I. The greater number of the defenders of autochthony allow that there is no fundamental impossibility in migration by land, but maintain that it is different in migrations by sea. The peopling of America, and especially that of Polynesia, by emigrants from our great continent, is, in their opinion, far more than could possibly be undertaken or accomplished by nations unacquainted with the science of astronomy, and the improved method of navigation. According to them, geographical conditions, winds and currents, must oppose an insurmountable obstacle to any enterprise of this nature.
Starting from Polynesia, let us see how much truth there is in these assertions. This will be taking, so to speak, the bull by the horns, for no other part of the globe seems to justify to such an extent, the opinions of autochthonists.
II. Polynesia is not quite so isolated as we are accustomed to think. A study of the map alone should be sufficient to justify us in holding that a maritime people, accustomed to the navigation of the Malay Archipelago, might, on some occasion, have pushed as far as New Guinea. This fact is now established above all dispute. Beyond New Guinea, the Archipelago of New Britain andthe Solomon Islandswould put, so to speak, any fairly adventurous navigators on their way to the Fiji Islands; once arrived at this archipelago, however little they may have been impelled by the spirit of discovery, they must easily have reached Polynesia properly so called. New Zealand to the south, and the SandwichIslands to the north, remain, however, beyond the limits of this route, as it is pointed out by geography.
For bold mariners to be stopped in their advance, winds and currents must have been invariably contrary and irresistible. The stronger the belief in the universality and absolute constancy of thetrade windsin these regions, the more was this action attributed to them. But the investigations which have been carried on in the interests of science, the writings of Commander Maury, and the charts of Captain Kerhallet, have taught us that the variable winds due to thecloud-ringextend over almost twenty degrees in the maritime area in question. We know, moreover, that every year themonsoondrives back the trade winds and blows beyond the Sandwich and Tahiti Islands, so that instead of the winds being contrary, they are, for many months, very favourable for ships sailing eastward.
Considerations drawn from currents lead almost to the same conclusions. In the Pacific, the equatorial current running from east to west forms in reality two great distinct oceanic streams separated by a large counter current flowing in the reverse direction. The latter skirts almost the whole northern portion of the Polynesian area; it thus, as it were, forms the outlet from the Indian Archipelago. There is every indication of its having played some part in the history of the dispersion of races in all parts of Oceania and to the east of the Malay peninsula.
Finally, we know that there is no absolute regularity in the atmospheric phenomena in the regions of the Pacific, any more than elsewhere. This ocean has in common with others its typhoons and its tempests, which suddenly change the direction of the winds and carry ships before them in spite of currents. Islands, both large and small, with which it is beset, must often have been visited by sailors who had thus lost their way, of which we shall presently quote examples.
Far from beingimpossible, the peopling of Polynesia by navigators starting from the Indian Archipelago is relativelyeasyat certain times of the year, provided only that the navigators are courageous and not afraid of losing sight of land. Now we know the character of the Malay populations in this respect.
Again, those who have taken all these circumstances into consideration, Malte-Brun, Homme, Lesson, Rienzi, Beechey, Wilkes and others, have not hesitated to regard Polynesia as having been peopled by migrations advancing from west to east.
III. Writers, on the contrary, who have only consulted the imperfect knowledge which we till lately possessed of these seas, and the ordinary direction of the winds, have either believed in autochthony or have invented various theories to explain the presence of man in this multitude of islands and remote islets.
Ellis held that the Polynesians had been conveyed from America to Oceania by winds and currents, but this hypothesis has had scarcely any adherents. It is in too direct contradiction with all the physical, philological, and social characters, which refer the Polynesians to the Malay races as strongly as they separate them from the Americans.
Dumont d’Urville has proposed a theory which, at first sight, is more satisfactory, and still has a few supporters. In his opinion, Polynesia is the remains of a great continent which was originally connected with Asia. This land sank after some geological revolutions; the sea covered the plains and hills, the highest summits only being now visible and forming the present archipelago. The Polynesians are the descendants of those who survived the catastrophe.
This hypothesis has the advantage of preserving those relations which were broken by that of Ellis. And, curious to relate, it agrees with the tradition of the deluge as preserved by the Tahitians. They say that the great inundation happened without either rain or tempest. It was the sea which rose and covered the whole earth with the exception of a flat rock where one man and a woman tookrefuge. We might say that there was nothing in this account but a mistake which is easily understood. The sea never rises, but the land may sink, and other people besides the Tahitians have been deceived.
Nevertheless, we cannot accept the theory of Dumont d’Urville. It is in contradiction to the zoological facts so thoroughly investigated by Darwin and Dana. If some of the atolls of Oceania shew signs of subsidence, a great number of islands offer incontestable proofs of upheaval, and Tahiti itself is one of the latter.
But the most serious argument which can be brought against d’Urville is derived from the inhabitants themselves. If travellers agree upon one point, it is that from the Sandwich Islands to New Zealand, from the Tonga Islands to Easter Island, all the Polynesians belong to the same race, and speak the same language with mere variations of dialect.
Now the Polynesian area, the limits of which I have just pointed out, is of greater extent than the whole of Asia. What would anAsiatic Polynesiabe like, if that continent were to sink beneath the waters and leave only the summits of its mountains visible, where some representatives of the present inhabitants might take refuge? Is it not at once evident that each archipelago, and often each island, would have its own race and language?
The considerations drawn from the identity of populations and languages in Polynesia are of themselves sufficient to justify the assertion that all the Islanders have a common origin; and consequently, that, starting from some unknown point, they have, in their advance from archipelago to archipelago, peopled by degrees the maritime world in which we find them.
Horatio Hale, the eminent anthropologist of the scientific expedition of the United States, was the first to approach the problem from a general point of view; he solved it as far as he was able with the data collected by himself, and sketched the first chart of Polynesian migrations. Freshfacts have been obtained since that time. Sir George Grey has published the historical songs of the Maories; Thomson, Shortland, and Hochstetter have brought to light fresh traditions; M. Remy published a history of Hawaii arranged by a native. M. Gaussin has carried off the prize in philology by his admirable work upon the Polynesian language; the Dépôt of the French Marine has received special documents from Tahiti to which General Ribourt, Admiral Lavaud, and Admiral Bruat have added the results of their own researches. These unpublished materials have been liberally placed at my disposal, and I have added to them some facts which have been forgotten. I have thus been able to confirm, from a general point of view, the conclusions of Hale, making, however, some important modifications, and to complete, again with some modifications, his chart of migrations. My readers will understand that I cannot here enter into a detailed discussion, and I must beg to refer them to my work uponThe Polynesians and their Migrations. I shall confine myself to a short summary of the results which, I believe, it demonstrates.
IV. Both physical and philological characters show that the Polynesians are a branch of those Malay races which are divided into numerous groups by shades of difference, sometimes strongly marked. It is to one of these groups which are least distant from the white type that the nations in question must be referred.
The starting point of these migrations, which were to extend so far into the east, was Boeroe Island, which is represented in all maps between Celebes and Ceram. This conclusion, already proposed with some diffidence by Hale, seems to me to be placed beyond a doubt by all the traditions collected at Tonga by Mariner, with whose work the learned American seems to have been unacquainted.
On quitting the Malay seas, the emigrants must have followed as nearly as possible the course given above. Repulsed doubtless by the black races which then, as now, occupied New Guinea, they passed Melanesia. Some canoes,however, probably separated from the others, reached the eastern extremity of this great island, and there founded a colony recently discovered by Commander Moresby. It is this colony which has doubtless furnished the several archipelagos of Melanesia with at least a part of the Polynesian elements which have been observed by several travellers. We know, however, thanks to the researches of M. de Rochas, that the Polynesian elements of the little archipelago of the Loyalty Islands is due to an emigration passing in 1770 from the Willis Islands to New Caledonia.
The great stream of emigration must have left all Melanesia to the south, and have separated into three branches. One would arrive at the Samoa Islands, another at the Tonga Islands, and a third at the Fiji Islands. The two first archipelagos were evidently uninhabited, the latter already possessed by a black population. An alliance was at first made, however, between the aborigines and the emigrants, but before long thewar of racesbroke out, the Malays were expelled, probably leaving behind them some of their women. In this manner the mixed character of the Fijian population was produced, with which all travellers have been struck. The ejected Malays gained the Tonga Islands. Finding them occupied by fellow-countrymen they attacked and defeated them. Instead of massacring or enslaving them they inventedserfdom, an institution which has only been met with in this archipelago.
Whilst the Malay colonies founded in the Fiji and Tonga Islands were dispersed and desolated by a fratricidal war, those in the Samoan archipelago prospered. The population became denser: the spirit of adventure was not as yet extinguished, fresh emigrations took to the sea, advancing in the direction which had led to the first discoveries. At this period the island of Savaï played an important part, according to the universal testimony of Polynesian traditions. Its name appears in almost all the archipelagos, scarcely modified by local dialects, in the Sandwich Islands and in New Zealand, in the MarquesasIslands as well as in Tahiti, and as far as the Manaïa Islands. Finally, Tupaïa, in drawing the curious map, which has been preserved by Forster, designates Savaï as the mother of all the others, and represents it as much larger than Tahiti. This is an error, but this very error proves beyond a doubt the importance of this locality from our present point of view.
With the exception of a single emigration, which passed directly from Tonga to the Marquesas Islands, it is from the Samoan archipelago, and from Savaï in particular, that all the great expeditions appear to have started, which formed secondary centres elsewhere. Tahiti and the Manaïa Islands are the two principal. The former peopled the north of the Pomotous and part of the Marquesas, which, in turn, sent out colonists to the Sandwich Islands, where, however, they had been preceded by the Tahitians. The latter, in which there were both Tahitians and Samoans, pushed their colonies as far as Rapa, to the Gambier Islands, to the south-east extremity of Polynesia and to New Zealand in the south-west.
V. We have only isolated and very incomplete accounts of the greater number of these migrations. Though sufficient to remove all doubt as to the fact, they tell us nothing of the circumstances which accompanied or followed them. It is quite otherwise when we come to consider New Zealand. Thanks to the songs collected by Sir George Grey, we possess the detailed history of this colonisation. This exception is doubly fortunate as giving us information upon a number of important points, and precisely in reference to those islands which, from being situated at a great distance from Polynesia, properly so called, favour autochthonic hypotheses more than all the rest of the area. It seems to me, therefore, to be advisable to enter into a few details upon the subject.
It is the inhabitants of Rarotonga, one of the principal islands of Manaïa, who had the honour of discovering and colonising New Zealand. An emigration from Tonga may,however, at some unknown period have possibly joined them.
The Christopher Columbus of this little world was a certain Ngahué, who was compelled to fly from his country to escape the persecutions of a queen, who wished to rob him of a jasper stone. It was doubtless chance which led him to New Zealand. He here discovered several pieces of jasper, which probably restored him to the favour of thefemale chief, for we do not hear that he was molested on his return to Rarotonga.
During the absence of Ngahué a general war had broken out in his island. The vanquished party followed the advice of the traveller, who persuaded them to go and occupy the recently discovered land with him. Several chiefs joined together and constructed six canoes, the names of which are still preserved. The song translated by Sir George Grey informs us that one of them, theArawa, was made of a tree which had been felled in Rarotonga, situated on the other side of Hawaïki. This was one of thosesecondary Savaïswhich I have mentioned above, and the place from which the emigrants started. “Once,” says one of those songs already quoted, “our ancestors separated; some were left at Hawaïki, and others came here in canoes.”
The same song describes the accidents of the voyage, the storms which the navigators met with, the care bestowed upon the first culture of the soil, the exploring expeditions undertaken in the new country, and the disagreements which occurred between the different crews. They show that the connection with the mother country continued to exist for some time, so much so indeed that a young woman accomplished the voyage with only a few companions, and warlike expeditions started sometimes from Hawaïki and sometimes from the colony to avenge some of those outrages which were considered by these races as demanding the life of the offender.
There is nothing astonishing in these passages. The Polynesians knew perfectly well how to direct their courseat sea by the stars, and the route from one point to another once observed was inscribed, if we may use the expression, in a song which would never be forgotten. They had a very correct general idea of the whole of their maritime world. The map drawn by Tupaïa, which I have reproduced in my book, is equal to those of our savants of the Middle Ages, while it embraces a considerable area. Tupaïa had seen for himself several of the islands which he represents. According to the calculations of Cook, he must have gone westward to a distance of 1,600 miles. But it was from thesacred songsof his country that he acquired his knowledge of the rest of Polynesia, and was able to sketch it with tolerable accuracy.
As to thecanoesin question, they were the same as the pirogues, which are mentioned by all travellers with admiration, and are declared by Cook to be very suitable for long voyages. This is a fact which is often established by the very precise details contained in some of the songs translated by Sir George Grey. We see, for example, one of the emigrant chiefs, Ngatoro-i-Rangi, “mount upon the roof of the hut constructed upon the platform which joined the two canoes.” We have only to add that theArawaand other similar vessels generally carried 140 warriors, and it will at once appear how devoid of foundation are the assertions of those writers who declare these voyages to have been impossible for want of sufficient means of transport.
VI. The various documents which we now possess have not only been of service in proving beyond a doubt the general fact of migrations, and in acquainting us with the circumstances by which some of them were accompanied; they even enable us to indicate with very tolerable exactness the date of some of the most important.
This result is generally obtained by the genealogies of the principal families. Each forms a kind of litany, which is sung in fixed rhythm, and of which each verse contains the name of a chief and those of his wife and son. Anyone, therefore, capable of remembering a song of one hundredverses may easily learn the longest of these genealogies. Confided to memory by theAreposorKeepers of the Archives, they were preserved with jealous care. Thomson informs us that in New Zealand a serious inquiry was made into these verbal documents, and their authenticity was so well established, that they have an equal value in matters of justice with our deeds.
Now, in the Marquesas, Gattanewa, the friend of Porter, who was descended from the first colonists of the Tongan portion of the archipelago, had only eighty-eight predecessors. At Hawaï, the genealogy of the Tamehameha, according to M. Remy, is contained in seventy-five verses. In 1840, according to Williams, Rarotonga was governed by the twenty-ninth descendant of Karika, the founder of the colony. In the Gambier Islands M. Maigret saw the twenty-seventh reigning chief since the arrival of the first colonists from Rarotonga.
Hale has shown very clearly that the Hawaïan genealogy contains at the outset, like many others in Europe, some fabulous personages. He considered it necessary to remove the first twenty-two verses. Some such correction should very probably be made in that of the Marquesas Islanders. As to those of Rarotonga and the Gambier Islands they are too recent to have been already contaminated by fable.
Hale, guided by considerations which I cannot here discuss, attributes to each verse of these genealogies the value of ageneration, from twenty-five to thirty years. Thomson and M. Remy, however, having had time to gather more precise information, regard them as indicating merelyreigns. Calculating the mean duration of these reigns from that given by the list of French kings from Clovis to Louis XVII., we obtain as a result 21·13 years.
According to these data, the arrival of the Tongans in the Marquesas Islands must have taken place in the year 417 of our era; thatof the Tahitiansin about 701; Karika must have colonized Rarotonga in 1207, and the Gambier Islands have been peopled in 1270.
For New Zealand we have a double source of information,and the results thus obtained agree so well that we cannot doubt their accuracy. The genealogies of the greater number of the Maori chiefs go back as far as those bold pioneers whose history I have related. Thomson, who has examined several, considers that the number of chiefs who have succeeded each other in every family since the colonization, may be estimated at about twenty. Taking the kings of England as a term of comparison, he attributes to thereign of each chiefa duration of 221/35years. These data took him back to the year 1419. The list of French kings would only give the year 1457.
On the other hand, in one of the songs preserved by Sir George Grey, there is an account of the history of the son of Hotunui, one of the colonizing chiefs of New Zealand, and of his immediate descendants. At the fourth generation a daughter was born, “from whom,” the legend adds, “are descended in eleven generations all the principal chiefs now living of the tribe of Ngalipaoa.” Taking thirty years for each generation, we find that the migration of Hotunui took place 450 years before the time when Sir George Grey received the document (about 1850), which carries us back to the year 1400.
Thus, these Maories, whom autochthonists regard as children of the soil, cannot have landed in New Zealand earlier than the beginning of the fifteenth century.
VII. I have hitherto only spoken of more or less voluntary migrations, such as might be induced by a spirit of adventure, civil troubles, or the authority of a priest despatching an excess of population in search of new countries. But in treating of Polynesia, we must, as I have already remarked, take accidents by sea into consideration. Several examples are known. It was in this manner that Toubouaï was peopled, which at the close of the last century, within an interval of a few years, received three canoes from different islands, one of which was Tahiti. All three had been carried away by a storm and driven ashore upon this island, which, till then, had been uninhabited.
Such, again, is the history of the chief Touwari and his companions, men, women, and children, discovered by Captain Beechey upon Byam-Martin Island, which they had begun to colonize. They had started from Anaa, an island situated two hundred and forty-five miles to the east of Tahiti, to go and pay homage to Pomare, but were surprised at Maïatea bythe monsoon, which had come sooner than usual. Driven to the south-east into the midst of the Pomatou Islands, they landed at first on Barrow Island. Finding, however, no means of subsistence, they took to the sea again, and fell in with the island where they were found by the English navigator.
This example is perfect, since it realises all the circumstances indicated by the theory. It establishes the existence of regular relations between islands situated at great distances from each other; it proves one of those occurrences which must more than once have caused these bold navigators to wander from the usual route; it shows how a remote island was able to receive all the elements of a colony; it leaves no doubt as to the possibility of dispersion going on in an exactly opposite direction to that of the trade winds. We need only add that the passage from Maïatea to Barrow and Byam-Martin Islands is more than five hundred and sixty miles, and we shall understand without any difficulty how Polynesia was peopled by voluntary or accidental colonization.
VIII. There is one more circumstance which it is important to observe, and which is completely at variance with all autochthonist hypotheses, that, namely, on approaching the islands where they have been discovered by us, the Polynesian found them uninhabited.
The songs, for which we are indebted to Sir George Grey, show that in New Zealand the greater number of the first emigrants met with no traces of a previous population. One only, named Manaïa, found upon a promontory aborigines of the country. This exception, from the very reason that it is unique, proves that this population could not havebeen very numerous. It has slightly altered the type of the lowest grades of the Maories, to which it has been confined. The portrait published by Hamilton Smith, and one of the skulls in the possession of the Museum, inform us that these supposed aborigines were Papuans. It is evident that they had reached New Zealand in consequence of some mischance similar to those I have just mentioned, and had not even had time to multiply sufficiently to occupy the entire shores of the North Island.
The traditions of the Sandwich Islands furnish us with a fact of the same nature. They tell us that the first colonists coming from Tahiti found in these islandsgodsandspirits, who inhabited the caves and with whom they entered into alliance. It is evident that we have here a troglodyte people, whose importance the legend has been pleased to exaggerate, and whose origin it is not difficult to find. If Kadou, whose history has been preserved by Kotzebue, instead of leaving the Caroline Islands for the Radak Islands, had started from the latter, and if he had made almost the same passage in the same direction, he would have landed in the Sandwich Islands.
The mixture of Polynesian and Micronesian races at once explains the darkness of colour and want of purity in the features of the Hawaïans. Perhaps the same cause may account for the difference in features, manners, and industry which is presented by some tribes of the Low Archipelago.
Apart from these few and, as we see, very feeble exceptions, all the islands of Polynesia appear to have been uninhabited when the navigators from Boeroe or their descendants landed. This fact is distinctly proved by traditions in Kingsmill, Rarotonga, Mangarewa, the Toubouaï Islands, etc. Purity of race testifies that this was also the case with the Tonga, Samoa, and Marquesas Islands.
IX. Finally, the facts to which I have been obliged to confine myself are entirely opposed to the theories of autochthonists, and lead to the following conclusions: Polynesia, a region which, from its geographical conditions, seems at firstsight to be isolated from the rest of the world, has been peopled by means of voluntary migrations and accidental dispersion, passing from west to east, at least as a general rule. The Polynesians, coming from Malaya, and the Isle of Boeroe in particular, first established and settled themselves in the Archipelagos of Samoa and Tonga. Thence they invaded by degrees the maritime world open before them; they found, almost without an exception, that all the countries where they landed were uninhabited, and only on two or three occasions met with very small tribes of a more or less black type.