1885 - Dilke, C. W. Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries. 8th ed. - Part II. Chapter III. Polynesians, p 245-249

       
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  1885 - Dilke, C. W. Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries. 8th ed. - Part II. Chapter III. Polynesians, p 245-249
 
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CHAPTER III. POLYNESIANS.

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CHAPTER III.

POLYNESIANS.

THE name "Maori" is said to mean "native," but the boast on the part of the Maori race contained in the title "Natives of the Soil" is one which conflicts with their traditions. These make them out to be mere interlopers--Tahitians, they themselves say--who, within historic ages, sailed down island by island in their war-canoes, massacring the inhabitants, and, finally landing in New Zealand, found a numerous horde of blacks of the Australian race living in the forests of the South Island. Favoured by a year of exceptional drought, they set fire to the woods, and burnt to the last man, or drove into the sea, the aboriginal possessors of the soil. Some ethnologists believe that this account is in the main correct, but hold that the Maori race is Malay, and not originally Tahitian: others have tried to show that the conflict between blacks and browns was not confined to these two islands, but raged throughout the whole of Polynesia; and that it was terminated in New Zealand itself, not by the destruction of the blacks, but by the amalgamation of the opposing races.

The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations are circumstantial in the extreme, and describe the first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and many such details of the landing. The names of the chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of "catalogue of ships," and the wars of the settlers are narrated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the legends of all lands.

The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century,

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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 ICTHYS, 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 "wahres," 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 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 "tapu 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 wahres 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 southwards to New Zealand, and accounts for the

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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 eastwards along the equatorial belt of calms, and then back to the south-west 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: Powhatan'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 Guadalupe; the giant masonry of Central America is similar to 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 eastwards to Honduras, westwards to Burmah, to Tartary and to Ceylon. The fibre mats, common to Polynesia and Red India, are unknown to savages elsewhere, and the feather head-dresses of the Maories are 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

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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 colour, the Indians and Polynesians are not alike; but colour 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.

Religious rites and social customs outlast both physical type and language; but even were it otherwise, there is great resemblance in build and feature between the Polynesians and many of the "Red-Indian" tribes. The aboriginal people of New York State are described by the early navigators not as tall, grave, hooked-nose men, but as copper-coloured, pleasant-looking, and with quick, shrewd eyes; and the Mexican Indian bears more likeness to the Sandwich Islander than to the Delaware or Cherokee.

In reaching South America, there were no distances to be overcome such as to present insurmountable difficulties to the Malays. Their canoes have frequently, within the years that we have had our missionary stations in the islands, made involuntary voyages of six or seven hundred miles. A Western editor has said of Columbus that he deserves no praise for discovering America, as it is so large that he could not well have

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missed it; but Easter Island is so small, that the chances must have been thousands to one against its being reached by canoes sailing even from the nearest land; yet it is an ascertained fact that Easter Island was peopled by the Polynesians. Whatever drove canoes to Easter Island would have driven them from the island to Chili and Peru. The Polynesian Malays would sometimes be taken out to sea by sudden storms, by war, by hunger, by love of change. In war-time, whole tribes have, within historic days, been clapped into their boats, and sent to sea by a merciful conqueror who had dined: this occurs, however, only when the market is already surfeited with human joints.

In sailing from America to New Zealand, we met strong westerly winds before we had gone half-way across the seas, and, south of the trade-wind region, these blow constantly to within a short distance of the American coast, where they are lost upon the edge of the Chilian current. A canoe blown off from the southern islands, and running steadily before the wind, would be cast on the Peruvian coast near Quito.

When Columbus landed in the Atlantic islands, he was, perhaps, not mistaken in his belief that it was "The Indies" that he had found--an India peopled by the Malay race, till lately the most widely-scattered of all the nations of the world, but one which the English seem destined to supplant.

The Maories, without doubt, were originally Malays, emigrants from the winterless climate of the Malay peninsula and Polynesian archipelago; and, although the northernmost portions of New Zealand suited them not ill, the cold winters of the South Island prevented the spread of the bands they planted there. At all times it has been remarked by ethnologists and acclimatizers that it is easier by far to carry men and beasts from the poles towards the tropics than from the tropics to the colder regions. The Malays, in coming to New Zealand, unknowingly broke one of Nature's laws, and their descendants are paying the penalty in extinction.


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