VI. The various documents which we now possess have not only been of service in proving beyond a doubt the general fact of migrations, and in acquainting us with the circumstances by which some of them were accompanied; they even enable us to indicate with very tolerable exactness the date of some of the most important.
This result is generally obtained by the genealogies of the principal families. Each forms a kind of litany, which is sung in fixed rhythm, and of which each verse contains the name of a chief and those of his wife and son. Anyone, therefore, capable of remembering a song of one hundred verses may easily learn the longest of these genealogies. Confided to memory by the Arepos or Keepers of the Archives, they were preserved with jealous care. Thomson informs us that in New Zealand a serious inquiry was made into these verbal documents, and their authenticity was so well established, that they have an equal value in matters of justice with our deeds.
Now, in the Marquesas, Gattanewa, the friend of Porter, who was descended from the first colonists of the Tongan portion of the archipelago, had only eighty-eight predecessors. At Hawaï, the genealogy of the Tamehameha, according to M. Remy, is contained in seventy-five verses. In 1840, according to Williams, Rarotonga was governed by the twenty-ninth descendant of Karika, the founder of the colony. In the Gambier Islands M. Maigret saw the twenty-seventh reigning chief since the arrival of the first colonists from Rarotonga.
Hale has shown very clearly that the Hawaïan genealogy contains at the outset, like many others in Europe, some fabulous personages. He considered it necessary to remove the first twenty-two verses. Some such correction should very probably be made in that of the Marquesas Islanders. As to those of Rarotonga and the Gambier Islands they are too recent to have been already contaminated by fable.
Hale, guided by considerations which I cannot here discuss, attributes to each verse of these genealogies the value of a generation, from twenty-five to thirty years. Thomson and M. Remy, however, having had time to gather more precise information, regard them as indicating merely reigns. Calculating the mean duration of these reigns from that given by the list of French kings from Clovis to Louis XVII., we obtain as a result 21·13 years.
According to these data, the arrival of the Tongans in the Marquesas Islands must have taken place in the year 417 of our era; that of the Tahitians in about 701; Karika must have colonized Rarotonga in 1207, and the Gambier Islands have been peopled in 1270.
For New Zealand we have a double source of information, and the results thus obtained agree so well that we cannot doubt their accuracy. The genealogies of the greater number of the Maori chiefs go back as far as those bold pioneers whose history I have related. Thomson, who has examined several, considers that the number of chiefs who have succeeded each other in every family since the colonization, may be estimated at about twenty. Taking the kings of England as a term of comparison, he attributes to the reign of each chief a duration of 221/35 years. These data took him back to the year 1419. The list of French kings would only give the year 1457.
On the other hand, in one of the songs preserved by Sir George Grey, there is an account of the history of the son of Hotunui, one of the colonizing chiefs of New Zealand, and of his immediate descendants. At the fourth generation a daughter was born, “from whom,” the legend adds, “are descended in eleven generations all the principal chiefs now living of the tribe of Ngalipaoa.” Taking thirty years for each generation, we find that the migration of Hotunui took place 450 years before the time when Sir George Grey received the document (about 1850), which carries us back to the year 1400.
Thus, these Maories, whom autochthonists regard as children of the soil, cannot have landed in New Zealand earlier than the beginning of the fifteenth century.
VII. I have hitherto only spoken of more or less voluntary migrations, such as might be induced by a spirit of adventure, civil troubles, or the authority of a priest despatching an excess of population in search of new countries. But in treating of Polynesia, we must, as I have already remarked, take accidents by sea into consideration. Several examples are known. It was in this manner that Toubouaï was peopled, which at the close of the last century, within an interval of a few years, received three canoes from different islands, one of which was Tahiti. All three had been carried away by a storm and driven ashore upon this island, which, till then, had been uninhabited.