Source and Migraf'wn of flic Polynesian Race. 233 



I am tolerably safe, then, in asserting- that these islands were inhabited 800 or 

 900 years ago, and had been inhabited for centuries i)reviousl\', b\' the same race of 

 peo|ile that inhabits them now. 



Professor Max Miiller, in his Lectures on the Science of Language, has shown it 

 tt) be very probable that in the 12th and 13th centuries before Christ the Tamul family 

 had already been driven into Deccan and the southern ])arts of the Hindu Peninsula bv 

 the invading Aryans. With due attention to the course and character of those waves 

 of migration, it becomes also very proljable that the Polynesian family had by or be- 

 fore that time been driven into the Asiatic Archipelago, displacing in their turn the 

 Papuan family. How soon or how long after that occu]iation the first ad\-enturous 

 Polynesians debouched into the Pacific, it is im])ossible to even conjecture. But we 

 know that, about the commencement of the Christian era, new swarms of emigrants 

 from middle and eastern India invaded the area occu])ied by the Polynesians and spread 

 themselves from Sumatra to Timor, from Java, to Manila, expelling, subjugating or iso- 

 lating the previous occupants. 



Taking this epoch as the starting-point for the appearance of' the Polynesian in 

 the Pacific, we have an interval of time of 900 to 1000 years, in which to people the vari- 

 ous islands and groups now held by the Polynesian family, and before we meet the uncon- 

 tested Hawaiian traditions which assure us that twenty-eight generations ago this group 

 was alread}^ peopled by that family. 



Among the Hawaiian genealogies, now extant, I am, for reasons which will here- 

 after appear, disposed to consider the Haloa-Nanaulu-Maweke line as the most reliable. 

 It numbers fifty-seven generations from Wakea to the ]:)resent time, twenty-nine from 

 Wakea to, and including, Maweke, and twenty-eight from Maweke until now. Fifty- 

 seven generations, at the recognized term of thirty years to a generation, makes 17 10 

 years from now U]) to Wakea, the recognized progenitor and head of most of the south- 

 ern and eastern Polynesian branches — or, say, A. D. 150, which would in a great meas- 

 ure correspond with the invasion and spread of the Hindu-Malay family in the Asiatic 

 Archipelago. It became known to. and was acknowledged, however, in the time of 

 Kamehameha I, by his bards and genealogists, that the first thirteen names on the Haloa 

 line, to Kanaulu, were shared in common with the Marquesan and Tahitian branches of 

 the Polynesian family. These then must have existed before the occupation of the Ha- 

 waiian Islands, which would leave sixteen generations or about 480 vears in which to 

 discover and people the islands previous to the era of Maweke and his contemporaries 

 — the Paumakua of Oahu, the Kuheailani of Hawaii, the Puna family of chiefs on Kauai, 

 the Hua family on Maui, the Kamauaua family on Molokai. and others. By which of 

 these sixteen generations, from Maweke up to Nanaulu, the islands were settled upon 

 there is nothing positively to show. The historical jiresumption, however, would indi- 

 cate Nanaulu, the first of these sixteen, as the epoch of such discovery, and there exists 

 still a Hawaiian tradition connected with the name of his grandson, Pehekeula, a chief 

 on Oahu. 



\\ e gel, then, ihc loUowing leading jiroposilions as chronological sign-posts, aj)- 

 ])roximately at least, of the Polynesian migrations in the Pacific: i. During the close of 

 the first and the beginning of the second century of the present era, the Polynesians 



