I am, further, disposed to believe that the Polynesian family left India before the Brahma religion attained its full development among the Sanskrit speaking Aryans. There undoubtedly were certain modes of thought, certain customs, common to both, but I have reason to believe that they were anterior to the establishments of Brahmanism, [The Polynesians were not acquainted with the Hindu Trimurti. They had a Chamurti, if I may use the expression, a quaternity of gods—Kane, Ku, Kangaloa and Lono or Ro’o, the latter however being the son of Kangaloa, and some others who were born of Po, the night, chaos, but their attributes were indefinite and promiscuous,] and their worship did not harden into a religious system or cult until long after their settlement in the Pacific. They retained the original idea of the Suttee, for with them it was not limited to the wives of a deceased, but embraced the dearest and best beloved friends of either sex; and instead of being obligatory it was optional among the relatives and friends, and only obligatory upon the slaves and dependants. Their division of castes show no derivation from the Brahman arrangement. The latter, at first, consisted probably only of three, the Brahmans, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas; the Sudras being a subsequent division: the Polynesians placing the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste, the ariki first; the Brahmans, the priesthood, the kahuna second; and the menehune or makaainana, the Vaisyas, the commonalty or plebs last. It is natural, and more conformable to the development of the actual society of savage people, that valor or manhood [[227]]should assert and assume the preeminence of rank over that of intelligence, and I hence conclude that the Polynesian division was older than the Sanskrit.
How long the Polynesian family remained in the Asiatic Archipelago ere it debouched in the Pacific, there is no means of forming even a conjecture. We only know that it must have left before its remaining congeners and cousins, in the course of the phonetic corruption of a once common tongue, commenced to add consonants to the endings of their words, or to eliminate vowel sounds, thus bringing two consonants together. Its reminiscences of that period are not many, with the exception of the identification of names of places. Its practice of tatooing (tatau) was either brought with it from India, or was adopted there. “Milu,” the Polynesian (Haw.) Pluto, god of the infernal regions, below the sea, where departed spirits went, according to some traditions, calls to mind Mount Miru (Gounoung se Miru), the sacred mountain in Java and first settlement of the Hindus in that island under Tritestra or Aji-Saka, about A.D. 76, although the name of the mountain may be as properly found in the Hawaiian adjective Milu, grand, solemn. The anthropophagism of some of the Polynesian tribes did probably receive its earliest development and confirmation during their sejour in the Malay Archipelago, and it is yet practiced by those of their kin who remained, such as the Battas, the Idaans and others. When they left India this horrible practice had probably not gone farther than the drinking the blood of a slain enemy, a practice common with the Rajpoots in northwestern India and some other of the older, if not aboriginal, tribes of that country.
I believe however that the Polynesian family did not leave the Asiatic Archipelago before Brahmanism had been introduced there. And although the Polynesians never adopted either Brahmanism or Buddhism as a creed, yet they carried with them and retained among their traditionary lore not a few of the ideas to which Brahmanism gave birth and circulation. The earth being created from an egg, referred to by Ellis as a Hawaiian tradition, is a Brahmin dogma. The different versions of the flood, current among the Polynesian tribes, north and south, had their probable origin in the Brahmin legend of Satyuorata, the seventh Manu, who alone with his family escaped the deluge that destroyed the rest of mankind.
The story of the fountain of youth and life—the “wai-ola-loa a Kane”—if not of Brahmin origin, was widely upheld by them, and was well known—mutatis mutandis—to the Polynesians. The arrangement of the calendar into twelve months of thirty days, with an intercalary month points strongly to a Brahmin-Malay original. The use of the betel or areca nut, though practised by many of the Papuan tribes and probably introduced among them by the neighboring Malays, or vice versa, is unknown to the Polynesian family. How old that custom may be among the Malays I have no means of ascertaining; but I infer that the Polynesians left for the Pacific before it was adopted. The resemblance and conformity of usages, customs and modes of thought, between the Polynesians and the Dayas, Battas, Buguis and other tribes still living in the Malay Archipelago, and which I look upon as remnants of the Polynesian family, are too many and too striking not to indicate a close relationship, a common origin, and a lengthened period of residence in the same place, to give time for their development and spread. [[228]]
In the L’Univers or Océanie by G. L. Domeny de Rienzi this subject and its bearing upon the relationship of the Polynesian and the present Daya tribes and their connections in Malaysia is fully and well treated. The Malays and Javanese, who arrived in the archipelago at a later date than the above tribes, also attest their priority by calling them the “Orang Benoa,” aborigines of the country.
Another indication of the Polynesians leaving the Malay Archipelago after the establishment of a Hindu empire and Brahmanism in that archipelago, seems to me to be found in the name “Sawaii,” “Hawaii,” “Havaiki,” as it is differently called in different Polynesian dialects. The word Hawaiki, used by the New Zealanders, the Tongas, the Hervey, some of the Paumotu and, I think the Northern Marquesas, is undoubtedly the oldest form of the word, that form—with the dialectical difference of s and h—which the Polynesians brought with them from Malaysia. But Hawaiki is identical with Djawa-iki or Jawa-iki (little Java) the j or dj sound being convertible into h, as evidenced in the names of other places and words common to the Polynesian and Malay tongues. Previous to the establishment of the Hindus in Jawa, that island was called Nusa-Kindang,[2] as reported in Javanese annals; after that establishment the name was changed to Nusa-Jawa. That event is by Javanese annals fixed at about 76 A.D. Those Hindus came from the country of Kling or Talinga on the west coast of India, and were probably of the Malay stirps, great-grand-nephews, so to say, of the long antecedent Polynesians. It was but natural that in their new habitats in the Pacific the latter should employ the nomenclature of their former homes, as we actually find it to have been the case in numerous instances.
Having then ascertained with a considerable degree of probability, as I think, that the early Polynesians, who settled in the Pacific, came from India through the Malay Archipelago, passing out by the Gilolo Passage or by Torres Straits, and most likely the latter, the question may arise, how came they to push past the entire Papuan Archipelago, some thousands of miles into the Pacific, before they established themselves in their new homes? That question involves a consideration of the origin and habitats of the Papuan race which I do not feel competent to engage in. This much, however, can be established; that at some remote period the Papuans inhabited the islands of the Malay Archipelago as far west, at least, as Borneo and probably extended up into Anam, Siam and Burma; that as the Malayo-Polynesian race advanced to the eastward, the Papuans were driven before them, either out of the islands altogether, or into the interior of the larger ones, where remnants of them still are found. Thus expelled from, or conquered in the Malay Archipelago, the Papuan furnished them an asylum and a home, unless we assume that they had already spread so far east before they came into hostile contact with the Hindu-Polynesians in the west. When, therefore, the latter were in their turn crowded out by the encroachments of the later Hindu-Malayans, and left from various points of the archipelago—from Sumatra to Timor—entering the Pacific in quest of new abodes, they found their ancient foes in superior force along their route, and unable to effect permanent settlements along the Papuan islands, they were obliged [[229]]to push on eastward until the Polynesian islands, at that time uninhabited, afforded them that shelter and rest which in vain they had sought on the Papuan coasts.
That their first attempt at permanent settlements, after a precarious and unsuccessful sejour at the Loyalty Isles, was at the Viti or Fiji Islands there can be little doubt. The number of Polynesian names by which these islands and places in them are called, even now, by the Papuan inhabitants, argues, if not wholly a priority, at least a permanence of residence, that can not well be disputed. The mixture of the two races, especially in the southeastern part of the Viti Archipelago, indicates a protracted stay and an intercourse of peace as well as of war. But after some time—how long can not now be expressed in generations or in centuries—the Papuans succeeded in driving the Polynesians out of their group, and then, if they had not before, they occupied the island groups still further eastward, simultaneously or successively. Of that intercourse, contest and hostility between the Papuan and Polynesian races on the southwest fringe of the Pacific there are several traditionary reminiscences among the Polynesian tribes, embodied in their mythology and connected with their earliest data, or retained as historical facts pointing to past collision and stimulating to further reprisals. The Tonga Islands have a tradition, recorded by Mariner, that Tangaloa, one of their principal gods, had two sons, of which the elder was called Tupo, the younger, Vaka-ako-uli. The first was indolent and shiftless, the other industrious and prosperous. Jealousy induced the former to kill the other. Then Tangaloa called the older brother and the family of the younger before him and thus addressed the latter: “Your bodies shall be fair, as the spirit of your father was good and pure; take your canoes and travel to the eastward and all good things attend you.” And to the older brother the offended god thus spoke: “Thy body shall be black, as thy soul is wicked and unclean; I will raise the east wind between you and your brother’s family, so that you cannot go to them, yet from time to time I will permit them to come to you for the purposes of trade.” When we consider that from earliest times the Tonga Islanders have kept up a constant intercourse with the Viti group, either warlike or commercial, it is not difficult to apply the tradition or to point the moral.
That the hostility in the early days of Polynesian settlement in the Pacific was remembered by other tribes as well as the Tonga, and looked upon as a national vendetta, may be inferred from a remark made by Quiros in his account of the expedition of Mendana (1595), while at the island of Santa Christina (Tahuata) in the Marquesan group. He says:—I quote from Voyage de Marchand, vol. I, p. 227,—that the natives, having observed a negro on board of the admiral’s ship among the Spaniards, said that to the south of their island there was land inhabited by black men; that they were their enemies; that they used the bow and arrow; and that the big war-canoes then lying in the bay of Madre de Dios, were destined and being fitted to make war upon them. Quiros, not then knowing the existence of the Viti group, discredited their story of the black men. The specialty, however, of their using the bow and arrow points them out as the Papuans of the Viti group, to whom that weapon was and is familiar, while by the Polynesians generally it is never or seldom used for purposes of war.
Whether the Marquesans at that time actually carried on so distant a warfare as between their group and the Viti, may or may not be called in doubt; but the fact, that [[230]]they were acquainted with the existence of the Papuan race in the Pacific, as distinct from their own, and with their peculiar weapon of war, and that that acquaintance was one of ancient and intense hostility, I think cannot be doubted.