In a recent work,[3] Wallace argues very ingenuously that the Polynesian race is merely a modification of the Papuan race, superinduced by an admixture of Malay or some light-colored Mongol element, the Papuan, however, largely predominating, physically, mentally and morally, but that such admixture probably occurred at such a remote period as, through the lapse of ages, to have become a permanent type. He further asserts that the presence of a decided Malay element in the Polynesian languages is altogether a phenomenon of recent occurrence originating in the roaming habits of the chief Malay tribes, and says that this fact is proved by the presence of a number of actual modern Malay and Javanese words and not more Malay roots, as would have been the case had their introduction been as remote as the origin of a very distinct race; and he concludes by saying that there are proofs of extensive migration among the Pacific Islands, but there are no proofs whatever of recent migration from any surrounding country to Polynesia, since there are no people to be found elsewhere sufficiently resembling the Polynesian race in their chief physical and mental characteristics.
With these propositions, I cannot agree. Wallace evidently classes the Battas, Dayas and Buguis as Malays,—Malays of the modern generally received type. Independent of traditional and historical proofs to the contrary, it does not seem to have occurred to him that those Battas, Buguis and Dayas, though from the same mother stock as the modern Malays, are an infinitely older off-shoot than the latter, and so regarded by them: that the Malays, instead of descending through Burmah, Siam and Malacca, claim for themselves a Hindu descent from the eastern coast, the country of Kling and Telinga; and that when they emigrated from that grand officina gentium the Malay Archipelago was already in possession of the Battas, Dyas and Buguis and their other congeners and contemporaries, of which I claim the present Polynesian family to have been one. He overlooks moreover the fact that the traditions, customs and language of those very pre-Malay occupants of the archipelago, from Sumatra to Celebes and Flores, Savu, Rothi and to some extent Timor, in a most remarkable degree point to central and northern India as their cradle and their source. He asserts that the Polynesian has a greater physical, mental and moral resemblance to the Papuan than to the Malay, and that ergo, he is, as regards origin, entirely distinct from the latter and merely a modification hardened into a variety of the former. Had the author studied the remarkable differences, physical, mental and moral, which characterize some of the European families now known to be descended from the same source—the low-browed, turned-up-nosed, large-mouthed, boisterous Celt, and the square-browed, aquiline-nosed, reserved Roman—he may have concluded that the Aryan descendants to the east would have been as diversified in their national and tribal development, as those to the west; and that the same law of variation would operate on the one side as on the other. His remarks—that the Malay element in the Polynesian languages is a recent phenomenon originating in the roaming habits of the Malays, and that that element[[231]]—instead of being composed of Malay roots, pointing to a remote origin,—is actually proven by the presence of a number of modern Malay Javanese words,—may very probably apply to the western Papuans, but are void and unsustained, if applied to the Polynesians proper of the East and South Pacific. So far from the Malay element being a modern intrusion into the Polynesian, the latter has not only preserved many of the older forms of speech of the common Malay, but in the words which are common to it and its congeners, the Battas, Dayas and Buguis, the Polynesian form is generally the purest, oldest and the least affected by phonetic corruption.
As to there being “no proofs whatever of recent migration from any surrounding country to Polynesia,” it might be well to understand at the outset what is meant by the word “recent.” Is it applied in its limited sense conveying the idea of a few generations or a few hundred years; or is it applied in a comparative sense, in which an event one or two thousand years ago may be called recent when compared with other events of a still more remote age? If the former, there certainly are no proofs of a recent migration from any surrounding country, inhabited by a kindred race, that could account for the arrival and spread of the Polynesian in the South and East Pacific; if the latter, the physical, mental and moral resemblance of the Polynesian to the pre-Malay occupants of the Asiatic Archipelago, his traditions, customs and language, prove,—inferentially it is true,—but prove beyond a doubt his migration from that archipelago and his kindred with its former possessors, as much so as the Celt, the Greek, the Goth and the Slav can be proved to have descended from the same stock in the west, that gave birth to the Hindu, Daya and Malay families in the east.
As regards the first settlers of the Hawaiian Islands, I am led to believe that they came from the Samoan group, through the Tahiti and Marquesas Islands; in other words, that the Tahitians came from Samoa, the Marquesans from Tahiti, and the Hawaiians from the Marquesans. The Marquesans have legends and traditions which pretend to describe their wanderings in olden times, but the Hawaiians have none but that their gods came from Tahiti. But where history and tradition fail, I hold that the gradual and phonetic corruption of the language will in a great measure indicate the halting places of those who speak it. We find then in the Tahitian that the Samoan ng is replaced with n and the s dropped or replaced with t, while the f and the t are retained. On proceeding to the Marquesas we find that, with the exception of some of the southern islands, ng and f have been replaced by n and h, and that the k sound has become as prominent as the t. Arriving at the Hawaiian group we find not only s, ng, and f repudiated in toto and replaced by h, n or k, and by h or p, and that k has become the predominant sound instead of t, but we find also the Tahitian causative hoa softened to hoo; we frequently find the k eliminated from between two vowels or at the commencement of a word where it is retained in the other dialects; we find words obsolete in the Hawaiian which still pass current in the other dialects with original or derivative meanings. We can thus trace the people by the phonetic corruption of their language, as, I have no doubt the Samoan (not in the present, but in its original form) could be traced by competent philologists to that primordial source from which both the Turanian and Aryan languages issued.
At what period in the world’s history the first Polynesian settlers discovered [[232]]and occupied the Hawaiian Islands, it is now impossible accurately to define. Ethnologically, we can trace them backward to India; historically, we can not trace them even to their last point of departure, the Marquesas or the Society Islands. That they are of the same race that now inhabit the eastern and southern parts of Polynesia is beyond a doubt. That that race was settled in the Asiatic Archipelago centuries before the Christian era, I believe to be equally certain; but whether the emigration into Polynesia took place before the Christian era, or was occasioned by the invasion of the forefathers of the Malay family from India about the commencement of that era, there is nothing, that I am aware of, either in Polynesian, Malayan or Hindu traditions to throw any light upon. In Hawaiian tradition, there is no distinct remembrance, and but the faintest allusion to the fact that the islands were inhabited while the volcanoes on the leeward islands were still in an active state. It is impossible to judge of the age of a lava flow by its looks. Portions of the lava stream of 1840, flowing from Kilauea into Puna district of Hawaii, were in 1867 covered with a luxuriant vegetation; while older flows in Puna, of which no memory exists, the last flow from Hualalai in 1791 or 1792 through Kekaha on the west of Hawaii, and the flow near Keoneoio in Honuaula, Maui, called Hanakaie, which is by tradition referred back to the mythological period of Pele and her compeers, look as fresh and glossy today as if thrown out but yesterday.
Geologically speaking, the leeward islands are the oldest in the group and, with the exception of the legends of Pele and Hawaii Loa, there is no trace or tradition in the popular mind that their volcanoes had been active since the islands had been inhabited. But both on Molokai and on Oahu human remains have been found imbedded in lava flows of undisputed antiquity and of whose occurrence no vestige of remembrance remains in song or saga.
In 1859, Mr. R. W. Meyer, of Kalae, Molokai, found in the side of a hill on his estate, some seventy feet beneath the surface and in a stratum of breccia—volcanic mud, clay and ashes—of several feet in thickness, a human skull whose every cavity was fully and compactly filled with the volcanic deposit surrounding it, as if it had been cast in a mould, evidently showing that the skull had been filled while the deposit was yet in a fluid state. As that stratum spreads over a considerable tract of land in the neighborhood, at a varying depth beneath the surface of from ten to four hundred feet, and as the valleys and gulches, which now intersect it in numerous places, were manifestly formed by erosion—perhaps in some measure also by subsequent earthquake shocks—the great age of that human vestige may be reasonably inferred, though impossible to demonstrate within a period of one or five hundred years preceding the coherent traditional accounts of that island.
Hawaiian traditions on Hawaiian soil, though valuable as national reminiscences, more or less obscured by the lapse of time, do not go back with any historical precision much more than twenty-eight generations from the present (about 1865), or say 840 years. Within that period the harbor and neighboring coast-line of Honolulu has remained nearly what it now is, nor has any subsidence, sufficient to account for the formation of the coral-pan in that place, or subsequent upheaval been retained in the memory of those twenty-eight generations. [[233]]
I am tolerably safe, then, in asserting that these islands were inhabited 800 or 900 years ago, and had been inhabited for centuries previously, by the same race of people that inhabits them now.
Professor Max Müller, in his Lectures on the Science of Language, has shown it to be very probable that in the 12th and 13th centuries before Christ the Tamul family had already been driven into Deccan and the southern parts of the Hindu Peninsula by the invading Aryans. With due attention to the course and character of those waves of migration, it becomes also very probable that the Polynesian family had by or before that time been driven into the Asiatic Archipelago, displacing in their turn the Papuan family. How soon or how long after that occupation the first adventurous Polynesians debouched into the Pacific, it is impossible to even conjecture. But we know that, about the commencement of the Christian era, new swarms of emigrants from middle and eastern India invaded the area occupied by the Polynesians and spread themselves from Sumatra to Timor, from Java to Manila, expelling, subjugating or isolating the previous occupants.