SAWAIORI MIGRATIONS. 15 



After recording known instances of involuntary voyages from 

 central Polynesia to the safe landfall of the Polynesian verge, after 

 discussing the Polynesian verge as a sieve for such migrations, Dr. 

 Thilenius concludes his argument as follows :* 



When one considers the remarkable exiguity of our islands [the Poly- 

 nesian verge], of whose surface, furthermore, only a fraction is habitable or 

 productive of food, certainly we find an adequate explanation of their 

 present population through these involuntary migrations. Whether at 

 any former time a Melanesian population of any sort lived upon these 

 islands is a question easy to put but hard to decide. No data of any nature 

 bear upon this idea. It is possible to hold the idea that there had been a 

 Melanesian population, but that for reasons unknown it had withdrawn 

 before the coming of the first wanderers, for the earliest settlers on Nuguria 

 and Liueniua found the land uninhabited and there is no ground on which 

 to set aside their testimony as false. 



Therefore the migration theory needs a brief discussion. Our islands 

 might have been halting-places of the peoples swarming from somewhere 

 in the northern Moluccas toward Polynesia. These early Polynesians must 

 have come hither out of the northwest, fairly enough along the same course 

 as was traversed by the boats coming from Ninigo, Taui (?) and Kapinga- 

 marangi. That presupposes that our little atolls, at least 800 or 1,000 

 years ago, constituted a region offering an adequate supply of vegetation. 

 Whether this was the case may readily be questioned on the score of the 

 thinness of the soil-layer on the islands to-day. It is always a possibility. 



The wanderers found the islands uninhabited and left behind them, on 

 each or on some, a company of those who were travel-weary. But these 

 folk, wholly ignorant of geography, in some wonderful fashion hit upon 

 the course to the other islands of northwest Polynesia. The knowledge of 

 these may have come to them from the fabulous aboriginal Melanesian 

 population, who surely, to have been able to give such information, con- 

 trary to the character of the present north Melanesians, must have con- 

 ducted extended voyages and thus have known one or other of the large 

 islands of Melanesia. The wanderers would surely have made sufficient 

 inquiry. Yet they prefer to follow a chain of poor atolls instead of seizing 

 and holding the great and fertile islands that lay close at hand. They 

 had sufficient numbers, for we can think of them only as the complement 

 of a fleet. But Buka, which lies so close to Nuguria at which they first 

 touched, shows no trace of Polynesians. f Then the whole aboriginal Melan- 

 esian population of our atoll is become a picture painted by the fancy. 



None the less it is highly probable that the wanderers came to one of 

 the great islands, for they sailed hither against the trades, and it is more 

 likely that they fell to leeward than that they, ignorant of the situation of 

 Samoa, busied themselves to make headway against them. At the least 

 it is probable that wind and current set the wanderers westward. That 

 not a single boat, on the ten-degree stretch from Nuguria to Sikayana, 

 was driven westward by only so much as a degree and a half, which was 

 sufficient to bring one of the great islands into sight, is so much the stranger 

 since Kilinailau and Nisan lie west of Nuguria and approximately in the 

 longitude of Buka. These were originally settled by Polynesians, and in 



*Op. c, page 78. 



fl can not let this statement go unchallenged. In this work I have collated thirty- 

 one vocables from Buka, of which twenty-four are borrowed from the Polynesian, the 

 quality being computed at 70 per cent. — W. C. 



