234 Poniaudcr Collection of Hai^'ciiian Folk-lore. 



left the Asiatic Archijielago and entered the Pacific, establishino- themselves on the 

 Samoa and Tonga oroui)s and spreading eastward and northward. 2. During the 5th 

 century Polynesians settled on the Hawaiian Islands and remained there comparatively 

 unknown until 3. the eleventh century when several parties of fresh immigrants from the 

 Marquesas, Tahiti and Samoa groups arrived at the Hawaiian Islands, and for the 

 space of five or six generations revived and maintained an active intercourse with the 

 first-named groups and the mother-stock. 



It is rather singular that while most of the principal groups of the Polynesian 

 familv claim, each for itself, the honor of being the first-created of mankind and, so to 

 say, autochthones on their respective islands — as the Tonga, Samoan, Society and Ha- 

 waiian Islands — with the exception of the legend of Hawaii Loa, the Marquesans alone 

 own to a foreign birthplace and a migration from a far-ofif land. In the meles and 

 legends collated and preserved by Mr. Lawson, a resident of Hiwaoa, Marquesan Isl- 

 ands (and now held in MS. by Professor Alexander of Punahou College, Oahu, Ha- 

 waiian Islands), mention is made of a number of lands or islands, on which they suc- 

 cessively stopped in their migration, ere they finally reached the Marquesan Islands, 

 or, as they are called by them, the Ao-maama. According to these, the Marquesans 

 started from a land called Take-hee-hee, far away to the westward from the group they 

 now occupy; and the name by which they call themselves is "tc Take." There are two 

 accounts of their wanderings after being dri\'cn out of Take-hee-hee. One mentions 

 thirteen places of stoppage before they arrived at Ao-maama, the present Marquesan 

 Islands; the other account mentions seventeen places before their final settlement on the 

 last-mentioned group. During all these migrations the Take, or Marquesan people rep- 

 resent themselves as coming from belozv (mei-iao) and going up (una). Throughout 

 the Polynesian groujjs, however, within the tropics, when a land is spoken of as iao, 

 Halo, iraro of the speaker's place, it invariably means to the leeward, before the prevail- 

 ing trade-wind. This being from northeast or southeast, these migrations pursued a 

 course from west to east, and thus corroborate the Polynesian descent from Asia or 

 the Asiatic Archipelago. 



That the Polynesians, during their sojourn in India or the Indian Archipelago, 

 had received no inconsiderable share of the culture and civilization which the ancient 

 Arabs, through their colonies and commerce, had spread over these countries long be- 

 fore the Vedic branch of the Aryans occupied Aria-warta or had crossed the Ganges, — 

 there is much in their legends, customs and religions to denote. Whether that culture 

 was received however, while in India or in the Archipelago, it is now impossible to 

 decide. That those old-world Arabs, those Cushites of the Indian records and of 

 Holy Writ, had, long before the Vedas were written, controlled the ante-Aryan peoples 

 of India and its Archipelago, and moulded them to their own usages and religion is now, 

 I believe, an admitted fact by anticiuarians and ethnologists. That that culture and those 

 usages were greatly modified by the subsequent occui)ation and predominancy — temporal 

 and spiritual — of the Aryan race, and that that, in its turn, was reacted upon by the pre- 

 vious Arab or Cushite culture, there are numerous proofs in the Hindu writings. Hence 

 that mixture of myths, that jumble of confused reminiscences, which stock the legends 

 and load the memory of the Polynesian tribes. Monotheism, zabaism, polytheism and 



