Polynesian people

“ It is natural, and more conformable to the development of the actual society of savage people, that valor or manhood [227] should assert and assume the preeminence of rank over that of intelligence, and I hence conclude that the Polynesian division was older than the Sanskrit.
How long the Polynesian family remained in the Asiatic Archipelago ere it debouched in the Pacific, there is no means of forming even a conjecture. ”

“ At the wharf half the population seems to be gathered to meet us. Some are clothed, native fashion, in the famous Polynesian mats or in the bark-cloth called tapa, or even in cotton; others are in European dress. The town with its white houses and verandas looks quite civilised. The inhabitants remind us of the New Zealand Maoris, though their colour is somewhat lighter; in fact, both peoples belong to the same great family, the Polynesians, or light-brown people of the Pacific, which is spread over many of the island groups which lie to the north-east and east of Tonga. ”

“ Polynesian culture is made up of at least two elements, an earlier, associated with the practice of interring the dead in a sitting position, communism, geometric art, local spirits and magical rites, and a later, which practised preservation of the dead. These latter may be identified with the kava-people while the earlier Polynesian stratum is that which entered into the composition of the dual-people of Melanesia at a still earlier date, and introduced the Austronesian language into Oceania [1351] . ”

“ But when we come to inquire into the causes which operated to inspire this migration, we get little information beyond the explanation commonly given as the root of all Polynesian movements, that "great wars prevailed." If this be the true reason why a whole nation should move en masse, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that the future Polynesians were the defeated people, and were forced by irresistible waves of invasion to abandon their home in India. Slowly they were pushed southward and eastward by the more warlike tribes who came down from the north ”

“ The question of the origin of the Polynesian race is still unsettled, but the balance both of evidence and of probability seems to incline in favour of the view that the people are descended from one of the yellow Mongoloid races of South-Eastern Asia, who gradually spread eastward over the Indian Archipelago and intermingling to some extent with the black aboriginal inhabitants of the islands formed the lighter-tinted brown race which we call the Polynesian. ”

“ There were other tales, too, of a later day; of a tribe of men dwelling in the valleys, neither tasting fish nor setting foot on the beach except when, at certain intervals, they were permitted to come down to worship by the sea. Even to-day it needs no effort of the imagination to see two distinct types among the island people: men and women of the kind one considers typically Polynesian—tall, clean limbed, and light brown, with clear, dark eyes, straight or waving hair, and heads not differing greatly from the heads of Europeans ”

“ Polynesian Family.
The tribes included by Dumont d’Urville under the name of Polynesians inhabit the entire eastern part of Oceania, namely, the Sandwich Islands, the Marquesas, the Friendly and Society groups, the Low Archipelago, New Zealand, etc.
The people of all these bear the closest affinity to each other. Their complexion is olive, verging on brown, but not copper-coloured; they are tall in stature, and have sinewy limbs, high foreheads, black, lively, and expressive eyes, and but slightly flattened noses. ”

“ Taking this epoch as the starting-point for the appearance of the Polynesian in the Pacific, we have an interval of time of 900 to 1000 years, in which to people the various islands and groups now held by the Polynesian family, and before we meet the uncontested Hawaiian traditions which assure us that twenty-eight generations ago this group was already peopled by that family. ”

“ The Negritos were like the pigmy Negroes of Africa. But here and there on the coast of New Guinea, or on the islands off it, were obvious Polynesian settlements of old times, and even on some isolated island a people quite pale skinned and Caucasian in appearance.
The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, of New Caledonia, and the Fiji archipelago are allied to the Papuans more than to any other stock, but are usually known as Melanesians. ”

“ During all these migrations the Take, or Marquesan people represent themselves as coming from below (mei-iao) and going up (una) . Throughout the Polynesian groups, however, within the tropics, when a land is spoken of as iao, ilalo, iraro of the speaker’s place, it invariably means to the leeward, before the prevailing trade-wind. This being from northeast or southeast, these migrations pursued a course from west to east, and thus corroborate the Polynesian descent from Asia or the Asiatic Archipelago. ”

“ Though no trace of their blood is left, New Guinea must at one time have been a halting place in the 84 migration. Papua it is called, and one finds the word current in Polynesia, meaning a garden, a rich land. The natives of New Guinea are as unlike the people of the eastern Pacific, I should say, as the average American or Englishman, and yet throughout New Guinea there is a most curious cropping out of Polynesian words, pointing to a very ancient intercourse between the races. Consider the word for woman among the Polynesians. In Rarotonga, it is vaine; in Tahiti, vahine ”

“ The population is quite different from that in the north, and one would call it Polynesian, were it not for the curly hair which shows Melanesian admixture. Light-coloured, tall, strong, with the fleshy body that is often a feature of the Polynesian, the people have, not infrequently, fine open features, small noses and intelligent faces of oval outline. They are more energetic, warlike and independent than those up north, and their mode of life is different, the Suque and everything connected with it being entirely absent. ”

“ The traditions of many of the Polynesian peoples tend to make Savaii, the largest of the Samoan Islands, their ancestral home in the East Pacific, and linguistic and other evidence goes to support the theory that the first Polynesian settlement in the East Pacific was in Samoa, and that thence the various branches of the race made their way in all directions. ”

“ Unlike most foreign residents in Polynesia he has acquired a good knowledge of the language spoken by the people among whom he dwelt. This has enabled him, during his thirty-four years’ residence in the Hawaiian Islands, to collect material which could be obtained only by a person possessing such an advantage. It is so seldom that a private settler in the Polynesian Islands takes an intelligent interest in local ethnology and archæology, and makes use of the advantage he possesses, that we feel especially thankful to Mr. ”

“ The drawer of water, as he lets his bucket down to the farthest reaches of the wells of antiquity, finds in his vessel evidence of kinship with races now covering the whole of Europe. Romance has it that the Amerindians are descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel and Mormon missionaries are carrying that charm among the Polynesians. They are very successful in New Zealand among the Maories. Like a great current of warm water in the sea, the Polynesian races have run from Hawaii to Samoa, the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Maoriland. ”

“ The universal belief in the passing of the spirits of the dead to the west, is to my mind a complete answer to those who hold that the Polynesian migrations were from the east. It is an essential part of Polynesian belief that the spirits rejoin those of the ancient dead and there dwell in a land of beauty and plenty, where the gods supply every want, and with whom communication is constant. The Polynesians would not locate this Paradise in the west, if their ancestral home was in the east. ”

“ The island-nature of the archipelago is very favourable to race-mixture; and as we know that on some islands there were several settlements of Polynesians, it is not surprising to find a very complex mingling of races, which it is not an easy task to disentangle. It would seem, however, that we have before us remnants of four races: a short, dark, curly-haired and perhaps original race, a few varieties of the tall Melanesian race, arrived in the islands in several migrations, an old Polynesian element as a relic of its former migrations eastward, and a present Polynesian element from the east. ”

“ A line drawn athwart the Pacific from New Zealand through Fiji to Hawaii will roughly cut off this domain from the rest of the Oceanic world, where all to the west is Melanesian, Papuan or mixed, while all to the right—Maori, some of the eastern Fijians, Tongans, Samoans, Tahitians, Marquesans, Hawaiians and Easter Islanders—is grouped under the name Polynesian, a type produced by a mixture of Proto-Malayan and Indonesian. ”

“ Those who are familiar with these legends, and have studied native manners and customs, see many unmistakable proofs that the Polynesians had, at their migration, considerable knowledge and culture, and that the race has greatly deteriorated.
The Polynesians are physically a very fine race. On some islands they average 5 ft. 10 in. in height. De Quatrefages, in a table giving the stature of different races of men, [3] puts the natives of Samoa and Tonga as the tallest people in the world. ”

“ And the things which civilisation has left behind or missed by the way are there, too, among the Polynesians: beauty and courtesy and mirth. I think there is no gift of mind or body that the wise value which these people lack. A man I met in some other islands, who had travelled much all over the world, said to me, "I have found no man, in or out of Europe, with the good manners and dignity of the Samoan, with the possible exception of the Irish peasant." ”

“ If there ever were a Polynesian Arcadia, and if it were possible for true reports of the doings and sayings of the Polynesians to reach us from that happy land—reports of their joys and sorrows, their love-makings and their jealousies, their family spats and reconciliations, their worship of beauty and of the gods and goddesses who walked in the garden of beauty—we may say, I think, that such a report would be in substantial agreement with the report that is here offered ”

“ The island is small, and the inhabitants probably not more than three hundred or four hundred. They are Polynesians, men of very large stature, rough in manner, and not very easily managed. I landed there and waded across the reef among forty or fifty men. On the beach a large party assembled. I told them in a sort of Polynesian patois, that I wished to take away two lads from their island, that I might learn their language, and come back and teach them many things for their good. ”

“ Now the Polynesian area, the limits of which I have just pointed out, is of greater extent than the whole of Asia. What would an Asiatic Polynesia be 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? ”

“ In spite of their diffusion over a multitude of islands separated from each other by hundreds and even thousands of miles of ocean, the Polynesians are on the whole a remarkably homogeneous race in physical type, language, and forms of society and religion. ”

“ The ruggedness of feature which marks out the race among Polynesians is the Italian ruggedness. Countenances of the same eloquent harshness, manners of the same vivacious cordiality, are to be found in Hawaii and amongst Italian fisher-folk or whose people, in the midst of life, retain more charm. I recall faces, both of men and women, with a certain leonine stamp, trusty, sagacious, brave, beautiful in plainness: faces that take the heart captive. ”

“ There are honest men and dishonest ones engaged in commerce in Polynesia, just as there are elsewhere. When you hear a Polynesian merchant denouncing the missionaries in vehement terms, you may fairly conclude that the missionaries have stood in his way when he was endeavoring to defraud the natives. ”

“ While probably of the same ethnic origin, the race which inhabits the Hawaiian, Marquesan, Society, Tonga, Friendly, Samoan, and other groups of the eastern division of the South Seas—the pure Polynesian—is as different, mentally [297] and physically, from the Melanesian or Papuan type of the New Hebrides, Solomons, New Britains and New Guinea as the Mongolian is from the Ethiopian. Each race seems to reflect the physical environment in which it has been cradled. ”

“ Whatever be the origin of the Polynesians, they are not Malays, though, themselves of mixed blood, they have probably certain racial elements in common with the latter, who are undoubtedly hybrids. There is every reason to believe that the Polynesians are ethnologically a far older race than the Malays, who, as they now exist, are a comparatively modern people ”

“ It is rather singular that while most of the principal groups of the Polynesian family claim, each for itself, the honor of being the first-created of mankind and, so to say, autochthones on their respective islands—as the Tonga, Samoan, Society and Hawaiian Islands—with the exception of the legend of Hawaii Loa, the Marquesans alone own to a foreign birthplace and a migration from a far-off land. ”

“ Pottery was not manufactured by the Polynesians: a fact which, it has been argued, goes far to prove the remoteness of the Polynesian migration from the Malay Archipelago, where there is not a single tribe which does not possess the art. It may, however, be that, moving among small coral islands for scores of generations and thus without materials, they lost the art. ”