A WHITE TOHUNGA.

Bruce Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 11, 11 February 1909, Page 1

A WHITE TOHUNGA.

AN ADVENTUROUS CAREER

; Mr C. E. Nelson, who died in Auck- : land last week, was a "white tohunga" and one of the foremost Maori scholars in the Dominion. He did not publish books or write at all, except in the form of occasional letters; but every Maori and Polynesian student in New Zealand looked upon "fare" Nelson as a man with a rare knack of getting to the very root of things in Maori expressions, usages, history and folk-lore. Eii'iy years in New Zealand, states Mr J. Cowan in an article published in the 'Now Zealand Times/ had made Mr Nelson almost a Maori in some respects, and particularly in his sympathy with the more abstruse and occult side of the Maori. He had been schooled by some of the real old "medicine-men" of the race, and he had a strong belief, "based on certain actual experiences, of which he did not care to say much except to like-minded investigators, in the mysterious powers of telepathy and of projection of the will possessed and exercised by the tohunga Maori." Mr Nelson's history was a remarkable one. He was born about seventy-nine years ago in Sweden, his real name being "Neilson," and at the age of fourteen he went to sea. Beforo he was twenty years old he had been all round the world, seeing much of very wild life, and serving in all sorts of craft, from whalers to slavers awd Yankee clippers to Arab dhows. He had a remarkable faculty for learning languages, and this gift enabled him to get into close association with men of many different races in the wilder parts of the vorld. When nineteen years of age he was serving on a slaver that was captured by a British war-vessel near tho island of St. Thomas, and was in some danger of being hanged owing to his ability to speak English like a native. He was landed at St. Helena in safety, and after a few more years of adventure on sea and land ho returned to Sweden and passed through a nautical college. He served for a period on tho Hansa, the first llagship of tho German navy, and about half a century ago ho came to New Zealand, landing at Auckhnd from a Bremen ship. Ho engage 1 in tho coastal and South Sea Island trade, served the Government as a surveyor and land purchase officer, and finally settled down on shore. Mr Tare Nelson had a vast amount of knowledge bearing upon tho origin of the Maori race. When on the south coast of Arabia in his younger days he saw a good deal of wild Arab life, and some racial customs he noticed, such as tho drying of sharks for food by splitting them and hanging them up n stages in the sun and the blue liptattooing of the women, bore remarkable resemblance to those of the Maoris. Customs of this sort, and many resemblances in language, afterwards led him to the conclusion that the ancestors of. the Maoris wee blood relations of the Cushites and Phoenicians, and that, like the latter, they migrated originally from tke coast of Arabia and the Persian Gulf. lie was a most diligent s:lndent of Polynesian oialeets. Ho k.iew Hawaiian, Samoan, llarotongan and other dialects; he was well acquainted with the Pacific peoples, and he had a wide knowledge of Hebrew, Sanscrit, Arabic and cognate languages. "Probably no other man," writes Mr J. Cow an, "was so fully equipped with philological and ethnographical evidence in support of theories as to the origiiuil home of the Polynesian race. He wjis about the first to suggest that the Maori was akin to the HamiticoSemitic peoples living in Arabia, and in Egypt and in other parts of Africa, and that this people had racial affinities with the ancient Phoenicians. Such facts as these, that the Phoenician god lo was also the supreme god of the Maori, an.l that many Semitic and Maori words for such things as water, wind, ship, etc., wero practically identical in root, wero amongst tho great mass of analogical evidence that he was fond of citing in support of his opiibn. Prom what ho had seen, too, of the Alaskan Indians during a cruise in a Bremen whaler, catching bowhead whales about Behring Straits, he was of opinion that there must have boon early intercourse between the Polynesians and the Indians, as affinities in woodcarving, fish-hooks, weapons, garments, etc., seemed to show. He bclieval that the Maori learned a good deal of his art from the Indains." Tt is a matter for great regret that Mr Nelson has passed away without leaving a definite record of his interesting researches and of the valuablo information he had collected.