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The Whence of The Maori.

The question as to the place in which the Maori originated has been much debated, and has become of character so highly controversial, that it would be idle to accept any general answer that would satisfy all the contestants, unless some new and startling discovery had been lately made. Many theories have been advanced, or, rather, many versions of two or three theories, but there has been no theory finally accepted as undoubtedly proven.

Broadly, the subject divides itself into two distinct questions: Were the Maori aborigines of New Zealand? If not, where was the place from which they came?

As to the first question, different answers are given, some believing that all the people of New Zealand were of one parentage and were autochthones; others that some of them were autochthones and were joined by a later accession of visitors belonging to the same race. Those who consider them all as aborigines

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point to the carving, tattooing, religion, cannibalism, forts, weapons, dress, etc., as being absolutely unique, and differing as much from those of any known people as the flora and fauna of New Zealand differ from those of any other locality. They point out that the birds and other animals, as well as the plants, trees, etc., said to have been brought in the canoes, are absolutely unknown in other places; that the immigration legends are pure myth, full of absurd contradictions, of impossible adventures, and that the tales show that the narrators were unacquainted with any locality outside New Zealand.

To these assertions it is replied that from one branch of evidence, that of language, it is almost certain that the Maori is not a unique race, but is akin to the Samoan, Hawaiian, Tahitian, and other Polynesians, and speaking the same tongue. If the Maori had always lived in New Zealand, then the people of Samoa, Tahiti, etc., must have originated here also, or they would not speak dialects of the same language. Moreover, many Maori words bear evidence of having been used in the South Seas, and are either obsolete, having no meaning to modern Maoris, or with only some perverted and local meaning of the original Polynesian word. Of course, if the “sunken continent” of the Lemuria theory can be accepted, the difficulty is got over, and the Maoris, with the other Pacific Islanders, may be survivors of the former inhabitants of a lost land, escaped to the mountain-peaks of a submerged continent, and preserving dialects of an ancient common

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language. The deep-sea soundings of scientific expeditions have, however, almost conclusively dispelled the Lemurian theory, and we may for practical purposes put it aside.

Language alone would be a weak cord on which to hang common origin, but here the testimony of speech is reinforced by similarity of custom. As Mr. Percy Smith has well observed, “Customs are more persistent than language, hence we find little mannerisms, if they may be so-called, common to every branch of the race. The upward nod of the head as a sign of assent; the way the women hold a shell or knife to cut or scrape anything; the joining of the two thumbs and forefingers on the leg when in repose, the way the women sometimes sit (noho titengi); the holding of the hand with the palm downwards when beckoning, and many other things may be noticed from New Zealand to Hawaii, from Samoa to Tahiti, and no doubt further away. These little things the child learns from its mother and transmits to the children. They become racial peculiarities and are very persistent.” To this we may add that the form of body, the quality of intellect, the mythology, the folk-lore, the genealogies, all link the fair race of the Pacific with the Maori. The raising of Earth from Ocean by Maui, the obtaining the gift of fire by the same hero, the story of Rata's canoe, of Hina's long swim to Sacred Island, the home of Tinirau the god of fishes, all these are as well known to the South Sea Islander as to the Maori, and known with almost the same names of places, parentage, etc.

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Even if the legends had been communicated over so many thousands of miles of intervening sea by visitors, the coincidence in names and family between the genealogies of the nobles in Hawaii and those of New Zealand are beyond suspicion of transference. The Maori and Polynesian is assuredly of one race, and their fathers were of one blood; the natives of Rarotonga and Tahiti call themselves “Maori,” as the New Zealander does.

If we answer the second question, “Where did they come from?” the task is more difficult. The general concensus of statement in most of the historical legends of the Maori tends to show that they came in canoes to these islands. The names of the canoes and of the people in them, the causes tending to their emigration from their own country, the incidents of the voyage, the places where the canoes came to shore, the settlement of the new colonies, are completed by genealogies bringing the families down to living persons, and all these incidents or circumstances are related with minute and profuse detail. It appears improbably, if not impossible, that all these narratives should be pure invention, and that when gathered from a thousand sources they should agree in such unanimity of lying. On the other hand there are certainly supernatural or impossible matters mingled with the threads of the stories, but this is not extraordinary when we consider that the traditions are centuries old, and have been the inheritance of a people for whom earth and sky were full of miracles, and the air fresh with the childhood

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of our race. Because a god or a priest crosses the sea on a feather or a piece of pumice it does not follow that the tradition in which the marvel occurs has had no historical base. If so, we must reject the histories of Greece, in which, to the last, wonders were persistent, and if the disproof of a few long-accepted statements invalidates the whole story, we may even have to renounce “the legend of Waterloo.”

These migration legends assert that the cradle-land of the Maori was named Hawaiki. It is over this name and its locality that the wordy war most rages. Hawaiki has been placed by some in the Island of Hawaiki, of the Sandwich Group; by others in Savaii, of the Navigator Islands. Fakarava, in the Paumotus, and Raiatea, in the Society Islands, have also been mentioned as possible places on account of the ancient name of each being Hawaiki. Unhappily for finality, in all these places there are traditions that the forefathers of the inhabitants also came from Havaiki or Havaii (the name differs in spelling according to the dropping or slurring of the letter k), and the enquiry is simply thrust farther and farther back until some theorise that the word Hawaiki (read as Hawa-the-little) is the original name of Java, or even of the Saba of the Cushites, in Asia. The investigation is darkened by the Polynesian custom of giving a new country or place a similar name to that left behind. The names of localities mentioned in old Maori songs and traditions, such as Hawaiki, Vavau, Kuporu (Upolu), etc., are scattered here and

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there all over the Pacific, and become almost impossible of separate identification. If Maoris, like other Polynesians, are the immigrant people they claim to be, it is reasonable to accept this name of Hawaiki, Avaiki, or Havaii, as that of their original home, and that they re-named other places in memory of the old habitat as they went along.

This book is not of a polemical nature, and as volumes could be written (many have been written) on the subject of the locality of Hawaiki, it is needless to discuss all the theories of different students who are groping for light on the geographical position. One of these theories, however, may be mentioned as deserving special reference, and that is, that as Avaiki in Rarotonga and Mangaia means “the Spirit World,” it is possible that it has no earthly locality, but that it has existence only in the land of dreams. Even in New Zealand we have glimpses of such meaning, thus, a tradition says, “the boy went quickly below to the Lower World (Reinga) to observe and look about at the steep cliffs of Hawaiki.” It is not impossible, however, that a place which once may have had real existence could in the passing of many centuries fade from human memory so far into the realm of legend as to become eventually the Land of Shadows, the dim region of the Under World. Wherever the locality of the primal Hawaiki, it is certain (so far as oral tradition can be trusted) that in coming to New Zealand from one of the latter-named Hawaiki, the Maoris had experiences different from any they could picture in New

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Zealand surroundings. They affirm that in the place they came from there were large animals, that the sun was exceedingly hot; that some of the tribes of people (enemies of their own fair race) were black, with hair standing out all round their heads, and not fastened in a knot, Polynesian fashion. The clothing worn in that old country was made from the bark of the Paper Mulberry (aute), and some fruit of the trees was as big as a child's head. The fruit was called ni (ni or niu the cocoa-nut?) and its inside was rendered down (tahu) into oil. The people of that land used axe-heads having holes in them through which the handles passed, and the axe-heads were not lashed on as with our axes. There was neither tattooing nor cannibalism in that country. We may add to the above that the sweet-potato (kumara), traditionally said to have been brought in the canoes, is certainly the offspring of a warm climate. In New Zealand the kumara only grows under conditions needing the most jealous and fostering care, proving that it is an acclimatised plant.

We must leave the fascinating subject of the “Whence of the Maori” as an open question, to be settled hereafter when more full and perfect knowledge enables the student of the future to gather up the ravelled strands of evidence and twist them into a cord that will bear the strain of scientific investigation. In the meantime the Polynesian Society is doing much to gather together the facts, and preserve the knowledge fading fast with the elders of the Maori people. It may be of interest to put

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before the reader the hypothesis most generally accepted by Polynesian scholars as to the advent of the Maori in the Pacific. It is as follows:—

The Polynesians are a people which either originated in India or in Central Asia, and passed through India. Leaving the mainland they journeyed eastward through the Malay Archipelago, occupying perhaps many generations in the voyages from island to island. At the time of their passage the Archipelago was not occupied by Malays, who are a subsequent migration from the Mongolian seaboard. The Maori expedition or expeditions passed by the Melanesian and Papuan islands, inhabited by black people (New Guinea, New Caledonia, etc.) and reached the Fiji group, where they settled for a long time. From Fiji as a centre, they colonised Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, the Marquesas, Mangareva, and extended their colonies even so far as Easter Island. In process of time they either “hived off” or were expelled from Fiji and the waves of migration passed to and fro among the group of islands. On one of these waves an expedition, starting probably from Raiatea, landed at Rarotonga and pushing on to the south-west reached New Zealand, where the occupants of their large double-canoes were known as the Maoris from Hawaiki.

There are details of the above word-sketch which are not assented to by every Polynesian Scholar; but the masterly treatise (“Hawaiki”) by Mr. S. Percy Smith, President of the Polynesian Society, has settled beyond much chance

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of doubt the route taken for this migration to New Zealand. It has not proven conclusively the whereabouts of the original cunabula of the Maori race, but has added much to the knowledge sought for as to the voyages of a few centuries ago. It is to this kind of “step by step” work we must look if we wish ever to attain certainty in regard to the unwritten history of the Polynesian people. It has proved (in my opinion) conclusively that the Maoris from whom the leading tribes claim descent, those ancestors said to have arrived in the Arawa, Tainui, Aotea, and other canoes of the Great Migration, were certainly not aborigines of New Zealand, even if there were other Maoris or other inhabitants resident on these islands when the Hawaiki canoes arrived.

This leads us, always supposing that we accept the hypothesis of migration, to consider the subject of the “former inhabitants,” a subject whereon we touch more solid ground than that of the birth of the race in the immeasurable distances of prehistoric antiquity.