INTRODUCTION. O 



by the reader, so simple and so gross as at once to be detected. Yet 

 he offers what purports to be the text and translation of several of these 

 tablet records. Of the text we need but say that it is not such language 

 of Rapanui as is recorded in the pages of this vocabulary, nor is it con- 

 sistently the known speech of any Polynesian people, but a jumble of 

 several. With such an uncertain base the translation can have no 

 value save only in so far as it shows that Dr. Carroll's version is in no 

 wise concerned with the same part of the world. 



5. These problems of Easter Island have been presented in brief 

 statement in order to show how necessary it will be in the following 

 pages to confine our attention to the discussion and, so far as is possible, 

 to the settlement of yet another problem, for the solution of which we 

 may feel that we find ourselves in possession of satisfactory and suffi- 

 cient data. Our purpose is to trace from linguistic material and through 

 philological method the peopling of this remotest outpost of Polynesian 

 culture. Incidentally it will involve the race problem of Southeast 

 Polynesia. 



In a former work ("The Polynesian Wanderings," 179) I found it 

 necessary to subdivide the general Polynesian area by erecting the 

 province of Nuclear Polynesia, in which Samoa is the nucleus, Niue, 

 Tonga, Viti, Rotuma, Uvea and Futuna, and Fakaafo describe the 

 perimeter. In this connection I have encountered, more as a valued 

 suggestion than in criticism, the memorandum of S. Percy Smith* that 

 there exists a Polynesian name for this region, "Hawaiki-raro or leeward 

 Hawaiki in contradistinction to Hawaiki-runga or windward Hawaiki 

 as including Tahiti and neighbor archipelagoes." It was not without 

 full consideration that I avoided these designations. In the first place 

 their currency is restricted to the race long after it has passed out from 

 Samoa. In the second place it would be doing violence to Polynesian 

 thought method to attempt to fix with metes and bounds so general a 

 division as these two terms connote. Furthermore, when laying out 

 Nuclear Polynesia as a geographic and ethnic province, particularly a 

 linguistic province, I foresaw that in due course it would become incum- 

 bent upon me, as now it has so become, to erect similarly, within the 

 diffuse area of Hawaiki-runga, a province of Southeast Polynesia call- 

 ing for precise definition. As set off for the purposes of the present 

 study this province comprises the Paumotu, including Mangareva geo- 

 graphically but particularizing it philologically ; the two groups of the 

 Marquesas; Rapanui; and for convenience Tahiti, as the practical 

 designation of the archipelago of which that island is the chief. To 

 complete the geographical record we may include Pitcairn, but its Poly- 

 nesian remains, discovered by the Bounty mutineers, had long been 

 mute. From this province I exclude the distal extensions of the race 



*43 Bulletin American Geographical Society, 267. 



