216 THE POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS. 



West quadrant : Tahiti, and Rapanui with a determinant word. 

 Moriori uncertain. 



The onlv deduction we can draw from this is that the two extremes of 

 Polynesian settlement are in accord in fixing the sense in the east. Yet 

 the accord is only a seeming one, as we shall next see. 



In all the South Sea islands we find four cardinal points : uta, shoreward ; 

 tai, seaward ; sake, up ; lalo, down. The latter pair are used in two dimen- 

 sions: in a vertical plane their directions are absolute, up and down; in 

 a horizontal plane their directions fluctuate, for sake is always up the wind 

 and therefore windward no matter how the wind may chop and change, 

 and lalo is leeward. The uta-tai direction may vary through opposite 

 semicircles beginning at any point and with a range of 180 . We may not 

 quite say that it adjusts itself always to the position in reference to the 

 nearest visible sea of the speaker in each act of speaking, although it very 

 frequently does so adjust itself. But for every little village community 

 it does establish itself with reference to its own cove and there is no com- 

 pass agreement on even the smallest island. The locus of the maximum 

 discordance would be a town built on the center of a circular island, in 

 which case every direction would be tai and there could be no uta. Thus 

 it will be seen that tai and uta may under certain conditions coincide with 

 sake and lalo, yet on the opposite shore of the same island they would be 

 in diametric disagreement. This digression is introduced to make it clear 

 that we have no positive direction sense by which to rate a norm for the 

 tokelau sense of direction. 



I incline to the opinion that the solution will be found to lie somewhere 

 in relation to the one fixed index of direction in the tropical Pacific, the 

 trade wind. This is seen in the Samoan name of the fair weather season, 

 the Vaito'elau, the "time of tokelaus," namely, the months in which the 

 trade blows regularly every day long from east-southeast. Let us note in 

 how many instances we can see an easterly sense: Efate, Samoa, Maori, 

 Paumotu with a qualification, Marquesas, Hawaii. In the Marquesas, Samoa 

 and the Paumotu this is clearly not the trade wind but at right angles 

 thereto, yet such breezes are rare in the trade wind season. This makes 

 it appear that the direction is not the wind's eye, yet that it is in some way 

 associated therewith as a departure. The Maori must owe its easterly 

 sense to the signification brought with the word from its earlier home, for 

 New Zealand lies outside the trades and in the region of the westerly vari- 

 ables. I can not pretend to solve the problem. But I am sure that the 

 solution will be found to lie in the identification of the tokelau direction in 

 some angular displacement or departure from the prevailing trade wind in 

 each group — or in some point from which its people migrated with the word 

 already oriented — and this angle most probably has to do with the sailing 

 quality of their canoes, in other words, the number of points by which they 

 can lie the wind. 



