MANGAREVA AS A CENTER OF DISTRIBUTION. 81 



edge of the art would be lost. We have no means of estimating the period 

 at which navigation passed from the Mangarevans; the most we may 

 know is that at some wholly uncertain epoch in the past the Mangarevans 

 became a sedentary people in the sea and had no further direct influence 

 upon the languages of their race fellows. 



Yet in the course of this chapter we are to see in a series of tables that 

 the influence of Mangarevan speech is strong in certain directions and 

 that it is particularly noticeable at the ultimates of migration in three 

 diverse tracks. 



In considering this we must fix the attention for a brief memorandum 

 upon one of the constants of such voyaging as was performed by these 

 Polynesian sailors and adventurers, a constant which is not set down upon 

 the charts. It has been made abundantly plain that the wind in the trop- 

 ical Pacific is not only motive power, but serves a compass end infixing the 

 direction of voyaging. Unwieldy, uncomfortable, and dull sailors before 

 the wind, these great double canoes were at their best sailing when snug 

 to the wind. Ignorant of the compass, these admirals of the brown could 

 establish direction upon the sea only by the constancy of the trade winds. 

 These are the considerations which establish the substantial unity of all 

 Polynesian voyaging. We find that all of eastward Polynesia was settled 

 by eastward voyages, always full and bye on the southeast trade. New 

 Zealand was settled by westward voyaging, yet this is no reversal of di- 

 rection sense; the course from Rarotonga to New Zealand is full and 

 bye on the westerly variables which lie south of the trade- wind region. 

 Mangareva lies outside the trade-wind belt ; its latitude is higher than the 

 southern limit of the regular southeast wind. Each year the trade does 

 reach up to include it for a few short weeks ; for much the greater period of 

 the year the westerly winds prevail. Time was nothing to these voyagers, 

 there are no conditions of life in which time ever can be anything to 

 the Polynesian ; they could await contentedly the coming of the wind they 

 sought. Thus Mangareva was a convenient point of distribution for 

 wanderings back into the torrid zone or into more remote regions in the 

 temperate zone to the southward. 



This position relative to windroses must be held to condition the rela- 

 tion of Mangareva to the general movement of migration, not only within 

 Southeast Polynesia but in the more remote seats of Polynesian culture. 

 Thus we are to find the Mangarevan represented strongly not only in the 

 magma which has gone on rather artificial record as the Paumotu speech, 

 not only in Rapanui, not only in the Marquesas, but we shall note a some- 

 what substantial element of the language which is identifiable only in 

 Hawaii. The conditions of the present study will interrupt our detailed 

 examination of this problem, but if Mangareva and Hawaii be noted upon 

 the wind and current charts now issued by the Hydrographic Office of the 

 United States Navy the services of a competent navigator, skilled in fore- 

 and-aft seamanship, will assist the ethnographer to the solution of the 



