DETERMINATION OF THE PLACE OF RAPANUI. 167 



make entries in journals, to post ledgers, and with great labor to come 

 to the absurd triumph of the trial balance. 



In the four languages of the province there is a wide speech group of 

 broad diffusion and of considerable complexity. Our analysis sub- 

 divides this speech group. We find one element of unknown antiquity, 

 a corpus of Polynesian speech summed at 16,000 vocables which have 

 passed from the use and memory of the others of their race. We find 

 reason to consider this due to a Proto-Samoan settlement of uncer- 

 tain date, but very possibly coincident with the first arrival of that 

 migration swarm within the central Pacific after its divaricated Mela- 

 nesian traverse. Upon this settlement was overlaid a migration of a 

 later Proto-Samoan colony, refugees from Tongafiti tyranny, at a 

 period, therefore, for which we have established in Samoan history the 

 critical date of Matamatame, approximately (in the history of our own 

 race) the date of the Norman Conquest. At the same time a third, 

 the second overlying, settlement was made upon these parts of the 

 province, the Tongafiti pursuit of Proto-Samoan fugitives. 



At a later period there entered the province, undoubtedly from lee- 

 ward, as is the impulse of all Polynesian folk movement, a migration 

 representing a different phase. At its place of departure the senior 

 Proto-Samoan and the junior Tongafiti had been in community of asso- 

 ciation so long and so intimately that the distinctive criteria of each 

 language phase had passed most largely into common stock and had 

 ceased to be distinctive. This later migration was caught in the Pau- 

 motu chain; only its stragglers, few in number, reached the other archi- 

 pelagoes. The conditions of such voyaging depend largely upon the 

 necessities of re victualing ; such a voyage must be one of halts, of crop 

 colonies.* How long the sojourn upon the Paumotu really was we have 

 no means of determining ; it must have been considerable to have led to 

 the interlacing of the curves of the two languages as we have developed 

 them. In time the voyage was resumed, whether through resumption 

 of the impulse of origin, whether from inability to maintain a foothold 

 against the earlier inhabitants, whether in such disgust as any Western 

 Polynesian would feel at the arid sands of the Paumotu, we can not now 

 discover; but resumed the voyage was, out over unknown sea toward 

 the rising of the sun. Only a small part of any fleet could have made 

 port in Rapanui, the last home of the Polynesian race for the rest, sub- 

 mersion. That this migration is the most recent of the folk movements 

 in the province is shown by the fact that wherever found the Rapanui 

 element still retains in sharp distinction its characteristic features. 



As in preceding chapters we have incorporated so much of the 

 vocabulary as was pertinent to the inquiry, so at the conclusion of this 

 chapter we set a finding-list of the vocabulary of Rapanui in sections 

 arranged in respect of the prime division of the speech material. 



*"The Polynesian Wanderings," page 139. 



