One fact, at least, is established. The Maori pertain to the Polynesian section of the great southern archipelago, not to the Melanesian. Most eminent ethnologists agree that the pure Polynesians are descended through the Malays from a very remote Asiatic stock.
No bolder navigators, no more merciless pirates than the Malays ever sailed the sea, and, as they skimmed over the blue in their queer proas, their fierce eyes searching the horizon for the sail of some helpless trader, they not infrequently made some hitherto unknown island. Adventurers all, they occupied the place if it were their whim, and mixed with or exterminated the original inhabitants. Thus their stock spread in the course of centuries over all Polynesia, giving populations to Tonga, to the Samoan, Sandwich, Society and other islands, and, more important to our theme, to New Zealand.
It is reasonably certain that, apart from haphazard adventure, there was once an emigration on a large scale, and it would seem that the pioneers of Polynesian colonisation left their home in Sumatra for the islands of their choice some nine or ten hundred years ago.
Centuries go on their appointed course and become the Past; the immigrants, long acclimatised, have only vague memories and fanciful traditions of their origin. They are no longer Malays; they are Polynesians. Climate, associations, food have worked an alteration in them; their skin is browner, their eyes less sleepy, their figures taller and more symmetrical, their features handsomer than in the forgotten days in Sumatra, cradle of their race. Their language, too, has undergone a marked change, and only traces of the parent stock are discoverable in their customs. One practice, occasional amongst their ancestors, they have unhappily not forgotten; for the Polynesians have established the flesh of their enemies—when they can get it—as the prime article in their dietary. They are not so abandoned in this respect as their neighbours of Melanesia; but they are smirched with the same pitch, and an unpleasant defilement it is.
More centuries roll on; in Europe the night of the Middle Ages is at its darkest, but in far-off Polynesia the dawn is at hand. On an unnamed island within that vast area there is unrest and tribulation, out of which a nation is presently to be born.
Where this island of Hawaiki was situated not even the Maori tradition can certainly determine. Some will have it that Rarotonga in the Cook Islands was once Hawaiki; but all that can be said with accuracy is that, some five or six hundred years ago, a company of Polynesians, perhaps a thousand strong, left the island on which they had been born and sailed the sea in search of a new home.
In time they made the North Island of New Zealand, which, delighted with its beauty and fertility, they decided to occupy. They landed at various points and wandered ever farther south, increasing and multiplying in numbers, until at last some of the most adventurous crossed Cook Strait and began to people the Middle Island. And these Polynesian immigrants were the ancestors of the race of men whom we now know as Maori.
Some recent investigators hold that the North Island was then possessed by peaceable folk calling themselves Moriori, who were speedily subdued by the warriors from Hawaiki. A remnant of the Moriori escaped, it is said, to the Chatham Islands, hoping to dwell in peace; but their evil fate pursued them, for the Ngati-Awa tribe migrated in 1835 to the same place, and the unfortunate Moriori were again conquered and enslaved.
Wherever the birthplace of the Maori, it lay within the tropics. The nearer the equator, the shorter the interval between day and night, and thus it was that the Maori, struck by the beauty of a phenomenon wholly unfamiliar, styled their new home in affectionate admiration, Ao-tea-roa, "The Land of the Long Lingering Day," or "The Land of Twilight." Always poetical, others called it Aotea, or "The Land of the Dawn." These charming subtitles did not displace the original name, Te Ika A Maui, or, as some have it, Eaheinomawe,[20] but they serve to show the poetic mind of the Maori. Later on, the Middle Island received its native appellation, Te Wai Pounamou, or "The Waters of Greenstone," while Ra Ki Ura, "In the Glow of the Sun," denoted Stewart Island, the small triangle which forms the southern extremity of New Zealand.