138 THE POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS. 



might become when the material for Melanesian study is more 

 abundant, we should judge, and rightly, the time and labor ill spent 

 which brought no better returns. 



But I feel confident that this material, thus handled, does unfold 

 to us the log of the Proto-Samoan swarm and does prove to us that 

 this migration, at least, followed the Melanesian course quite regard- 

 less of the wind-and-wave argument on which Dr. Thilenius has 

 expended so much attention. It will be observed that these studies 

 have identified Proto-Samoan elements in Melanesian, and scarcely 

 other than Proto-Samoan. The Tongafiti swarm does not appear. 

 That must be left for later study : first, its segregation in Polynesian 

 philologv, then its identification in whatever travel lane it may have 

 followed It may be that it can be identified in that mid-Pacific 

 track which Thilenius proposed . This much is certain, the Tongafiti 

 migration has left absolutely no trace of its passage in Melanesia. 



On the sieve hypothesis, namely, that the Polynesian content of 

 Melanesia is due to drift of castaways from Nuclear Polynesia, we 

 should look to find such content strongly localized at those points 

 more immediately to leeward of the point of involuntary departure, 

 that is in Viti and the New Hebrides. Yet as to Viti the Samoan 

 record is clear. It was not drift of castaways, it was a long series 

 of purposeful voyages from Samoa to Viti, from Viti to Samoa, 

 for love and for war ; it was such a common voyage that the sisters 

 Tilafainga and Taema swam it. And as to the New Hebrides, 

 where the Polynesian content by this theory should be at its best, 

 we have just proved the existence there of an area in which the 

 Polynesian is at its poorest. Furthermore this Polynesian element 

 is found quite as strongly, in fact more strongly, in the Solomons 

 and yet more northern groups quite outside the normal course of 

 drift, so far as I am able to identify it upon the charts with the aid 

 of no merely theoretical familiarity with the winds and currents of 

 this western Pacific. 



Let us rather examine our data in the light of what might be 

 expected of a great ethnic swarm, and not the feeble struggle for 

 life of fishermen landed in distress upon inhospitable shores. Let 

 us set before ourselves the manner of such voyaging. 



Under the stress of some expulsive force acting upon their rear 

 in Indonesia, under the draft of some force leading out into the 

 eastward unknown, the Proto-Samoan fleets passed through some 

 one or more of the free channels out of the Malay seas. They were 

 navigators, for, as I have already had occasion to remark, we can not 

 deny them their ability to sail the seas to Nuclear Polynesia, while 

 granting, as we must, their ability to sail voyages of equal length 

 out of Nuclear Polynesia to yet ulterior eastern lands. Samoa was 

 no dockyard, it was no school of navigation; Bougainville's name 



