PREFACE. V 



By rigid processes of exclusion I have sought to make the lin- 

 guistic material assembled in this volume tell the tale of the peopling 

 of so much of the Pacific as is comprehended within the range of 

 its extent. It will be seen that Micronesia is wholly omitted; con- 

 siderable material is available for the study of that equatorial region, 

 but it is removed by an irreducible gap from the sweep of the data 

 upon which these studies are based. In Melanesia this material 

 tells no tale of the origin of the dusky races there found; it gives 

 us no more than the assurance that the dark races were already 

 settled in their crude savagery when the migration swarms of the 

 brilliant Polynesians swept onward to happier homes ever eastward. 

 Not all of Polynesia are we to find included within the scope of 

 this work. The linguistic record here dealt with excludes of its own 

 motion the later sweep of migration, that to which I have given 

 the designation of Tongafiti, the adventurous voyagers who swept 

 onward past central Polynesia to found new races at the utmost 

 verge of the great South Sea. 



Our material restricts us to the most ancient Polynesians, the first- 

 comers into the Pacific, voyagers who swept the unknown sea some 

 two thousand years ago. Of these Proto-Samoans we find here a 

 history which carries them back to their expulsion from the Asiatic 

 archipelago. I have essayed to plot their ocean fairways. I have 

 shown that in two swarms they came out from Indonesia ; that one 

 swarm came around the north of New Guinea and entered the Pacific 

 by way of Saint George's Channel and at last came to new homes in 

 Samoa ; that the other was driven by advancing Malayans into the 

 Arafura Sea and south of New Guinea through Torres Straits and 

 thence onward to a new home in Fiji. There in Nuclear Polynesia 

 the sundered kin resumed their fellowship ; thence they despatched 

 yet other expeditions which brought them to Hawaii, to New Zealand, 

 and to several spots in the distant east of the Pacific. Upon the 

 smaller of the accompanying charts I have plotted so much of these 

 Proto-Samoan voyages as I have been able to determine, and to 

 these I have added the voyages of the Tongafiti folk who came later, 

 by about a thousand years, leaving uncertain the voyage which 

 brought them into Nuclear Polynesia, since this material affords no 

 record thereof. 



Nor is this all. This record points to something of wider value 

 than the wandering of an unimportant folk in a world of islands 

 which can attain but scantily to economic importance. We are 



