Bbowjj. — Migrations of the Polynesians. 19o 



patriarchate is at least thousands of years in advance of the matriarchate, 

 for it makes history and tribal and political unities ; the father hands on 

 to the children, and he is the warrior and event-maker ; hence, under the 

 patriarchate, tradition accumulates into chieftainship and kingship. There is 

 no broad realm of the patriarchate westwards from Polynesia till we reach 

 India. That the Polynesian social system should have travelled tens of 

 thousands of miles in frail canoes in the teeth of the trade- winds, and run 

 the gauntlet of two matriarchal realms, has a touch of the miraculous in it 

 or, in other words, seems contrary to the laws of nature. 



It seems more in harmony with the possible, if not the probable, that 

 whatever kinship lies between the cultures and the languages of these three 

 regions has gone westwards out of Polynesia. And this is borne out by 

 facts. Fiji, the nearest part of the two regions to Polynesia, has had its 

 social system transformed from the matriarchal to the patriarchal ; chief- 

 ship and tribe and tradition have arisen in the group. It is highly Poly- 

 nesianized. When we get to the Solomon Islands, the nearest part to Fiji 

 in the eye of the trade-winds, three islands have gone in parts through the 

 same transformation — Malaita, Choiseul. and New Georgia ; and their natives 

 show a larger percentage of European features and light-brown hair than 

 those of any others of the group ; they are also most warlike, and go back 

 furthest into the past with their genealogies and traditions. The influence 

 of the patriarchate, tapers off as we go farther west into Malaysia. 



The purpose of this excursion into ethnology is to show how close to 

 the absurd those philologists, like Finck, go who make the starting-point 

 of Polynesian colonization the south (they should say rather the east) of 

 the Solomons. The basis of the conjecture is a name often given to San 

 Cristoval, the most easterly of the Solomons. Hale identifies Bulotu, the 

 paradise and probable original home of Tongan and Samoan tradition, with 

 Bouro, one of the most easterly islands of Malaysia. German ethnologists 

 prefer, as a rule, to identify it with Bauro, the name referred to as applied 

 to San Cristoval. But Bauro is only a district on the north-east coast of 

 the island, and the natives prefer to call the island, if they have any name 

 for the whole, Makira. 



We get into the region of the miraculous when we start a patriarchal, 

 tribal, genealogy-loving, chiefly Caucasian people from a matriarchal, kin- 

 divisioned, skort-memoried negrito island ; and still nearer the miraculous 

 when we start off, for nearly ten thousand miles of open oceanic wandering, 

 a canoe expedition right in the teeth of the only constant winds, the trades 

 that blow eight or nine months of the year, from an island that had only 

 shallow shells of canoes, unfit for crossing anything but fairly narrow straits 

 in calm weather or a favourable wind. The Polynesians were the only 

 people in the world that learned oceanic navigation before the use of the 

 compass. And it needs some exceptional, if not catastrophic, goad of 

 nature to explain the exception ; that we have in the subsidence, probably 

 often slow, but probably as often sudden, of the central island zone of the 

 Pacific that stretches south-east from the southern end of Japan across the 

 Equator, even as far as Easter Island. This manifestly went on for hundreds 

 of thousands of years ; and any humans that got on to the islands of this 

 zone would, time and again, have to go off the best way they could find in 

 search of other standing-places in the great flux of waters. Nowhere else 

 in the history of our world has such a goad been held by nature to the 

 backs of human beings. We may be quite certain that the regions to the 

 west would get flooded with migrations from water-logged Polynesia. 

 7 -Trans. 



