Community of speech

It was with astonishment that the close connection of the languages of Oceania was first recognised. Just as little could the general ethnographical similarity be overlooked; the only difficulty was to find therein a scale of affinity, still more of remoteness, in point of time. There can be no doubt that from New Guinea to Easter Island we are in presence of essentially one civilization. A special branch of it has developed in the narrower region of Polynesia. The elements of this civilization are distributed over the islands with little uniformity.

Rattan cuirass, throwing-sticks of dark wood, and bark belt, from Kaiser Wilhelm's Land.
(Berlin Museum.)

We cannot ignore the possibility that closer affinities are indicated by the distribution of particular articles, but hitherto the right way to identify them has hardly been taken, least of all by those who imagine they see in New Zealand the point whence Polynesian migrations had set out. For the distribution of certain weapons upon which this hypothesis rests in the first instance is everywhere so uneven and capricious that conclusions of very wide import cannot be based upon it. That the home of the Maui myth appears to be in New Zealand; that the title Ariki is here applied to priests, but in the rest of Polynesia to temporal chiefs; and that New Zealand alone can be the home of the articles made of jade which are scattered throughout Polynesia, none of these are facts from which we can draw the important conclusion that New Zealand was the point of dispersion.

Legend of Hawaiki

It is solely upon the basis of the traditions that the view of the great majority of students is at present to the effect that not only the New Zealanders but also other Polynesians migrated to their present abodes from some southerly point in equatorial Polynesia. The Maori tradition is that they came to their island from a place called Hawaiki; they seem to distinguish a larger and smaller, or a nearer and further Hawaiki.

"The seed of our coming is from Hawaiki, the seed of our nourishing, the seed of mankind."

Feather mask - Hawaii
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This name, Hawaiki, is cognate with a whole number of Polynesian place names: Savaii in the Samoa group, Hawaii in the group of that name, Apai in the Tonga Islands, Evava in the Marquesas and others. Savaii, one of the Samoa or Navigator Islands, has the greatest probability on its side. As Hawaii it forms also the starting-point for emigration to Raiatea and Tahiti, while the legends of the Marquesas and Hawaii refer back to Tahiti. There is a song in which Rarotonga, Waerota, Waeroti, Parima, and Manono are mentioned as neighbouring islands to Tahiti. The Rarotongans themselves have the tradition that they come from Awaiki. Waerota and Waeroti are now unknown, but Parima and Manono are small islets of the Samoan group, the inhabitants of which say they came from Savaii.

Wild dogs like those of New Zealand, the same kind of rats, the sweet potato, the taro, the same kind of gourd, are found in the Navigator Islands. Maori traditions again which call Rarotonga the way to Hawaiki, and say that some of the New Zealand boats were built in Rarotonga, are equally in favour of the journey having been made first from the somewhat mythical Hawaiki to that island which no doubt is the "nearer Hawaiki" of tradition. It is possible that the larger part of the Maoris are of Rarotongan origin.