On rainy days, when Chief Tetuanui did not oversee the making or repair of roads in his district, and always when we were both at leisure, I sat with him, and the elders of the neighborhood, and queried them, or repeated for correction and comment my notes upon their antiquities—notes founded on reading and my observation.
Whence had come these Polynesians or Maoris who peopled the ocean islands from Hawaii to New Zealand, and from Easter Island to the eastern Fijis? A race set apart by its isolation for thousands of years from all the rest of the world, distinguished in all its habitats— Hawaii, Samoa, the Marquesas, Tonga, the Paumotus, and the Society archipelago, and New Zealand—by beauty of form, tint and uniformity of color, height, and soft expression—an expression they vainly sought to make terrible by tattooing?
The legends and chants of the race unfolded much of the mystery; its language’s relation to others, more. These Tahitians and all their kind were ancient Aryans who in the dim past were in India, and afterward in the Indian archipelago. They were in Sumatra, in Java, in the Philippines long before the Malays. Certainly their blood brothers, changed by millenniums of a different environment, remain in Malaysia, known there as the aborigines (Orang-Benoa), by the majority races. D’Urville said the Harfouras of Celebes were identical physically with the Polynesians. At some unfixed date the first of the Polynesians pushed out in their insecure craft for this sea, driven away by the Malay-Hindu invasion or by interracial feuds.
The pioneer, according to the legend, was Hawaii-uli-kai-oo, Hawaii and the Dotted Sea, a great fisherman and navigator. He sailed toward the Pleiades from his unknown home in the far West, and arrived at eastern islands. So pleased was he with them, that he returned to his western birthplace for his family, and brought them to Polynesia.
Other Polynesians left the Asiatic archipelago about the end of the first century, and went to many islands. Finally they reached the Samoan, Tongan, Marquesan, Paumotuan, and Society groups, and Easter Island and New Zealand. In pushing eastward they skirted Papua, but were unable to stay, because the Papuans, whom the Polynesians had long ago driven out of the Asiatic archipelago, were stronger than the emigrants. They next tried Fiji, and tarried there longest, leaving those powerful imprints on the Papuans in appearance and language that make Fiji the anomaly of Melanesia. But the Fiji-Papuans at last drove them out, and they left with blood in their eyes. When the whites found the Marquesans in the sixteenth century, they were building at Vaitahu great war-canoes to “attack the black people who used bows and arrows.” No living Marquesan had ever seen them nor could they have attained Fiji in any strength, yet the historical hate persisted.
The Marquesans of the north said their race came from Hawaii, and those of the south from Vavao. Seventeen places they had stopped at in their great migration eastward, they said.
Pu te metani me Vevau
A anu te tai o Hawa-ii!
Pu atu te metani me Hawa-ii
A anu te ao e Vevau!
Blow winds from Vavao
And cool the sea of Hawaii!
Blow back, winds from Hawaii,
And cool the air of Vavao!
That was the Marquesan legendary chant, the primal command of their God after creation. Vevau and Hawaii were placed in their former abode toward India (Hawaii being undoubtedly Java; and Vevau being Vavao, in Malagasy); but they had brought the names with them, and when they reached the present American territory, of which Honolulu is the capital, they called it Hawaii, as they had an island of the Samoan group, Sawaii. It was in the fifth century they peopled the now American Hawaii, and they remained unknown there until the eleventh, when Marquesans, Tahitians, and Samoans began to pour in on them, and continued to do so for a few generations. Then the present Hawaiians were isolated and forgotten for twenty-one generations until rediscovery by Captain Cook in 1778.
They gave the old names to Polynesia that they knew in Asia, as all over the world emigrants carry their home names, not only Hawaii, or Savaii, for Java, but Moorea, a Javan place, to the island near Tahiti; Bora-Bora from Sumatra to a Society island; Puna of Borneo to places in Tahiti, Kauai, and Hawaii; Ouahou of Borneo to Oahu, on which Honolulu is; and Molokai, from the Moluccas, to another island of Hawaii. One might cite hundreds of examples, all going to prove their far-away origin, as Florida, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, New England, New York, and Albany, indicate theirs.