OCEANIC MIGRATIONS. 133 



been reckoned, not through the eldest, but through a younger son. 

 Allowing, therefore, thirty years to a generation, and supposing the 

 list to be a correct one, we should have, for the time which has 

 elapsed since the settlement of the Sandwich Islands, about two thou- 

 sand years (67 x 30 = 2010). 



But though there is no doubt of the ability of the natives to pre- 

 serve a genealogy of this length, several circumstances incline us to 

 question its entire correctness, and to doubt whether the first twenty- 

 three names be not entirely supposititious. In the first place, the name 

 of the king at the head of the list is O Watea, which is precisely the 

 same in pronunciation with the Oataia of the Marquesans (ante, p. 

 128), the orthography only being different. The name of his wife is 

 Papa, of whom it is said "she was the mother of these islands." This 

 is the same name, and the same tradition that the Tahitians apply to 

 the wife of their great deity, Taaroa. It is further related by the 

 Hawaiians that Watea and Papa had a deformed child, whom they 

 buried, and from it sprung the faro-plant; the stalk of this plant was 

 called haloa, and this name was given to their son and heir who suc- 

 ceeded them. This fable is evidently derived from the Nukuhivan 

 story that the children of Oataia were named after the various plants 

 which he had brought with him from Vavau. Thus we have, in the 

 commencement of the Hawaiian history, a singular mixture of Mar- 

 quesan and Tahitian traditions. The twenty-second king was Atalana, 

 being the name of the god who supports the island of Savaii (ante, p. 

 23). He had four children, all of whom were named Maui, with 

 some epithet appropriated, in other groups, to a deity. The youngest, 

 Maui-atalana succeeded him, and to him are attributed the same 

 deeds that the Tahitians relate of their great deity Maui, another 

 name or manifestation of Taaroa. He was succeeded by Nanamaoa, 

 from whom the real history of the islands seems to commence. 



The probability is that the Sandwich Islands were first peopled by 

 emigrants from the Marquesas, of the mixed race which is there 

 found. When, after a time, the inhabitants had become numerous, 

 and some family was raised to the supreme power, it became an 

 object to trace the pedigree of the sovereign as far back as possible. 

 After ascending as far as their recollections would carry them, per- 

 haps to one of the first settlers, till they reached an ancestor whose 

 paternity was unknown, they made him, according to the usual 

 fashion in such cases, the son of a god, Maui. This god was repre- 

 sented as the son of another deity, Atalana, and not satisfied with this, 



34 



