POLYNESIAN RELICS IN MELANESIA. 141 



I feel that I can not set too acute an accent upon this idea of course. 

 Without knowledge of what might lie before them, with no chart 

 and with no compass to guide them, even had they known what they 

 sought, there was but one fixed and recognizable fact in empty sea 

 under the cloud-flecked emptiness of sky. This fact was direction, 

 the angle with the wind at which their canoes were at their best 

 sailing speed. Where all else was uncertainty the fixity of this fact 

 must have kept them true upon the sea by night as well as by day, 

 for in the darkness, when the eye could no longer see the tremor of 

 the after leach of the great mat sail bellying above them, the ear 

 could be warned by its quivering. All else uncertainty, this alone 

 was fact. 



The New Hebrides, therefore, lying so near would yet be distant 

 because out of course. Upon the shores from Norbarbar to Aneityum, 

 still more remote and still more to leeward, in Uea, Lifu, and Mare, at 

 the most remote spot to leeward beyond which lay no land whatever, 

 at New Caledonia, would come only the dull sailors and those who 

 through blast of gales had sagged down the wind. Therefore from 

 the point where the axis of the land masses breaks from its northwest- 

 southeast direction and sets off north-south we should expect 

 to find a difference in the Polynesian content of the indigenous 

 languages. 



So far in these notes our attention has been given to the direction 

 of the Polynesian traverse through Melanesia. We may pause 

 briefly to consider a point of relative duration of this traverse, and 

 we note with surprise that Thilenius has permitted himself to write 

 of a measure of weeks. 



Much earlier in this work I have noted the instances of Polynesian 

 inclusions within Melanesia. Stated in terms of the point as now 

 presented, these are cases where the duration of the traverse has 

 reached the absolute maximum in a fixed and permanent settlement, 

 a relinquishment of the voyage. 



Remember that we have no means of determining what was the 

 impulse upon which these voyages were undertaken. It will, how- 

 ever, involve no great strain of the probabilities if we assume as 

 established the reasonable hypothesis which has been proposed, that 

 the impulse upon the Polynesians commorant in Indonesia was an 

 expulsive force and that it was applied upon them on their exposed 

 northern flank and upon their rear equally exposed to the crowding 

 of swarms of alien and incompatible migration from the Asiatic main- 

 land. Upon this assumption we may naturally draw the conclusion 

 that the power of expulsion had practically vanished when the 

 Polynesian swarm had set the great island of New Guinea behind 

 them. This we know of a certainty, in all the unknown ages which 

 have elapsed, the Malayan peoples (if it were their ancestors who 



