In one version, the voyage is recounted, as in the stories of Pele and Ru, as a series of island stops within the Marquesan archipelago. But in another it is described as a series of legs, each defined by the appearance of a star in the sky who challenges the voyagers with a question about their identity. Only when they give the correct answer—“We are Pepeu and Utunui, Mahaitivi’s boys, like the wind, like the wind we glide behind the sky, our hair darts into the air, we go to Aotona”—does the star permit them to move on. This idea of sailing under a series of stars perfectly matches the concept of a star path—a sequence of stars rising at roughly the same point on the horizon, each of which is used, in turn, to maintain a constant heading—one of the presumed techniques of ancient Polynesian navigation.
But it is a long way to Aotona. The food runs out, the water runs out, and the men begin to die. “Twenty died. Two times twenty died, three times twenty died, four times twenty died, five times twenty died. Twice twenty men remained with Aka.” At length they reach their destination, fill their baskets with red feathers, and set off home. But the voyage back is just as arduous, and they are “at sea for as long as a large bread fruit harvest.” When they finally reach home, the women, who have been awaiting the canoe’s return, look down from the cliffs on the returning voyagers. Of the “seven times twenty” men who sailed to Aotona, fewer than a third have returned alive.
VOYAGING STORIES WERE a staple of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century attempts to place the Polynesian migrations on a firm historical footing. After Fornander’s death, in 1887, the locus of this kind of work shifted to New Zealand, where a man named S. Percy Smith picked up the trail. Like Tregear, with whom he later collaborated, Smith first came into sustained contact with Māori people while working as a surveyor in the New Zealand backcountry in the 1850s and ’60s. By the age of twenty he was fluent enough in Māori to be employed as an interpreter, and he soon began to collect stories and chants. In 1892, he and Tregear co-founded the Polynesian Society, with the aim of promoting “the study of the Anthropology, Ethnology, Philology and Antiquities of the Polynesian races,” and launched The Journal of the Polynesian Society as a venue for articles, commentary, and transcriptions of traditional lore.
Like Fornander, whom he greatly admired, Smith was committed to the authenticity of Polynesian oral traditions, viewing it as axiomatic that “all tradition is based on fact—whilst the details may be wrong, the main stem is generally right.” In a series of influential books and articles published between 1898 and 1921, he laid out his version of Polynesian history, closely following the outline Fornander had established. This included a remote and ancient origin in India; a migration to Indonesia around 65 B.C.; arrival in the Fiji/Tonga/Samoa region by A.D. 450; and a “heroic period” of voyaging, during which the major island groups of Polynesia were settled. Smith then turned his attention to the peregrinations of his own local branch of the Polynesian family, and his most significant contributions revolve around what he liked to call “the whence of the Maori.” The “whence” consisted, essentially, of the where and the when, two things that oral traditions are particularly bad at encoding (by contrast, they are quite good at the who and the why). Smith agreed with Fornander that without dates and locations there could be no history, and so he set about establishing both a route and a chronology for the settlement of New Zealand.
One of the central problems for European interpreters of Polynesian voyaging traditions was the location of a place known in the lore as Hawaiki. In stories from the central and eastern Pacific, Hawaiki, or one of its cognates—Havaiki, Havai‘i, Avaiki—is the name of the land from which the great voyagers depart. It is often described as an ancestral homeland, but in many cases it is much more than that. In cosmogonies from the Society Islands, it is the first land to be created: “Havai‘i, the birthplace of lands, Havai‘i, the birthplace of gods, Havai‘i the birthplace of kings, Havai‘i the birthplace of men.” In a myth from Mangareva, it is a sort of world tree, “whose roots are in the Po, whose topmost branches touch the sacred sky of Tane.” Good things—pigs, kumara (sweet potato), special kinds of yams—are said to come from Hawaiki, as are treasures like greenstone and red feathers, and special bodies of knowledge like that of tā moko, the Māori tattoo. In a story from Manihiki, the hero Maui brings back fire from Havaiki; in tales from the Marquesas, men follow their dead wives to Hawaiki or travel there in search of lost sons. A homeland and a source, it is both a paradisal land of plenty and, like Te Pō, a land of spirits and of generations waiting to be born.
In most stories, Hawaiki is described as lying somewhere in the west—the direction associated in Polynesia with the passage of the dead to their last resting place—though sometimes it is said to be in the east or in the sky, or even underground. But there are also a number of real islands in the Pacific that go by the name of Hawaiki (or one of its cognates), most obviously the Big Island of Hawai‘i and the Samoan island of Savai‘i, but also the island of Ra‘iatea, in the Society Islands, which was formerly known as Havai‘i.
The first European to put two and two together regarding this legendary location was Horatio Hale, the insightful philologist with the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–42, who also had interesting ideas about Tupaia’s chart. In the course of his travels around the Pacific, Hale learned from the inhabitants of Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands, that their ancestors had come from Avaiki. In the Marquesas he was told that Havaiki was the name of the underworld. Being American, he was familiar with the island of Hawai‘i, and, being a linguist, he recognized that these were all variants of the same name. It was only when he got to Savai‘i, in Samoa, however, that it occurred to him that Hawaiki might be the “key-word” that would unlock “the mystery of the Polynesian migrations.” On the principle that people name new lands after the lands they have left behind—Plymouth, Venice, New Amsterdam, New Mexico—one had only to follow the trail of Hawaikis in order to trace the different branches of the Polynesian family “back to their original seat.”
Hale believed he had found this “original seat” in Savai‘i, the largest and most westerly of the Samoan islands. But, plausible as this was, it did not satisfy Smith and Fornander, whose Aryan thesis required a much older and remoter Polynesian homeland, a Hawaiki much farther to the west, at least in Indonesia if not in India itself. Fornander had alighted on the idea of Java as the original root, tracing the place name through a series of phonetic transformations—Java, Jawa, Hawa, Hawa-iti, Hawaiki—and Smith followed his lead in tracing the ancestral homeland back to the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Seram. But, when it came to the voyaging stories, Smith also argued that the Hawaiki from which any given hero had departed might not be this original Hawaiki but one of the many other Hawaikis named by ancient voyagers along the way. Thus, a Māori voyager who claimed to have come from Hawaiki might actually be said to have come from Havai‘i (a.k.a. Ra‘iatea), in the Society Islands. This conveniently allowed Smith to fudge both dates and locations, an approach he also took with legendary figures when he concluded, in cases of conflicting genealogical evidence, that there must have been more than one person with that name. It was the same problem that Fornander had wrestled with, and the more Smith insisted on the strict historical veracity of the traditions, the more contorted his interpretations became.
INTERESTINGLY, WHILE FORNANDER’S work set the stage for these attempts at chronicling the Polynesian past, he himself was somewhat lost to history, and his narratives largely subsumed by time. In New Zealand, on the other hand, Smith’s account of the discovery and settlement of New Zealand was widely accepted, even celebrated, as the orthodox version of Māori history. Taught to schoolchildren, repeated in histories, commemorated on plaques, it functioned throughout most of the twentieth century as a national myth of origin.
Smith’s story was based on the teachings, recorded in 1865, of two eminent East Coast tohunga. It begins in the year A.D. 925 in the ancient homeland of Hawaiki an
d concerns a man named Kupe, who becomes embroiled in an argument about an octopus. The octopus—a giant with eyes like abalone shells and arms “five fathoms long”—is interfering with Kupe’s fishing grounds and Kupe decides that he will have to kill it. So he prepares a great canoe and tells his men to gather plenty of provisions. When everything is ready, he embarks with his wife and his friend Ngahue. Out at sea, Kupe spies the octopus, which he knows by the reddening of the ripples on the water, but as soon as the canoe draws near, the monster swims away—so straight and fast that Kupe knows it is leading them to some strange country. Eventually, when they have been at sea for quite some time, Kupe’s wife catches sight of land, “like a cloud on the horizon.” Thus the name Aotearoa, which Smith interprets as “the long white cloud.” (Other interpretations include “the cloud hanging over a body of land discovered at the end of a long journey” and “the distant land to windward.”)
Smith later conceded that some aspects of this story partook “of the marvelous” and sought to ground it more firmly in reality by suggesting that the real reason for Kupe’s exploratory voyage southward was that he had observed “the flight of the kohoperoa, or long-tailed cuckoo,” coming from the southwest. Knowing the habits of this bird, he argued, Kupe would certainly have realized that this meant there must be land somewhere to the southwest. In any case, having reached Aotearoa, Kupe discovers that the country is uninhabited—or, rather, that it is inhabited only by birds. He makes an exploratory circuit of the islands, and when this is done he sails back to Hawaiki and reports what he has found. There he lives out his life, for, according to the story, Kupe never returns to Aotearoa. Thus the rhetorical question E hoki Kupe? (Will Kupe return?), which is an ironical proverb signifying that one has no intention of revisiting a place.
According to Smith, Kupe’s discovery of New Zealand was followed by two separate waves of immigration from Hawaiki: one in A.D. 1150, when a wayfinder named Toi set sail in search of a grandson who had been swept away in a storm; and another in A.D. 1350, with the arrival of the Great Fleet. The story of Toi almost seems an afterthought in Smith’s version, but the Great Fleet is a cherished piece of modern New Zealand mythology. It recounts the arrival of an armada of seven great voyaging canoes carrying men, women, and children—as many as seventy to a vessel—with all their gods, plants, animals, food, water, implements, and tools. The canoes, which arrive more or less together, separate once they reach Aotearoa, each one traveling to a different part of the coast, where the occupants alight and settle, thereby establishing the land rights and lineages of people who would later trace their descent from these founding figures. For most of the twentieth century, the arrival of the Great Fleet was considered to be “the most famous event in Māori history because,” as one eminent Māori scholar put it, “all tribes trace their aristocratic lineages back to the chiefs of the voyaging canoes.” It was also the capstone of the Polynesian migration story and the end of the great voyaging era. New Zealand was the last of the Polynesian islands to be settled; following the arrival of the Great Fleet, in the words of a Māori proverb, “The tapu sea to Hawaiki is cut off.”
FOR DECADES THE stories of Kupe and the Great Fleet were accepted as a true and faithful account of Māori history. But there were reasons to be skeptical. Later scholars, looking at “traditional” accounts compiled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by men like Fornander and Smith, began detailing the many ways in which these stories had been altered. Names, words, paragraphing, punctuation, and grammar had all been tampered with; stories were re-sequenced and whole passages bowdlerized. Some of this, argued the classicist Agathe Thornton, may have been the natural consequence of converting oral narratives to written texts. Oral narratives (one can think here of the Iliad or the Odyssey) are famously non-chronological, beginning in the middle of an action and unfolding in a zigzag fashion, frequently detouring from the main events to fill in background or explain important information. Traditional Māori narratives were similar, and when they were edited by Europeans (with a European audience in mind), many of these structural kinks were ironed out. The effect was to turn “terse, cryptic and audience-centred originals” into smooth, exegetical narratives, making them more like history and less like myth.
Another problem with these Europeanized histories is that they are often composites. In a close textual study from the 1970s, D. R. Simmons argued that the much-loved stories of Kupe the discoverer and the Great Fleet did not actually represent any particular Māori tradition. Rather, they had been cobbled together from many different sources, often with interpolations by the compilers. Simmons also rejected the dates that Smith had assigned to these events, pointing out that Smith’s date of 925 for Kupe was arrived at by working backward from purported settlement events in the twelfth century and was partly driven by the idea that Kupe had found the islands uninhabited and so had to have arrived before anyone else. As for the Great Fleet, Smith had settled on a date of 1350 by taking the mean of a large number of genealogies—some of which had as few as fourteen lines, while others had as many as twenty-seven—a process that, in Simmons’s view, rendered it valid “only as an exercise in arithmetic.”
Simmons was careful to say that his conclusions did not mean that Māori did not have traditions of settlement or discovery, or that they did not commemorate the voyages of heroes or particular canoes. But he was firm on the point that the orthodox stories of Kupe and the Great Fleet were modern myths that had arisen “out of the desire of European scholars to provide a coherent framework by which to interpret the prehistory of New Zealand” and had gradually become “more and more accepted as ‘factual’ and ‘historical’” as time wore on.
Thus, over the course of the twentieth century, the prestige of histories based on Polynesian oral traditions gradually diminished. The uncritical acceptance of Polynesian traditions that had characterized the work of men like Tregear, Fornander, and Smith came into disrepute, while the messiness of the process—the fragmentary nature of the texts, the layers of translation, uncertainty about the value of genealogical dating—led more scientifically minded scholars of the twentieth century to devalue the discovery and settlement narratives that the traditions had given rise to. Gradually the “heroic” account of bold Polynesian seafarers and their daring journeys—Fornander’s Vikings of the South Seas—faded, and a new, more skeptical perspective, one with a preference for “facts” over “rumors,” emerged.
Part IV
The Rise of Science
(1920–1959)
In which anthropologists pick up the trail of the ancient Polynesians, bringing a new, quantitative approach to the questions of who, where, and when.
Somatology
The Measure of Man
“Polynesian women from the Marquesas (Type I),” photos by E. S. C. Handy and Ralph Linton, in “Marquesan Somatology” by Louis R. Sullivan (Honolulu, 1923).
TOZZER LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY.
THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH century, the question of who Polynesians were had been addressed by amateurs: missionaries, traders, colonial officials. Isolated from the intellectual mainstream but immersed in Polynesian cultures, they had pursued the question with great passion, clinging fiercely to some fairly idiosyncratic ideas. All this changed in the early decades of the twentieth century with the rise of anthropology as a discipline. The Pacific—one of the great loci of early ethnological research, along with Africa and the Americas—was suddenly awash in professional anthropologists who brought with them a new scientific approach. The problems were all still the same—Who were the Polynesians? Where had they come from? How and when had they colonized the Pacific? What was different was the methods used to address them.
In 1922, Herbert E. Gregory, director of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, in Honolulu, wrote that the history of Polynesia was “fundamentally a field problem” that could be solved only through “the accumulation of facts.” One popular approach was to send teams of researchers fr
om different subdisciplines out into the field to collect information, and in the early twentieth century scores of British and American scientists traveled to remote corners of the world on large anthropological expeditions, many of which were named for wealthy benefactors. Funded by bankers, industrialists, and department store owners, these ventures reflected the confluence of three fin de siècle trends: the vast fortunes accumulated during the Gilded Age, a growing interest in the so-called primitive (many of the great museum collections of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas were made around this time), and the professionalization of social sciences like anthropology and sociology, which promised to bring the rigor of the physical sciences to the study of humankind. For the right kind of donor, it was a highly attractive sort of philanthropy, combining fashionable intellectual inquiry with rugged adventure in exotic locales.
Gregory was fortunate in having just such a benefactor: Bayard Dominick Jr., scion of an old New York family, partner with his father and uncle in the brokerage firm Dominick and Dominick, member of the New York Stock Exchange, philanthropist, and big-game hunter. In 1920, Dominick donated forty thousand dollars—the equivalent of half a million dollars in today’s money—to Yale University to finance a major anthropological expedition to the South Seas. The money, to be administered by the Bishop Museum, would support the Bayard Dominick Expedition, “the first comprehensive attack on a large scale on the problem of Polynesian origins” and a “systematic investigation” into the physical, cultural, and environmental characteristics of the Polynesian people.
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