingenuously that the Polynesian race is merely a modification of the Papuan race, superinduced by an admixture of Malay or some light-colored Mongol element, the Papuan, however, largely predominating, physically, mentally and morally, but that such admixture probably occurred at such a remote period as, through the lapse of ages, to have become a permanent type. He further asserts that the presence of a decided Malay element in the Polynesian languages is altogether a phenomenon of recent occurrence originating in the roaming habits of the chief Malay tribes, and says that this fact is proved by the presence of a number of actual modern Malay and Javanese words and not more Malay roots, as would have been the case had their introduction been as remote as the origin of a very distinct race; and he concludes by saying that there are proofs of extensive migration among the Pacific Islands, but there are no proofs whatever of recent migration from any surrounding country to Polynesia, since there are no people to be found elsewhere sufficiently resembling the Polynesian race in their chief physical and mental characteristics.
With these propositions, I cannot agree. Wallace evidently classes the Battas, Dayas and Buguis as Malays,—Malays of the modern generally received type. Independent of traditional and historical proofs to the contrary, it does not seem to have occurred to him that those Battas, Buguis and Dayas, though from the same mother stock as the modern Malays, are an infinitely older off-shoot than the latter, and so regarded by them: that the Malays, instead of descending through Burmah, Siam and Malacca, claim for themselves a Hindu descent from the eastern coast, the country of Kling and Telinga; and that when they emigrated from that grand officina gentium the Malay Archipelago was already in possession of the Battas, Dyas and Buguis and their other congeners and contemporaries, of which I claim the present Polynesian family to have been one. He overlooks moreover the fact that the traditions, customs and language of those very pre-Malay occupants of the archipelago, from Sumatra to Celebes and Flores, Savu, Rothi and to some extent Timor, in a most remarkable degree point to central and northern India as their cradle and their source. He asserts that the Polynesian has a greater physical, mental and moral resemblance to the Papuan than to the Malay, and that ergo, he is, as regards origin, entirely distinct from the latter and merely a modification hardened into a variety of the former. Had the author studied the remarkable differences, physical, mental and moral, which characterize some of the European families now known to be descended from the same source—the low-browed, turned-up-nosed, large-mouthed, boisterous Celt, and the square-browed, aquiline-nosed, reserved Roman—he may have concluded that the Aryan descendants to the east would have been as diversified in their national and tribal development, as those to the west; and that the same law of variation would operate on the one side as on the other. His remarks—that the Malay element in the Polynesian languages is a recent phenomenon originating in the roaming habits of the Malays, and that that element[[231]]—instead of being composed of Malay roots, pointing to a remote origin,—is actually proven by the presence of a number of modern Malay Javanese words,—may very probably apply to the western Papuans, but are void and unsustained, if applied to the Polynesians proper of the East and South Pacific. So far from the Malay element being a modern intrusion into the Polynesian, the latter has not only preserved many of the older forms of speech of the common Malay, but in the words which are common to it and its congeners, the Battas, Dayas and Buguis, the Polynesian form is generally the purest, oldest and the least affected by phonetic corruption.
As to there being “no proofs whatever of recent migration from any surrounding country to Polynesia,” it might be well to understand at the outset what is meant by the word “recent.” Is it applied in its limited sense conveying the idea of a few generations or a few hundred years; or is it applied in a comparative sense, in which an event one or two thousand years ago may be called recent when compared with other events of a still more remote age? If the former, there certainly are no proofs of a recent migration from any surrounding country, inhabited by a kindred race, that could account for the arrival and spread of the Polynesian in the South and East Pacific; if the latter, the physical, mental and moral resemblance of the Polynesian to the pre-Malay occupants of the Asiatic Archipelago, his traditions, customs and language, prove,—inferentially it is true,—but prove beyond a doubt his migration from that archipelago and his kindred with its former possessors, as much so as the Celt, the Greek, the Goth and the Slav can be proved to have descended from the same stock in the west, that gave birth to the Hindu, Daya and Malay families in the east.
As regards the first settlers of the Hawaiian Islands, I am led to believe that they came from the Samoan group, through the Tahiti and Marquesas Islands; in other words, that the Tahitians came from Samoa, the Marquesans from Tahiti, and the Hawaiians from the Marquesans. The Marquesans have legends and traditions which pretend to describe their wanderings in olden times, but the Hawaiians have none but that their gods came from Tahiti. But where history and tradition fail, I hold that the gradual and phonetic corruption of the language will in a great measure indicate the halting places of those who speak it. We find then in the Tahitian that the Samoan ng is replaced with n and the s dropped or replaced with t, while the f and the t are retained. On proceeding to the Marquesas we find that, with the exception of some of the southern islands, ng and f have been replaced by n and h, and that the k sound has become as prominent as the t. Arriving at the Hawaiian group we find not only s, ng, and f repudiated in toto and replaced by h, n or k, and by h or p, and that k has become the predominant sound instead of t, but we find also the Tahitian causative hoa softened to hoo; we frequently find the k eliminated from between two vowels or at the commencement of a word where it is retained in the other dialects; we find words obsolete in the Hawaiian which still pass current in the other dialects with original or derivative meanings. We can thus trace the people by the phonetic corruption of their language, as, I have no doubt the Samoan (not in the present, but in its original form) could be traced by competent philologists to that primordial source from which both the Turanian and Aryan languages issued.
At what period in the world’s history the first Polynesian settlers discovered [[232]]and occupied the Hawaiian Islands, it is now impossible accurately to define. Ethnologically, we can trace them backward to India; historically, we can not trace them even to their last point of departure, the Marquesas or the Society Islands. That they are of the same race that now inhabit the eastern and southern parts of Polynesia is beyond a doubt. That that race was settled in the Asiatic Archipelago centuries before the Christian era, I believe to be equally certain; but whether the emigration into Polynesia took place before the Christian era, or was occasioned by the invasion of the forefathers of the Malay family from India about the commencement of that era, there is nothing, that I am aware of, either in Polynesian, Malayan or Hindu traditions to throw any light upon. In Hawaiian tradition, there is no distinct remembrance, and but the faintest allusion to the fact that the islands were inhabited while the volcanoes on the leeward islands were still in an active state. It is impossible to judge of the age of a lava flow by its looks. Portions of the lava stream of 1840, flowing from Kilauea into Puna district of Hawaii, were in 1867 covered with a luxuriant vegetation; while older flows in Puna, of which no memory exists, the last flow from Hualalai in 1791 or 1792 through Kekaha on the west of Hawaii, and the flow near Keoneoio in Honuaula, Maui, called Hanakaie, which is by tradition referred back to the mythological period of Pele and her compeers, look as fresh and glossy today as if thrown out but yesterday.
Geologically speaking, the leeward islands are the oldest in the group and, with the exception of the legends of Pele and Hawaii Loa, there is no trace or tradition in the popular mind that their volcanoes had been active since the islands had been inhabited. But both on Molokai and on Oahu human remains have been found imbedded in lava flows of undisputed antiquity and of whose occurrence no vestige of remembrance remains in song or saga.
In 1859, Mr. R. W. Meyer, of Kalae, Molokai, found in the side of a hill on his estate, some seventy feet beneath the surface and in a stratum of breccia—volcanic mud, clay and ashes—of several feet in thickness, a human skull whose every cavity was fully and compactly filled with the volcanic deposit surrounding it, as if it had been cast in a mould, evidently showing that the skull had been filled while the deposit was yet in a fluid state. As that stratum spreads over a considerable tract of land in the neighborhood, at a varying depth beneath the surface of from ten to four hundred feet, and as the valleys and gulches, which now intersect it in numerous places, were manifestly formed by erosion—perhaps in some measure also by subsequent earthquake shocks—the great age of that human vestige may be reasonably inferred, though impossible to demonstrate within a period of one or five hundred years preceding the coherent traditional accounts of that island.
Hawaiian traditions on Hawaiian soil, though valuable as national reminiscences, more or less obscured by the lapse of time, do not go back with any historical precision much more than twenty-eight generations from the present (about 1865), or say 840 years. Within that period the harbor and neighboring coast-line of Honolulu has remained nearly what it now is, nor has any subsidence, sufficient to account for the formation of the coral-pan in that place, or subsequent upheaval been retained in the memory of those twenty-eight generations. [[233]]
I am tolerably safe, then, in asserting that these islands were inhabited 800 or 900 years ago, and had been inhabited for centuries previously, by the same race of people that inhabits them now.
Professor Max Müller, in his Lectures on the Science of Language, has shown it to be very probable that in the 12th and 13th centuries before Christ the Tamul family had already been driven into Deccan and the southern parts of the Hindu Peninsula by the invading Aryans. With due attention to the course and character of those waves of migration, it becomes also very probable that the Polynesian family had by or before that time been driven into the Asiatic Archipelago, displacing in their turn the Papuan family. How soon or how long after that occupation the first adventurous Polynesians debouched into the Pacific, it is impossible to even conjecture. But we know that, about the commencement of the Christian era, new swarms of emigrants from middle and eastern India invaded the area occupied by the Polynesians and spread themselves from Sumatra to Timor, from Java to Manila, expelling, subjugating or isolating the previous occupants.
Taking this epoch as the starting-point for the appearance of the Polynesian in the Pacific, we have an interval of time of 900 to 1000 years, in which to people the various islands and groups now held by the Polynesian family, and before we meet the uncontested Hawaiian traditions which assure us that twenty-eight generations ago this group was already peopled by that family.
Among the Hawaiian genealogies, now extant, I am, for reasons which will hereafter appear, disposed to consider the Haloa-Nanaulu-Maweke line as the most reliable. It numbers fifty-seven generations from Wakea to the present time, twenty-nine from Wakea to, and including, Maweke, and twenty-eight from Maweke until now. Fifty-seven generations, at the recognized term of thirty years to a generation, makes 1710 years from now up to Wakea, the recognized progenitor and head of most of the southern and eastern Polynesian branches—or, say, A.D. 150, which would in a great measure correspond with the invasion and spread of the Hindu-Malay family in the Asiatic Archipelago. It became known to, and was acknowledged, however, in the time of Kamehameha I, by his bards and genealogists, that the first thirteen names on the Haloa line, to Nanaulu, were shared in common with the Marquesan and Tahitian branches of the Polynesian family. These then must have existed before the occupation of the Hawaiian Islands, which would leave sixteen generations or about 480 years in which to discover and people the islands previous to the era of Maweke and his contemporaries—the Paumakua of Oahu, the Kuheailani of Hawaii, the Puna family of chiefs on Kauai, the Hua family on Maui, the Kamauaua family on Molokai, and others. By which of these sixteen generations, from Maweke up to Nanaulu, the islands were settled upon there is nothing positively to show. The historical presumption, however, would indicate Nanaulu, the first of these sixteen, as the epoch of such discovery, and there exists still a Hawaiian tradition connected with the name of his grandson, Pehekeula, a chief on Oahu.
We get, then, the following leading propositions as chronological sign-posts, approximately at least, of the Polynesian migrations in the Pacific: 1. During the close of the first and the beginning of the second century of the present era, the Polynesians [[234]]left the Asiatic Archipelago and entered the Pacific, establishing themselves on the Samoa and Tonga groups and spreading eastward and northward. 2. During the 5th century Polynesians settled on the Hawaiian Islands and remained there comparatively unknown until 3. the eleventh century when several parties of fresh immigrants from the Marquesas, Tahiti and Samoa groups arrived at the Hawaiian Islands, and for the space of five or six generations revived and maintained an active intercourse with the first-named groups and the mother-stock.
It is rather singular that while most of the principal groups of the Polynesian family claim, each for itself, the honor of being the first-created of mankind and, so to say, autochthones on their respective islands—as the Tonga, Samoan, Society and Hawaiian Islands—with the exception of the legend of Hawaii Loa, the Marquesans alone own to a foreign birthplace and a migration from a far-off land. In the meles and legends collated and preserved by Mr. Lawson, a resident of Hiwaoa, Marquesan Islands (and now held in MS. by Professor Alexander of Punahou College, Oahu, Hawaiian Islands), mention is made of a number of lands or islands, on which they successively stopped in their migration, ere they finally reached the Marquesan Islands, or, as they are called by them, the Ao-maama. According to these, the Marquesans started from a land called Take-hee-hee, far away to the westward from the group they now occupy; and the name by which they call themselves is “te Take.” There are two accounts of their wanderings after being driven out of Take-hee-hee. One mentions thirteen places of stoppage before they arrived at Ao-maama, the present Marquesan Islands; the other account mentions seventeen places before their final settlement on the last-mentioned group. During all these migrations the Take, or Marquesan people represent themselves as coming from below (mei-iao) and going up (una). Throughout the Polynesian groups, however, within the tropics, when a land is spoken of as iao, ilalo, iraro of the speaker’s place, it invariably means to the leeward, before the prevailing trade-wind. This being from northeast or southeast, these migrations pursued a course from west to east, and thus corroborate the Polynesian descent from Asia or the Asiatic Archipelago.
That the Polynesians, during their sojourn in India or the Indian Archipelago, had received no inconsiderable share of the culture and civilization which the ancient Arabs, through their colonies and commerce, had spread over these countries long before the Vedic branch of the Aryans occupied Aria-warta or had crossed the Ganges,—there is much in their legends, customs and religions to denote. Whether that culture was received however, while in India or in the Archipelago, it is now impossible to decide. That those old-world Arabs, those Cushites of the Indian records and of Holy Writ, had, long before the Vedas were written, controlled the ante-Aryan peoples of India and its Archipelago, and moulded them to their own usages and religion is now, I believe, an admitted fact by antiquarians and ethnologists. That that culture and those usages were greatly modified by the subsequent occupation and predominancy—temporal and spiritual—of the Aryan race, and that that, in its turn, was reacted upon by the previous Arab or Cushite culture, there are numerous proofs in the Hindu writings. Hence that mixture of myths, that jumble of confused reminiscences, which stock the legends and load the memory of the Polynesian tribes. Monotheism, zabaism, polytheism and [[235]]fetishism were inextricably mixed up in their religious conceptions, and while the two latter were the ordinary practice of everyday life for, at least, the last thirty generations of their abode in the Pacific, yet glimpses of the former were retained in their memory and hoarded as deposits “mai ka Po mai”—from a hoary antiquity—by their kilos, kaulas and kahunas (prophets and priests). Hence their diversity of worship: some tribes making Kanaloa, some Kane, some Kali, some Atea the chief of their deities and the originator of all things. Hence some tribes continued the Arab practice of circumcision, while others did not. Hence the Arab institution in social life of independent yet confederated communes among some tribes, while the monarchial or feudal system obtained among others. Hence the Arabic type of truncated pyramids in the shape of their temples, side by side with the Hindu practice of promenading their god in gorgeous processions. Hence while the Arab doctrine of a primal chaos is retained by nearly all the Polynesian tribes, some still retain the Braminical doctrine of the World-egg. So far as I am acquainted only one of the Polynesian tribes designates itself by a national name, other than that of the habitat or country which they occupy, and that is the Southern Marquesans. They call themselves the nation or tribe of the Take—te Take. Now this word, allowing for the Polynesian pronunciation, is identical with Tasi, an ancient national name, by which Iranian writers designated the Arabs of Southern and Eastern Arabia, from Yemen to Irak-Arabi; and their progenitor was called “Taz,” probably representing “Tasm,” one of the twelve original tribes of the old Cushite race, according to Arabian traditions. The name occurs again in Thas-os, an island in the Ægean, off the coast of Thrace, which, according to Herodotus, was colonized by the Phœnicians and called after their leader Thas-us. This Phœnician origin and name connects it with the great Cushite family in race and language of which the Phœnicians formed so conspicuous a branch. The same word occurs again in “Desi,” a name by which the Sanskrit writers designated the language of the people who occupied India before the Aryans entered it. This word occurs again in “Dasyus,” a name by which the Sanskrit speaking Aryans designated the non-Aryan population of India, who were also called by them “Rakshasha” and “Mlechcha,” the latter of which words still survives in the Polynesian maloka and with the same meaning—impious, profane—as in the Sanskrit.
The inhabitants of the plateau of Moldi, opposite the Island of Massua, on the coast of Abyssinia, being of the pure Greek race and speaking the Tigrai dialect of the old Ethiopian, are called Khasi by the Arabs, signifying “unaltered, pure.”
The word take, as expressing a nation or race, exists in other Polynesian dialects under the form of tae, tai or kai, which in the Marquesan itself is used interchangeably with the former. Thus we find Ani-tai and Ahee-tai for Anitake and Ahee-take. In the Tonga group tai is a common expression to designate a race, people or generation—Kai-Fiti, Viti people, Kai-Tonga, Tonga people, etc. In Hawaiian we find Kakai, a family including servants and dependents.
In the Hindu legend of Arachandran,[4] the perfect man, it is said that when he had been tormented and tried and driven out of his kingdom, he started to go to the country [[236]]of Kasi, on the Ganges. The “Khasi” in Abyssinia, and the “Kasi” on the Ganges were both of Cushite origin. Again, in the Polynesian legends reference is made to a country called Kua-i-helani and a king of that country called Iku or Aiku who had twelve children, whose adventures and exploits are fully related in the legend of Aukelenuiaiku. Now we know from Indian lore that, far off in the prehistoric times, a famous king ruled over Arabia and upper Egypt whose name was It or Ait, and whom the Greek traditions called Aetus.[5] We know that before the Aryans entered India, and long after, they called the country between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf by the name of “Cusha-dwipa,” and that the same extent of country was by the Semite Hebrews called “Cush.” These words in Polynesian pronunciation would infallibly become either “Kua” or “Ku,” the suffixed “Helani” being merely an epithet of grandeur and glory.
Again, Oro or Koro, of the Society and Hervey groups, was the terrible God of War, on whose altars human sacrifices were offered. He was the son of Kangaloa, the principal deity of these groups. His name and attributes forcibly recall Horus the son of Osiris of Egyptian traditions and uro the Egyptian hieroglyphic name for king, as well as Hor the invincible War-God, from time immemorial, of the Raypoots in Northwestern India. “Gourou” or “Goro,” moreover, is an old Indian and Javanese word for deity in general, and its modern meaning is “a religious instructor.”[6]
Unless, then, we concede the origin of the Polynesian family to have been, proximately in the Asiatic Archipelago, more remotely in India, as one perhaps of the many branches of the Dravidian family, certainly as one of the ante-Aryan peoples living there and being more or less impregnated with the Arab blood and culture which in these early days controlled India, the Indian Ocean and all the coasts and islands near it, from Mozambique to Japan,—unless we concede this, Polynesian myths, songs, traditions and customs become unintelligible, and the people itself becomes an historical puzzle, an ethnological accident.
In one of the Marquesan legends or religious chants of the creation of the world—Te Pena-pena—by the God Atea, the then known world extended from Vavau to Hawaii, “me Vavau i Hawaii;” and after the earth was made or, rather, brought to light, the order was given:
Pu te metani me Vevau
A anu te tai o Hawa-ii
Pu atu te metani me Hawa-ii
A anu te ao o Vevau.
(Blow winds from Vavau and cool the sea of Hawa-ii; blow back winds from Hawa-ii and cool the air [or the region] of Vavau); and the burden of each stanza or act of creation is
O Vevau me Hawa-ii.
Again in the chant of the Deluge, it is said that after the flood the ribs of the earth [[237]]and the mountain ridges of Hawaii rose up and extended far and near over the sea of Hawaii
Una te tai o Hawaii.
The question now arises where and what were this “Vevau” and “Hawaii,” which constituted the boundaries of the world when this chant was composed?
I have already stated that the large bay of Coupang, on the Island of Timor, was formerly called Babao. This bay and surrounding country was, at the time of the European settlements there, an independent state and kingdom, and it is highly probable that in ancient times, before the Malay element preponderated in the Indian Archipelago, it might have given its name to the whole island, inasmuch as that name is found in the nomenclature of islands, districts and places which the Polynesians carried with them into the Pacific and adapted to their new habitats. But Babao is and would be Vavao or Vevao in any of the Polynesian dialects, for they have no letter b. If I am right in this, it becomes intelligible why Vavao or Timor should have been quoted as the one terminus of the known world to the people then occupying the archipelago from there to Java or Sumatra. To those people, at that time, it was the eastern-most land then known, and, when the Malay element assumed the preponderance in the archipelago, it was called “Timor” or “The East,” plainly indicating that it was also by them at that time considered as the extreme east.
I have already stated that I consider the Polynesian word Hawaii as corresponding to, or representing the word Jawa, as applied to the second island of the Sunda group. From the pronunciation of the word in the different Polynesian dialects I was led to believe that its original name in Polynesian mouths was “Hawa-iki” or Little Jawa. It is possible, however, that it may also have been, as pronounced in some dialects, Hawa-ii or Sava-ii,—the raging furious (as applied to volcanic mountains) Hawa or Sava or Saba. How far this name was applied to the western islands of the Sunda group I am unable to say. We know that Ptolomy, the geographer, designated Sumatra as “Jaba-din.” It may therefore very probably in times anterior to him have included a portion or the whole of the latter island as well as the present Java. Be this as it may, the frequent allusions made in the chant referred to, to the sea of Hawaii (te tai o Hawaii)—the Jawa sea, points with sufficient accuracy to this island as the western terminus of the world as known to those who composed that chant.
In this way the expression used in the chant regarding the wind receives a force and application, which under no other construction it could have received. It then applied to the regular monsoons which blow over that part of the world: “Blow wind from Vevao (from the east) and cool the sea of Hawa: blow back wind from Hawa (from the west) and cool the region or air of Vevao.”
The Hawaiian appellations for the same cardinal points, while they differ in name, tend to the same result. In the Hawaiian group the North is called, among other names, “Ulunui,” “Uliuli,” “Hakalauai,” “Melemele,” but these are known by tradition to have been names of lands, situated to the north of some former habitat of the people, of which all knowledge and remembrance was lost save that they were situated to the north of them, and were visited at one time by that famous voyager, whose exploits [[238]]survive in song and saga, Kaulu-a-Kalana. Among the names for the South occurs that ancient one of lipo, also of lepo. The former signifies blue, black or dark, and hence the deep water in the sea; the latter is synonymous with moana, the deep open ocean. Now, there is no land to the north of the Hawaiian Islands within reach or ken that could have suggested these names as cognomens or epithets for the North, while moana lipo, the dark, bottomless ocean, approaches them not on the south only, but on every side. Those names, therefore, bespeak a foreign origin, and that origin I hold to have been in the Sunda Islands. No other configuration of land can account for it.
Though none of the above statements, singly, amounts to a positive proof, yet, taken together, I think they furnish sufficient induction to warrant the conclusion that the Polynesian family in the Pacific, from New Zealand to the Hawaiian group and from Easter Island to the outlying eastern portion of the Viti Archipelago, is descended from a branch that was agnate to, but far older than, the Vedic branch of the Aryan race; that it had entered India long before the Aryans; that, while there, it became moulded to the Cushite-Arabian civilization of that time and more or less mixed up with the Dravidian branches, who either were in India before it, or entered there from the northeast; that, whether driven out by force or leaving for colonizing purposes, it established itself in the Indian Archipelago at an early period and spread itself from Sumatra to Timor, from Borneo to Manila; that it was followed into this archipelago by Brahmanized Dravidians and other tribes from Deccan who, in their turn, obtained the ascendancy and drove the Polynesians to the mountains and the interior of the larger islands or compelled them to leave altogether; that no positive time can be assigned for leaving the Asiatic Archipelago and pushing into the Pacific—it may have occurred centuries before the present era, but certainly was not later than the first century of it, or thereabout; that the diversity of features and complexion in the Polynesian family—the frequent high forehead and Roman nose and light olive color—attest as much its Aryan relation and Cushite connection, as it does its intermixture with the Dravidian and Malay branches before and subsequent to leaving India; and that if the present Hindu is an Aryan descendant, the Polynesian is, a fortiori, an Aryan ancestor. [[239]]
[1] The mother of the tii or spirits, and subsequently the mother of the first man and woman, according to a Tahitian tradition. [↑]
[2] This seems to have been the name of the whole island, while at the same time the eastern portion was called Nusa Hara-Hara and the western portion was called Sonda. May not the latter correspond to the Polynesian Tonga, Tona, Kona, as variously pronounced and generally used to designate the western or the lee-side of the Polynesian islands? [↑]
[3] Alfred Russell Wallace: Malay Archipelago, New York, 1869, pp. 593–594, also 250–269. [↑]
[4] I. Roberts’ Orient Illustrated, p. 259. [↑]
[5] Several places yet bear the name of Iku or Aiku; among others Aitu-take, one of the Hervey group, and Afareaaitu, a village in Huahaine of the Society Islands. [↑]
[6] It is of pre-Aryan origin; in ancient Greek writers we find the word koros or kouros applied to the infant gods. [↑]