150 EASTER ISLAND. 



later, probably somewhat more actively energized, swarm of his own 

 race. We shall spread before our eyes the drama of welcome extended 

 to the newcomer, of the subjection of the earlier resident, of the growth 

 of intolerable conditions of tyranny, of the revolt and the abrupt eva- 

 sion from Samoa of the insolent oppressor when at long last his power is 

 broken. This record, when we come to it, need not be considered com- 

 plete ; it is no more than a summary. Even when we deal with the sav- 

 age and the primitive we are not debarred from factoring into his prob- 

 lem so much of our human nature as we may establish as in community 

 of possession. It is only in gnomic wisdom that not-cured and endured 

 form a perfect dilemma; in real life there is a very satisfactory third horn 

 in dodging; it may be stated with Ciceronian grace as evasit-erupit; in 

 English current this winter it is "doing a bunk, " always man's way out 

 by taking to his heels, in token of which Hermes wears the talaria. With 

 the sea always within sight and sound, ever enticing to ear and eye and 

 to a deeper race instinct of joy afloat with the song of the wind and the 

 dance of the stars, we do no violence to Polynesian nature when we put 

 forward the idea that the oppressed, when they found or made their 

 chance, even as the oppressors at their Matamatame climax, set forth 

 upon the sea to find new lands and to found new homes. 



East of Fiji there is no reason to suppose that the new land upon 

 which the wanderers chanced was other than land awaiting men ; every 

 consideration with which we study man argues against the existence of 

 earlier and alien peopling, of autochthons before the Polynesian wan- 

 derers. Now for each eastward place of settlement of refugees repeat in 

 small the story which Samoa has written presbyter large, and we shall 

 find a constant eastward flight, a constant ulterior eastward settlement 

 of smaller and ever smaller squadrons of such fugitives. At last we 

 come to the end of land in the sea; beyond it a waste of ocean where 

 Polynesian wanderers must hunger and thirst until at last each in utter 

 peace domes upon the enfolding wave just one bubble to last a moment 

 in all the glory of the heaven that is his. This end of land in the sea? 

 We have been studying it closely in these pages; it is this province of 

 Southeast Polynesia. 



Unbooked this people is, unlettered even, its words are in constant 

 danger of loss. Where they remain in touch, one family with another, 

 island with island, archipelago with archipelago and this we know to 

 have been in many instances the case in the period of the great voy- 

 ages the speech would tend toward the correction of its gradual loss, a 

 common vocabulary would exist. But in the case of isolated and remote 

 settlements the loss would progress with no possibility of reparation ; 

 each language would tend more and more to a greater bulk of vocabu- 

 lary which elsewhere had fallen or had been forced into disuse. It 

 does not surprise us that in four of these languages this individual and 

 mutually incomprehensible stock of a primitive common speech should 

 amount to two-thirds of the speech in use. 



