CHAPTER I. 

 THE POLYNESIAN ALPHABET. 



In reducing the speech of the Easter Islanders to writing, Pere Rous- 

 sel, who had served an apostolate of a dozen years (i 854-1 866) in the 

 Marquesas, employed the alphabet with which he had become familiar 

 in the northern archipelago. The priests who introduced writing to 

 the Marquesas had also drawn for their alphabet upon that with which 

 they had become familiar in Tahiti, which stood as the metropolis of 

 this evangelical colony. In Tahiti the priests of the older communion 

 were late (and, in the complex of European politics, stormy) comers 

 to a field already cultivated.* Thus they found an alphabet already 

 adjusted to the phonetics of the Polynesian by the pioneer missionaries 

 of the London Missionary Society. Furthermore, since the English mis- 

 sionaries, under the stimulus of the restless soul of John Williams, the 

 martyr of Eromanga and an interesting blend of pietism and Wanderlust, 

 pushed ever into new fields and always carried with them the alphabet 

 which they had designed as standard for Tahiti, this has become effec- 

 tively the standard for all Polynesia. We have just observed how the 

 French missionaries adopted it as already in existence and ready to their 

 hands. The mission colony of the American Board of Commissioners 

 of Foreign Missions accepted it gladly when Ellis of the London Mis- 

 sion was called to their aid in Hawaii ; from that new center it was in 

 the course of time carried to Micronesia. The Wesleyan Mission 

 adopted it for their earliest settlement in Tonga, and thence carried it 

 to Viti. It is not until we reach the independent Presbyterian estab- 

 lishments in the New Hebrides that we find its neat simplicity disre- 

 garded, and even in that western area it is essentially retained by the 

 Melanesian Mission of the English establishment. 



An economical motive underlay the adoption of this standard alpha- 

 bet of Polynesia at its beginning and equally operative with each new 

 extension. In the first party of missionaries who sailed from England 

 aboard the Duff for Tahiti in 1796, one of the four ordained ministers 

 in the company of thirty-nine, representing many useful trades, has 

 set against his name the memorandum "and understands printing." 

 The only type which could be available to render this memorandum 



*We must deprecate the assumption of a polemical attitude. With the sagacious Ellis 

 ("Polynesian Researches" ii, 6) we note so much of priority as may lie in the temporary 

 sojourn of two Spanish priests from the Viceroyalty of Peru just twenty-five years before 

 the coming of the English missionaries. Doctors of theology will have to pass upon the 

 permanence of the theological statement inscribed upon the wooden cross at Taiarapu: 

 "Christus vincit et Carolus III imperat, 1774," of which the succeeding diplomatic claim 

 was never held valid. For all practical purposes the institution of the Catholic mission 

 dates from 1838. 



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