Date of the Migrations

The epochs of the Polynesian migrations must have been very various. They took place so long as there were any Polynesians in the Pacific. In the case of the colonisation of Rarotonga, tradition demands thirty generations, in that of the Maoris fifteen to twenty. On Nukahiva indeed we hear of eighty-eight generations; and there are sixty-seven ancestors of Kamehameha; but to these figures no credit can be given.

We are entitled, however, to assign no great antiquity to Polynesian colonisation. The people have not had time to develop any marked peculiarities in culture. The date of their arrival in New Zealand and the other places of immigration can only be a matter of some centuries back. The settlement of Tahiti no doubt falls earlier. Many isolated casual migrations may have preceded the greater deliberate movements. But in any case we must clearly grasp the fact that there was a period during which the sending forth of colonies was enjoined by the increase in population, and was rendered possible by the political organisation.

In the newly occupied territories too, the development of the new populations began upon a higher level, and then fell off; upon the remoter islands like New Zealand, Hawaii, Easter Island, where disturbing influence pressed upon them less, they retained the most traces of a past higher condition. The decadence of the Maoris affords a conspicuous instance of a rapid impoverishment in the advantages of culture.

The larger states split up into small communities, on a mutual footing of feud and extermination, having lost the consciousness of a stronger cohesion, with its power to maintain culture. The character of the people lost in demeanour and discipline, becoming ever more savage and cruel. Hand in hand with this went belief in their old native gods, and the transformation of these into demons of the forest and the sea, cruel spectral caricatures, distorted at pleasure. A superstitious cult of the individual took the place of the state or national religion. They went back even in the arts; even in Cook's time works of former generations were preserved as sacred objects, which they had lost the knowledge and the capacity to produce.

Polynesians in Melanesia and Micronesia

These migrations were not confined within the limits of Polynesia. Colonies went forth into all the Melanesian groups; where we obtain a general impression of a permeation with Polynesian elements from the eastward. On the small islands they hold their ground; on the larger they were merged in the mass of the resident population, but not without leaving their traces. Ethnographical varieties become clear, if we remember that one or the other element has been the bearer of them. Thus in the territory of the New Hebrides and Solomon Islands, where "mother-right" prevails, Polynesian colonists have brought in "father-right"; in this case a revolutionary institution.

Axes from the D'Entrecasteaux Islands - approx 70cm top to bottom. (Christy Collection.)

Uninhabited islands

Nothing indicates more clearly the frequency and extent of these migrations than the very small number of totally uninhabited islands. These vikings of the Pacific contrived to discover even small and remote islets. In the whole of the Pacific there is not one island of any size of which it was left to Europeans to demonstrate the habitability. Many of them were only visited periodically for their palms or the fishing; but these were in all cases certain to be less well suited than the others for habitation.

Of the little islets which rise from a common base in a reef, and lie almost flush with the sea, forming an atoll, often only one in a group, the largest or most productive, is inhabited. Indubitable traces of former habitation show that the uninhabited regions did not extend beyond their present boundaries. These are proved to lie in those central Pacific Sporades which hold so important a place between the groups of Eastern Polynesia and Hawaii, such as the Guano Islands of the Central Pacific, the Penrhyn group, the most southeasterly islets of the Paumotu group, and others.

Norfolk Island is the only one in the Southern Pacific which can be pointed out as having from its natural conditions and endowments deserved to be permanently settled; but in the angle it makes with Australia and Polynesia, it lies far from all migrations, and it has an area of not more than 18 square miles.