136 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



in Chinese annals as having been discovered by them 

 several thousands of years ago, was a portion of Central 

 America. This brings us to a brief consideration of 

 the great part played by the main oceanic currents 

 in the colonization of the world ; not perhaps in the 

 modern sense of colonization, but as accounting for 

 the obvious relationship between the inhabitants of 

 lands widely separated by ocean. This relationship 

 is, of course, too large a subject to do more than 

 mention here, and yet I feel I must allude to one 

 striking instance which came under my own notice. 

 During my cruise in Polynesia I gained a superficial 

 knowledge of some of the dialects, but principally 

 of the Tongan. At any rate, I learned to count up 

 to ten ta'ha, ooa, tolu, fah, leema, ona, feetu, valoo, 

 eva, cow-ongafulu (I spell as I remember, phoneti- 

 cally). Several years after I was in Madagascar, at 

 Tamatave, and we employed on board a number of 

 Betsimasaraka, the aborigines of the islands, the 

 Hovas being obviously the ruling race of Malay 

 conquerors, and having no likeness to the real autoch- 

 thones. One day I heard a native counting, and 

 to my intense amazement his numbers were almost 

 identically the same as in Tongan. I asked the Kev. 

 George Shaw, who was then the L.M.S. Missionary 

 at Tamatave, if he could explain it, knowing that he 

 had been in Polynesia; but although he gave me a 

 very learned lecture upon the interchange of races, 

 I regret to say that I have not retained any of it, 

 except the profound conviction that in some way, 

 unexplainable now, but certainly owing to the set 

 of the currents of the ocean-drifting canoes with men 

 in them from one island to another, the similarity 



