POLYNESIAN VOYAGES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18761, 15 July 1924, Page 9

POLYNESIAN VOYAGES.

HOW THE MAQFII CAME. "SAFE" CANOE TRIPS. LOST PACIFIC ISLANDS. BT W.B. OTOEOHAKGA. First: a bit of private history, in which is: humbly craved a pardon for an apparently too frequent mention of the pronoun, "I": This is written on the evening of July 7, on my 76th birthday of a wide-flung, strenuous, colonial life, during which the race—whose annals, as I knew them, it has been my pride and pleasure to collect—has been more intimate than friend. It has told me its sages and traditions; it has crooned in my ears its songs of love and war, and permitted me to plumb the depths of its emotions. It has told me of the white man's coming; its admiration of. the stranger; its disappointments at his vagrom attitudes; its dread of the prehensile white fingers that stack to everything they touched; its distrust later of his easy-made yet broken promises; its final search for what solutions the arbitrament of war might yield! Among the race I have known grave stately tattooed warriors, concealing beneath those patterns the noblest sentiments of man: whose "aye" was sacred as the white man's oath. Also, blackguards, for whose hanging Hainan's gibbet was scarcely high enough! From which poor script it may be sensed that I treat the Maori and his customs as those of that complex creature, "Man." An Attitude of Doubt.

In debating matter of two aspects by men of strong convictions hard hits are possible, but the saving sense that such are given and expected, yet meaning no offence, makes true sports just duck their heads and grin. So, when lam told that the Maori traversed vast tracts qf stormy ocean, in canoes (not frail) , man-handled by short Maori < paddles, at once my memory reverts to sea perils I have known: of seas, sheer as falling cliffs, whipped and torn to shreds and fury, where the heart thumps sick with expectation, where salvation ■ lies solely on six pairs of bulging, straining muscles, bending to crescents six 16-foot oars, held to a rigid end-on, obedient to the 18-foot tailsweeps of a steer-oar, in the fierce command of constant watch and sea-craft — not once, but many times—and compare the two, I am right to pause, and doubt! Mr. F. H. Bodle makes a telling point m quoting Captain Bligh, etc Where to my mind he fails is that he omits to stress to their full extension the white man's accessories of charts, sextant and compass, which these heroic endurers were aided with in their calamitous distress. Another point, apparently conclusive, but bristling with defects, is that in a storm the Maori navigator lashed all and battened down, and let her drift. Here again personal experience asks: 'TDrift to where V How, under such drift conditions, without the accessories just mentioned, could he know the distance, nor to what meridians he had drifted, and finally regain the perfect course he needed, of which " tradition " tells, and credulity believes, he "many times" achieved ? Again I pause, and doubt: for I, too, have drifted from the sight of land, bat with a compass, and with the -luck his gods grant to the foolish, found land again. Mr. Bodle's points deserve attention; their fault is that they are all sicklied o'er with the pal 6 cast of "tradition !" Islands That Are no More. Still, as ethnographical research confirms the conclusion that the Maori was no autochthon, but that he arrived here in canoes, let us try and reconstruct the "how":—

On the Chatham Islands, where, by reason of distance from diluting distractions, the Maori tenaciously held to his ancient histories, there lived a major chief, Nga Mate, whose son and nephew, because they were refused the maidens they desired, decided to join a whaling ship then in the bay. The father sold many pigs and tons, of potatoes, and giving the young men the proceeds, said: —"Go to Hawaiki, the home of your ancestors, and inquire if there be still kindred of your rank, whose maidens you may wed. Visit also Rangitea, Rangitihi, Ponui and the many other islands which our historians say the migration canoes touched at on their way to Aotearoa."

I, a yonng man, heard this poroporoaki (farewell) spoken. The young men went and were here seen no more. The old father died. Time passed, till one day, 23 years later, Te Aka, the only remaining .son, gave me a letter to read for him, which after a laborious re-con-version into local Maori, inter alia said :— "We have searched for the land, Hawaiki —it is not of that name now. We have searched" for Rangitihi, for Ponui, for the other islands you .vsnt us to—these are not at all. If they have once been, then kua toromi (they have sunk), as, we are told, other islands, once known, are now no more." A Changed Pacific. Here then you have one, the most probable solution of tho much debated Polynesian navigation perplexity. It is the one I have held ever since that letter, my sea experiences, and the view of plain commonsense. Instead of a void expanse of ocean, it was dotted with islands te and from which the migrators moved press of population demanded, across narrow seas quite possible of safe canoe navigation. What " other islands " are here meant but those which geologic cataclysms later submerged in a region notorious for such disappearance? Even the later Maori, as I have before said, he of the many open-hoat-in-a-storm contendings, has to me repeatedly volunteered the suggestion, that only from island to island, • across narrow expanses, in chosen weather, could he have made those traditional open canoe migration voyages. The immemorial centuries during which these various Polynesian dispersions occurred are not sufficiently appraised. As for Maori genealogical tables compiled from oral repetitions, these are as reliable as that of Kupe's joining the flotsam Chathams into one group by virtue of his esoteric gifts! My son, Te Eangi Hiroa's contribution explains obscure figurative Maori ideals, but adds nothing now to the original theme in debate, i.e. Do Polynesian navigation traditions align with computations deduced from the actual tests of expert experience and plain commonsense? Its opponents have stated their " why not," and, now, added the " how." If this debate has failed in all else, it has, I feel sure, contributed some interesting facts and opinions, of whose vahie posterity will judge.