142 THE POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS. 



crowded out the Sawaiori) have been able to effect no lodgment 

 of settlement upon that dark island, and their trade settlement has 

 scarcely advanced beyond the occasional raiding dash of the sea 

 rover and slaver. 



Once in Torres Straits, for such as found the exit in the Arafura 

 Sea, once within the great bight of the Bismarck Archipelago, for 

 what seems to have been the main flight, the voyagers lacked impulse 

 as they certainly wanted direction. They were afloat, but they were 

 headed nowhere in particular. The world may have been in a sense 

 before them, but choice was limited to such lands as they might 

 chance upon. I have already spoken of the necessity of crop settle- 

 ment as a condition of their naval economy. Without destination 

 to lure onward, without force behind to drive them yet farther 

 along, such crop settlement under favorable conditions of soil, water, 

 and subduable autochthons tended inevitably to become a perma- 

 nent colonization. 



If we note upon the charts the position of such Polynesian inclu- 

 sions, crop settlements become fixed colonies — the islands of the 

 western verge of Polynesia in Nuguria, Tauu and Liueniua, Matema, 

 Ticopia, Sikayana, Mai, Aniwa, Fotuna — we shall find them with- 

 out exception the windward islands of the archipelagoes with which 

 respectively they are associated in descriptive geography. Even 

 Rennel and Moiki, although they lie to leeward of San Cristoval 

 in the southern Solomons, are yet a weather ly achievement to such 

 voyagers as issued easterly from Torres Straits. Where we find 

 these fixed colonies in such number there must have been other crop 

 settlements similar in their beginnings which endured in the measure 

 of years or perhaps generations until inability to withstand the 

 assaults of the indigenes or the lure of some new squadron of 

 wanderers of their own race and speech led them to essay yet 

 again the great sea, never forgetting that it is inborn a character- 

 istic of the Polynesian to hold himself proudly the master of the 

 ocean. 



If these considerations are to be held somewhat of more worth 

 than the divagations of fancy there must somewhere be some record 

 to give them substance. Where else, then, than in these speech 

 records which we have subjected to such minute analysis? 



But how to make the record appear? 



For Mota, for Aneityum, and for Efate we now have dictionaries 

 of unequal excellence. These languages we may, therefore, compare 

 with the Polynesian languages for which we have similar standards, 

 indeed regulate by so much of the comparative Polynesian phil- 

 ology as has been elaborated upon these data. For so much we 

 are thankful, yet these are but three, and in the data upon which 

 these studies rest we have had under intimate dissection no less than 



