THE POLYNESIANS AND THEIR PLANT-NAMES. 141 



explain the limitation of the shaddock to Tonga and Fiji, 

 bnt not the wide distribution of the banana, the bread-fruit, 

 the tubers, the Malay apple, and the turmeric over the length 

 and breadth of the tropical Pacific. Yet there is sometimes 

 an element of exaggeration in the accounts that have been 

 given of the extent of the isolation in which they lived. 

 We have all read the interesting account given by Williams^ 

 in his Missionary Enterprises, of his discovery of Rarotonga, 

 how the Raiateans who accompanied him were greeted by 

 the Rarotougans in style truly Homeric and in language that 

 would have fitly come from the lips of an inhabitant of the 

 Cyclades. They inquired as to the removal of Rarotonga to 

 its present position by the gods and as to the place of abode 

 of the god Tangaroa himself Yet I find from the journal 

 of Barela, the pilot of the Spanish expedition despatched 

 from Peru in 1772, that the Spaniards were acquainted with 

 the existence of the island half a century before the time of 

 Williams. These islanders seem reticent on the subject of 

 previous visitors to newcomers. It is well known that 

 Captain Cook was not acquainted with the fact that between 

 his second and third visits to Tahiti some Franciscan priests 

 had spent nearly a year on the island.* Then again Cook, 

 when he re-discovered Easter Island in 1774, imagined that 

 since the arrival of Roggewein in 1722 no Europeans had 

 visited the island. I have, however, come upon a short 

 description of the island, its monuments, and its people, as 

 they appeared to the Spaniards four years before the time of 

 Cook. Facts of this kind make us a little suspicious of the 

 accounts given of the extreme isolation of some of these 

 islanders, whether as regards their neighbours or with refer- 

 ence to the outside world. The Spaniards have exercised 

 such a miserable spirit of jealousy and mystery in these seas- 

 that their part in plant-distribution will always remain an 

 unknown element in such discussions as these. There is 

 a curious story told of an American sailor wrecked in the 

 Pelews, who in the full conviction that he had for years 

 lived amongst natives entirely cut off from the world pre- 

 sented a vocabulary to Hale containing the Spanish and 

 French words for a hat. 



* These devoted men were certainly the first missionaries in Polynesia. 

 I am now translating their journal, which presents a terrible picture of 

 Tahitian life, not that, I would scarcely add, which was presented to the 

 navigators, Bougainville, Wallis, and Cook. 



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