At the gateways of the day

by Padraic Colum

Abraham Fornander, the author of The Polynesian Race, lived on the Islands for over forty years. He edited a journal called The Polynesian, and he was Superintendent of Public Instruction on the Islands in 1865–1866. He had married an Hawaiian lady, and he was a strong partisan of the native race.

The theory which he expounds in The Polynesian Race is that the Polynesian people carried with them into the islands of the Pacific a culture and a set of ideas that connect them with the East Indians—with the pre-Sanscrit culture and with an Arabian culture that touched both the Hebrews and the East Indians. There is no reason to take this theory into account now. The important thing is that Abraham Fornander, in order to substantiate it, made an appeal to the traditions that were then current amongst the natives of Hawaii.

At that time, over forty years ago, there was considerable native scholarship. Haleole, who made an attempt to found a native literature with his romance Laieikawai, was writing and publishing. The Mission School in Lahainaluna on the Island of Maui had become a sort of Hawaiian university. Abraham Fornander had the good sense to appeal to native scholars, and he was able to get the best of them to interest themselves in his project of collecting all the native lore that could throw a light on the migrations of the Polynesian people. The Hawaiian monarchy [[xxiv]]was then in undisputed existence; native institutions were still vigorous; everywhere there were men and women whose memories were stocked with the historical traditions and the romances of Hawaii.

With the help of a corps of native scholars a great deal of the surviving tradition of Hawaii was collected by Fornander. Some of it was published in the Hawaiian newspapers of the time, but no extensive publication was given to it. The manuscripts were kept together; then, on the death of Abraham Fornander in 1887, the collection was acquired by Charles R. Bishop, the husband of Bernice Pauahi, an Hawaiian royalty whose estate went to the foundation of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History in Honolulu.

Forty years after it had been got together, the publication of the material was begun by the Bishop Museum. That was in 1916. The volumes have appeared under the editorship of that veteran Hawaiian scholar, Mr. Thomas Thrum, with the Hawaiian text on one page and the English translation by Mr. John Wise on the other. It is Mr. Wise’s translations that have furnished me with the bulk of the material for this book.

Although the stories are described in the Museum publications as folk-lore, I doubted from the time of my first reading of them that they were folk-lore in the strict sense of the word; that is, I doubted their coming out of an unlearned and popular tradition. The greater number of them seemed to me to be deliberate compositions intended for a rather select audience. And then I found that a great master of Hawaiian tradition, Mr. William [[xxv]]Hyde Rice, favored this opinion. In the Introduction to his Hawaiian Legends[4] it is said:

Mr. Rice’s theory as to the origin of these legends is based on the fact that in the old days, before the discovery of the Islands by Captain Cook, there were bards and story-tellers, either itinerant or attached to the courts of the chiefs, similar to the minstrels and tale-tellers of mediæval Europe. These men formed a distinct class, and lived only at the courts of the high chiefs. Accordingly, their stories were heard by none except those people attached to the service of the chiefs. This accounts for the loss of many legends, in later years, as they were not commonly known. These bards or story-tellers sometimes used historical incidents or natural phenomena for the foundation of their stories, which were handed down from generation to generation. Other legends were simply fabrications of the imagination, in which the greatest “teller of tales” was awarded the highest place in the chief’s favor. All these elements, fiction combined with fact, and shrouded in the mist of antiquity, came, by repetition, to be more or less believed as true. This class of men were skillful in the art of the “apo”—that is, “catching,” literally, or memorizing instantly at the first hearing. One man would recite or chant for two or three hours at a stretch, and when he had finished, his auditor would start at the beginning of the chant and go through the whole mele or story without missing or changing a word. These trained men received through their ears as we receive through our eyes, and in that way the ancient Hawaiians had a spoken literature much as we have a written one.

And as to the substance of this spoken literature, Miss Martha Warren Beckwith, who has made by her edition of Haleole’s romance of Laieikawai a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Polynesian poetry and romance, states [[xxvi]]that the traditional Hawaiian romance belongs to no isolated group but to the whole Polynesian area. “We find,” she says, “the same story told in New Zealand and Hawaii, scarcely changed, even in name.” Miss Beckwith thinks that the bulk of Hawaiian romance consists of stories about the demi-gods—beings descended from the gods, or adopted or endowed by them. These legendary tales reflect actual Polynesian conditions—“Gods and men are, in fact, to the Polynesian mind, one family under different forms, the gods having superior control over certain phenomena, a control which they can impart to their offspring on earth.… The supernatural blends with the natural in exactly the same way as to the Polynesian mind gods relate themselves to men, facts about one being regarded as, even though removed to the heavens, quite as objective as those which belong to the other, and being employed to explain social customs and physical appearances in actual experience.”

The bulk of the stories in the present volume are founded, then, on Polynesian literature rather than on Polynesian folk-lore. They are based on the compositions of men who were trained in the handling of character and incident. There are stories in the volume that obviously belong to folk-lore, however. The stories of the Me-ne-hu-ne, which are not given in the Fornander Collection, but are taken from the work of Mr. Thrum and Mr. Rice, are folk-lore, I believe. The stories of Ma-ui the demi-god are folk-lore, too. The story of Hina coming from the land under the sea, and the other story of her going to the moon and becoming the woman in the moon, undoubtedly belong to Polynesian folk-lore. [[xxvii]]

I do not believe that the Polynesian language, with its sounds that seem to belong to the forest and the sea, is going or that it has to go. Indeed, there may be a Polynesian revival similar to the national revivals which we have seen in European countries; the Polynesian, with tragic exceptions in the case of the people of the Marquesas, is coming back. He has turned the corner; our diseases no longer threaten his very existence. And yet, although his language and parts of his culture will probably remain for many generations, his children, if they are in the American territory of Hawaii, and if they are to read the romances of old Hawaii, will have to read them in English. For them, and for the neo-Hawaiian children—the children of American, British, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese parents, mixed or unmixed with Hawaiian blood—these stories have been reshaped. I have had to condense, expand, heighten, subdue, rearrange—in a word, I have had to retell the stories, using the old romances as material for wonder-stories. The old stories were not for children; they gave an image of life to kings and soldiers, to courtiers and to ruling women. As in all stories not originally intended for children, much has had to be suppressed in retelling them for a youthful audience.