Legends of migrations

Feather masks - Hawaii

We feel some scruple about making the name Hawaiki indicate one single island of a small archipelago. Streams of emigration are supposed to have poured forth from it, at the most various epochs, to Hawaii as well as to New Zealand, to Tahiti no less than to Tonga. Why just that one and that only? No doubt the name possesses a general, and like other place-names, a mythical significance, wherewith many of the attributes of the legend can more easily be combined than with that somewhat forced geographical interpretation.

We are from the first warned to be cautious by the fact that this legend of Hawaiki is one of the few legends related by a race about its own origin, which science has nevertheless thoroughly accepted. At all times we are strongly averse to such traditions, since they are never free from mythical elements. The geographical position of Hawaiki is not absolutely certain in all traditions; but rather shows a considerable fluctuation. It even turns up as a spirit land, as the land of the West, where the souls go with the sun into the under world, as the land of souls, and so as the land of forefathers, the ancestral land.

We can now understand the belief of the Marquesans that their entire country once lay in this Hawaiki, and came up from it. Similarly it is the land where mankind once lost their immortality, and from spirits became men. Numerous place-names show that a name may recur widely without actual transmission. Lastly, the fluctuations in individual traditions must not be overlooked. If a Tahitian origin is universally assumed by the Hawaiians, traditions also point to the Marquesas and Samoa, and from the Marquesas the threads lead back to Tahiti, Samoa, and even Tonga. The old Hawaiians seem by "Tahiti" to have understood strangers in general.

Jade battle-axes and jade hatchet, insignia of chiefs, from New Caledonia. (Christy Collection.)

The Maori^l legends also testify that not one immigration only, but several, took place from the northward. A much later arrival is emphasised in all the legends. We know therefore why those wanderers are alleged to have found in these islands aboriginal inhabitants, of whom the geological record of New Zealand, and its fossils, have so far revealed no trace. At any rate, the fact, still contested, that the dog occurs not as the companion of man, but as a beast of prey, points to another civilization than that which met the first Europeans who visited the Maoris.

The legend of the various immigrations also takes various forms. In New Zealand the new comers find footmarks, which they recognise as those of one of their companions who had been thrown out of his boat. One legend speaks of fair natives, and of the rise of a darker stock through mixture with older inhabitants; likewise of men who lived on these islands "after, the great monster," and who left great shell heaps behind them. We reach quite mythical ground with the Pua-Reingas, who lived underground and could not be conquered till a chief made a hole in the earth by which the sunbeams entered. Less frequently, for instance in Rarotonga, Mangarewa, the Kingsmill or Austral groups, the legend is decided as to their being uninhabited.

¹ Maori "native " in opposition to Pakeha "stranger" occurs in the same sense in other parts of Polynesia, in the forms Maoi and Maoli.