THE DOMINANCE OF TAHITI OVER THE PROVINCE- 109 



Aole o Kahiki kanaka; 



Hookahi o Kahiki kanaka, he haole; 



Me ia la he akua, 



Me au la he kanaka; 

 He kanaka no, 

 Pai kau, a ke kanaka hookahi e hiki. 



Kahiki, land of the far-reaching ocean, 

 Land where Olopana dwelt! 



Within is the land, outside is the sun; 

 Indistinct is the sun and the land when approaching. 

 Perhaps you have seen it? 

 I have seen it. 



1 have surely seen Kahiki. 



A land with a strange language is Kahiki. 



The men of Kahiki have ascended up 



The backbone of heaven; 



And up there they trample indeed, 



And look down on below. 



Men of our race are not in Kahiki. 



One kind of men is in Kahiki the white man. 



He is like a god ; 



I am like a man; 

 A man indeed, 

 Wandering about, and the only man who got there. 



See now the dominance of Tahiti. Sitting in the disgrace of the 

 dangling noose, the English sailor lad sends his dying thoughts back to 

 the land of his happy sojourn and writes a dictionary that gloomy mis- 

 sion men may sing their somber hymns in a land where all is light. A 

 volume might be written on the magnificence of the imagery of the verse 



Boko ka moku, iwaho ka la 



but it will not avail to set upon the geographical coordinates of any of 

 our maps the strange land to which Kualii's bard had voyaged and from 

 which he returned with strange true tales. Whether mutineer, mission- 

 ary, or savage poet all feel the grip of Tahiti in the remote sea. Still 

 more are we to find that grip in Southeast Polynesia in the material of 

 our present study, the speech of men, of men above all who say taio first 

 to the stranger on their shores. 



These tabulations, these number lists, are particularly irksome to me, 

 for the words of Polynesian speech lie warm within whatever Capricorn 

 and Cancer tropics may belt the hemispheres of my brain. Thus it is 

 that I pause to write this note that the tables made necessary by the 

 method which I must follow are but the finger-boards to the words. 



In the examination of the alphabet of Tahiti speech we are to find 

 ourselves at almost the ultimate point of phonetic degradation in Poly- 

 nesian. Of the eleven consonants of the Proto-Samoan but eight sur- 

 vive, the lowest point of degradation is reached in the Hawaiian with 

 seven surviving consonants, and the Hawaiian lies without the limits of 

 the studies contained in this volume. This estimate, however, is but 

 numerical ; veracious figures seldom tell the whole truth, for arithmetic 

 is scarcely moral, and we shall soon find cause to revise the estimate of 

 the figures and to show that Tahiti is really at the extreme of dilapida- 



