AN EXTINCT RACE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LVII, Issue LVII, 19 August 1910, Page 3

AN EXTINCT RACE.

HISTORY OF THE MORIORI. INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR MACMILLAN BHOWX. The tragic end of Mr Alexander Shand, the well-known Moriorl authority, revives interest in that interesting pVople, now practically extinct, and about whom we know so little. Professor Macmillan Brown has interested himself considerably in these people, and he supplied a Christchurch Press representative with some extremely interesting particulars concerning them. "Many people identify them with the^ Polynesians," said the Professor, "but I think those who do are wrong. I think they are merely a slight infusion of one aboriginal race, a small, dark raice that occupied the Marlborough Soi nds, and dwelt in .those pit dwellings described in my "Maori and Polynesian.' These people used to haul their canoes up to their houses by means of ropes every night. Mr Shand says there are a dimutive people among the Morioris, but that the bulk are of average height, showing only slightly of a small, dark race, for he recognises that they are of the same two types as amongst the Maoris, though the Morions are slightly shorter in stature than the Maoris. The two types are the fairer complexioncd with lank hair and the darker complexioned with curly hair. Mr Shand," continued Professor Brown, "appeared to identify these latter with the Melanesian element. That had been the favored idea some years ago that there were Melanesians in Polynesia before the European light race, but he was inclined to think Mr Shand was wrong there. One never found mere curliness arising from negroids; one got tuftiness from them, but curliness was always an evidence of the Caucasian, and the dark color was probably a relic firstly of the small dark race in the Marlborough Sounds, and secondly, a sign that a large element of the ancestry of the Morioris had come from the hotter tropics. There were other signs of this. For instance, the Morioris elided the letter 'X' like the peoples of the Polynesian groups nearer the equator, and unlike the Maoris ; and again, they had the sound 'eh.' as in 'church,' which the Tongans alone had among the Polynesians." These facts indicated that certain ancestors of the Morioris had come from some one of the inner tropical groups. Of course their isolated and insular position had modified their habits and types, but they must have been very bold sailors. Mr" Shand had seemed to think their peculiar canoes made of flax sticks and rushes, with the water rushing through thtm, were due to the fact that they had not the timber, but he himself had pointed out that they had enormous keraka trees, from the kernals of whose fruits they obtained a great part of their farinaceous food. These might well have served for large oceanic dugouts. Professor Brown's own opinion was that the Morioris' system of peculiar raft canoes had been really picked up from the pre-Moriori peoples of New Zealand, for the Patupaiarehe, or-as the Maoris called them, "fairies," a people with fair hair and complexion like Europeans, used, the Maoris said, to use flax stick rafts, exactly like the Morions,, and he was inclined to unite these with the universal craft of the Pacific Coast of South America, the balsa, which was "simply a raft of buoyant sticks or logs, bound together, and thtse were often modified,! especially on inland waters like Lake Titicaca, where the raft became a canoe, made of sticks an. l rushes exactly like a Moriori canoe Professor Brown said lie saw thousands of them oii the lake this time last year. Tho exact kinship of these New Zealand and Moriori crafts and rush canoes with those of the coast of South America, indicated a primeval population thai had some kinship. Of course, the djg-out of the Polynesian, the out-rigger and tjie double canoe, were such enormous advances upon such flimsy craft for oceanic navigation, that they had naturally driven them out. Of course, continued Professor Brown, the Moriori race was now practically extinct, save for a few halfcastes. He possessed a photo of the last chief of the Morioris, a youngishlooking man, still alive, Solomon Rangipuni by name, of Manakau, Chatham islands. ' Unfortunately there had been no purebred Moriori for him to marry, so he had to content himself with a half-caste. The chief cause of the extinction of the Moriori had been the conquest of tho island in 1835 by the Maoris from Wellington, who had slaughtered the islanders mercilessly. The Morioris were an extremely peaceful race; they never used weapons against each other, except the quarterstaff, when one man ran away with another man's wife. The tradition was that one of the great chiefs had led them to the Chathains and had made them cease both war and cannibalism. 'That sf course might or might not be; tradition was not always to be trusted. One curious thing about the Morioris was that they wore seal skins long before Europeans did, but with the fur next to the skin, though they had brought with them the habit of wearing mats.