I have already stated that the large bay of Coupang, on the Island of Timor, was formerly called Babao. This bay and surrounding country was, at the time of the European settlements there, an independent state and kingdom, and it is highly probable that in ancient times, before the Malay element preponderated in the Indian Archipelago, it might have given its name to the whole island, inasmuch as that name is found in the nomenclature of islands, districts and places which the Polynesians carried with them into the Pacific and adapted to their new habitats. But Babao is and would be Vavao or Vevao in any of the Polynesian dialects, for they have no letter b. If I am right in this, it becomes intelligible why Vavao or Timor should have been quoted as the one terminus of the known world to the people then occupying the archipelago from there to Java or Sumatra. To those people, at that time, it was the eastern-most land then known, and, when the Malay element assumed the preponderance in the archipelago, it was called “Timor” or “The East,” plainly indicating that it was also by them at that time considered as the extreme east.
I have already stated that I consider the Polynesian word Hawaii as corresponding to, or representing the word Jawa, as applied to the second island of the Sunda group. From the pronunciation of the word in the different Polynesian dialects I was led to believe that its original name in Polynesian mouths was “Hawa-iki” or Little Jawa. It is possible, however, that it may also have been, as pronounced in some dialects, Hawa-ii or Sava-ii,—the raging furious (as applied to volcanic mountains) Hawa or Sava or Saba. How far this name was applied to the western islands of the Sunda group I am unable to say. We know that Ptolomy, the geographer, designated Sumatra as “Jaba-din.” It may therefore very probably in times anterior to him have included a portion or the whole of the latter island as well as the present Java. Be this as it may, the frequent allusions made in the chant referred to, to the sea of Hawaii (te tai o Hawaii)—the Jawa sea, points with sufficient accuracy to this island as the western terminus of the world as known to those who composed that chant.
In this way the expression used in the chant regarding the wind receives a force and application, which under no other construction it could have received. It then applied to the regular monsoons which blow over that part of the world: “Blow wind from Vevao (from the east) and cool the sea of Hawa: blow back wind from Hawa (from the west) and cool the region or air of Vevao.”
The Hawaiian appellations for the same cardinal points, while they differ in name, tend to the same result. In the Hawaiian group the North is called, among other names, “Ulunui,” “Uliuli,” “Hakalauai,” “Melemele,” but these are known by tradition to have been names of lands, situated to the north of some former habitat of the people, of which all knowledge and remembrance was lost save that they were situated to the north of them, and were visited at one time by that famous voyager, whose exploits [[238]]survive in song and saga, Kaulu-a-Kalana. Among the names for the South occurs that ancient one of lipo, also of lepo. The former signifies blue, black or dark, and hence the deep water in the sea; the latter is synonymous with moana, the deep open ocean. Now, there is no land to the north of the Hawaiian Islands within reach or ken that could have suggested these names as cognomens or epithets for the North, while moana lipo, the dark, bottomless ocean, approaches them not on the south only, but on every side. Those names, therefore, bespeak a foreign origin, and that origin I hold to have been in the Sunda Islands. No other configuration of land can account for it.
Though none of the above statements, singly, amounts to a positive proof, yet, taken together, I think they furnish sufficient induction to warrant the conclusion that the Polynesian family in the Pacific, from New Zealand to the Hawaiian group and from Easter Island to the outlying eastern portion of the Viti Archipelago, is descended from a branch that was agnate to, but far older than, the Vedic branch of the Aryan race; that it had entered India long before the Aryans; that, while there, it became moulded to the Cushite-Arabian civilization of that time and more or less mixed up with the Dravidian branches, who either were in India before it, or entered there from the northeast; that, whether driven out by force or leaving for colonizing purposes, it established itself in the Indian Archipelago at an early period and spread itself from Sumatra to Timor, from Borneo to Manila; that it was followed into this archipelago by Brahmanized Dravidians and other tribes from Deccan who, in their turn, obtained the ascendancy and drove the Polynesians to the mountains and the interior of the larger islands or compelled them to leave altogether; that no positive time can be assigned for leaving the Asiatic Archipelago and pushing into the Pacific—it may have occurred centuries before the present era, but certainly was not later than the first century of it, or thereabout; that the diversity of features and complexion in the Polynesian family—the frequent high forehead and Roman nose and light olive color—attest as much its Aryan relation and Cushite connection, as it does its intermixture with the Dravidian and Malay branches before and subsequent to leaving India; and that if the present Hindu is an Aryan descendant, the Polynesian is, a fortiori, an Aryan ancestor. [[239]]
[1] The mother of the tii or spirits, and subsequently the mother of the first man and woman, according to a Tahitian tradition. [↑]
[2] This seems to have been the name of the whole island, while at the same time the eastern portion was called Nusa Hara-Hara and the western portion was called Sonda. May not the latter correspond to the Polynesian Tonga, Tona, Kona, as variously pronounced and generally used to designate the western or the lee-side of the Polynesian islands? [↑]
[3] Alfred Russell Wallace: Malay Archipelago, New York, 1869, pp. 593–594, also 250–269. [↑]