POLYNESIAN ORIGINS.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 10, 12 January 1929, Page 8

POLYNESIAN ORIGINS.

The cabled announcement from Honolulu, on the authority of the Bishop Museum, that

"scientists have established the origin of the Polynesian race in South-eastern Asia" is a rather belated piece of news. The Bishop Museum experts are three or four decades behind the times in their discovery, if the intention is to convey the idea that not until now has such origin been accepted as the most likely source of the Polynesian. It has long been the opinion of most students of the race that theoriginal home of tfie Maori and of the other brown peoples in the Pacific was in that sector of Asia, and that the islands of Indonesia were a Living-off place for the migrants on their cen-turies-long voyages eastward. Fornander, F. D. Fenton, S. Percy Smith, Euward Tregoar, C. K. Nelson, the principal pioneer writers on this subject, all saw somewhere in Southern Asia the first Hawaiki of the Maori; and later evidence has gone to support their conclusions. New Zealand investigators have done the greater part of the work of establishing the connection.

The now popular belief that the origin of the islanders was in India or thereabouts should, I think, be qualified by a reference to the coast of Arabia as a most likely source of one of the numerous racial elements that went to the making of the Maori's remote ancestors. Judge Fen'on and Mr. C. E. Nelson were the chief champions of a part Arabian origin of the Polynesian, and consideration of their arguments incline one strongly to their view. Years ago I often discussed these questions with Mr. Nelson, who was the most erudite linguist that ever took up the study of Maori-Polynesian origins. He was a philologist of profound knowledge—it was hereditary; his father had been professor of languages at Christiania University, Sweden—and he had besides a practical acquaintance with many Asiatic peoples as well as the Polynesians. He had in his adventurous sailor ing davs berni much about the Red Sea, for one thing", Jiving with the coast Arabs and navigating slave dhows from the East Coast of Africa, and some of the customs he observed among the sea Arabs were exactly similar to those when he came to live among the Maoris and sail in the South Seas in the 'sixties. Customs, he always held, were more persistent even than language. Such practical observations and illustrations as those with which Nelson's wonderful memory was stored were worth more than all the theorisings of manypeople who are called experts to-day.

It is extremely likely that it was the searoving Arabs who gave the founders of the Polynesian race their nautical bent, made their daring ocean sailors and navigators. A mingling in Indonesia or on the coast of India of the inland migrants, of Caucasian origin, and the adventurers from the coasts of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, is a highly probable phase in the Asiatic history of our Maori forefathers. The Arabs were the greatest sea-rovers among the Asiatic peoples of ancient times, and the Polynesian in the course of cruising became an oven more enterprising and skilful seaman and explorer than the dhow-men of the coast of the first Hawaiki. As to physical likenesses, no straining of the imagination is required to see in many a Maori, especially the tall, lean, athletic old warriors, once so numerous, a resemblance to the bold Arab type. "By the cut of his jib" Nelson knew him. "When I came to New Zealand," he used to say, "and saw a fishing p«rtv of Maoris drying their haul in the sun ami when I observed the types of the people, the women with their tattooed chins, the pattern of their nets, and a score of other details, f could have imagined myself bark once more on the south-west coast of Arabia."' A mingling of races such as that outlined here seems to me a more likely origin for the Maori Polynesian than a strong blending of Mongolian with the parent stock, as advanced by the Bishop Museum experts. —J.C.