INTRODUCTION. 6 



of the navel, means the end of anything. Each recorder has been 

 misled by the secondary sense of the former element of the locution. 

 Thomson has gone still more astray by accepting a secondary sense 

 of the latter element as well. I must disregard Paymaster Thomson's 

 story of the antiquity of this name, even though it has passed into 

 currency under the dignity of the name of the Smithsonian Institution. 

 Each of these interpretations is to be rejected, for the French priest's 

 rendering, though marked by simplicity, is at variance with any meta- 

 phor which might suggest itself to the islander's mind. The name 

 means no more than "the end of the land." 



Now to denominate an island so situated as is this land of our present 

 study by the designation "the end of the land " is a very simple exercise 

 of such knowledge of geography as we possess from early childhood, 

 the ability to read a map. Tracing out the chains of islands which dot 

 the South Sea, we find Easter Island far outlying, and beyond it no 

 land at all until we come within sight of the arid snows of the Andes ; 

 to our comprehension it is an end of the land indeed. But we must 

 not lose sight of the fact that for these islanders there existed no chart. 

 It was impossible for them, whether in the remote days of Hotu Matua, 

 or in any later generation, until some slight modicum of our knowl- 

 edge was brought within their reach, to know that their home was the 

 end of all land in that sea. In contrary fact their own history taught 

 them that if one but sailed far enough from home there was a new home 

 awaiting. That was the way in which they came themselves to their 

 outpost home; it is within the bounds of possibility that their first 

 settlement had seen a second migration find them in their loneliness. 

 These considerations are negative: I do not lack positive considerations. 

 After examining an Easter Islander sufficiently to discover that in his 

 association with European sailors he was able to comprehend a map I 

 showed him the chart of his own island and asked as to this name 

 Te Pito o te Henua. At once he replied, "there are three," and put 

 his finger on each of the terminal promontories, for Easter Island is as 

 mathematically a Trinacria as Sicily itself. It seems clear that Te 

 Pito o te Henua is not the name of the island, not at least in an indig- 

 enous usage, save as forced upon it by contact with foreigners. It 

 appears to have been used in the same sense as the designation of 

 Land's End at the tip of Cornwall; it is impossible that to the Poly- 

 nesian it could have had any particle of such signification as attached 

 to the Ultima Thule of our ancient and mediaeval geography. 



Nothing should surprise us in the existence in the South Sea of an 

 inhabited island without a name; there are many such. It is quite in 

 accord with the islander's habit of mind to speckle his home with names 

 changing every few feet and to leave the major divisions nameless. I 

 know one Samoan community where the land on the public green is 

 parceled out in ownership into estates so restricted in dimensions that 



