The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century it is believed, and the people landed chanting a chorus-speech, which is still preserved:
“We come at last to this fair land—a resting-place;
Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food.”
That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no doubt: a bird with them is “manu,” a fish “ika” (the Greek ἱχθυς, become with the digamma “piscis” and “poisson;” and connected with “fisch,” and “fish”), as they are throughout the Malayan archipelago and Polynesian isles; the Maori “atua,” a god, is the “hotua” of the Friendly Islanders; the “wahrés,” or native huts, are identical in all the islands; the names of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia, and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and “pahs,” and that of tabooing things, places, times, and persons, prevail from Hawaii to Stewart‘s Land, though not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga Isles, where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from disturbing by their quacking the sacred stillness of “tapú time.”
Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay peninsula as the cradle of the race, and the personal resemblance of the Maories to the Malays is very strong, except in the setting of the eyes; while the figures on the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs have eyes more oblique than are now found among the Maori people. Strangely enough, the New Zealand “pah” is identical with the Burmese “stockade,” but the word “pah” stands both for the palisade and for the village of wahrés which it contains. The Polynesian and Malay tongues have not much in common; but that variations of language sufficiently great to leave no apparent tie spring up in a few centuries, cannot be denied by us who know for certain that “visible” and “optician” come from a common root, and can trace the steps through which “jour” is derived from “dies.”
The tradition of the Polynesians is that they came from Paradise, which they place, in the southern islands, to the north; in the northern islands, to the westward. This legend indicates a migration from Asia to the northern islands, and thence southward to New Zealand, and accounts for the non-colonization of Australia by the Polynesians. The sea between New Zealand, and Australia is too rough and wide to be traversed by canoes, and the wind-chart shows that the track of the Malays must have been eastward along the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to the southwest with the southeast trade-wind right abeam to their canoes.
The wanderings of the Polynesian race were, probably, not confined to the Pacific. Ethnology is as yet in its infancy: we know nothing of the Tudas of the Neilgherries; we ask in vain who are the Gonds; we are in doubt about the Japanese; we are lost in perplexity as to who we may be ourselves; but there is at least as much ground for the statement that the Red Indians are Malays as for the assertion that we are Saxons.
The resemblances between the Red Indians and the Pacific Islanders are innumerable. Strachey‘s account of the Indians of Virginia, written in 1612, needs but a change in the names to fit the Maories: Powhátan‘s house is that of William Thompson. Cannibalism prevailed in Brazil and along the Pacific coast of North America at the time of their discovery, and even the Indians of Chili ate many an early navigator; the aborigines of Vancouver Island are tattooed; their canoes resemble those of the Malays, and the mode of paddling is the same from New Zealand to Hudson‘s Bay—from Florida to Singapore. Jade ornaments of the shape of the Maori “Heitiki” (the charm worn about the neck) have been found by the French in Guadaloupe; the giant masonry of Central America is identical with that of Cambodia and Siam. Small-legged squatting figures, like those of the idols of China and Japan, not only surmount the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs, but are found eastward to Honduras, westward to Burmah, to Tartary, and to Ceylon. The fiber mats, common to Polynesia and Red India, are unknown to savages elsewhere, and the feather headdresses of the Maories are almost identical with those of the Delawares or Hurons.
In the Indians of America and of Polynesia there is the same hatred of continued toil, and the same readiness to engage in violent exertion for a time. Superstition and witchcraft are common to all untaught peoples, but in the Malays and red men they take similar shapes; and the Indians of Mexico and Peru had, like all the Polynesians, a sacred language, understood only by the priests. The American altars were one with the temples of the Pacific, and were not confined to Mexico, for they form the “mounds” of Ohio and Illinois. There is great likeness between the legend of Maui, the Maori hero, and that of Hiawatha, especially in the history of how the sun was noosed, and made to move more slowly through the skies, so as to give men long days for toil. The resemblance of the Maori “runanga,” or assembly for debate, to the Indian council is extremely close, and throughout America and Polynesia a singular blending of poetry and ferocity is characteristic of the Malays.
In color, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike; but color does not seem to be, ethnologically speaking, of much account. The Hindoos of Calcutta have the same features as those of Delhi; but the former are black, the latter brown, or, if high-caste men, almost white. Exposure to sun, in a damp, hot climate, seems to blacken every race that it does not destroy. The races that it will finally destroy, tropical heat first whitens. The English planters of Mississippi and Florida are extremely dark, yet there is not a suspicion of black blood in their veins: it is the white blood of the slaves to which the Abolitionists refer in their philippics. The Jews at Bombay and Aden are of a deep brown; in Morocco they are swarthy; in England, nearly white.