48 ON THE ORICmS" AND MIGRATIONS OF THE POLYNESIAN NATION. 



2,000 miles of the American land. There, at all events, 

 our own great navigator, Captain Cook, actually found not onlj 

 a people of the real Polynesian type but the colossal remains of 

 their long extinct civilization. 



And this extreme antiquity which I assign to the Polynesian 

 race is not merely a matter of conjecture. There are two 

 remarkable notes of time in the case that throw us back irre- 

 sistibly to the very cunabula gentis, the actual cradle of the 

 Polynesian race. The distinguished scholars of the Indian 

 Archipelago — Sir Thomas Baffles, Dr. Leyden, Mr. Crawford, 

 Mr. Marsden, and others — inform us that there have been two 

 distinct foreign infusions into the ancient Malayan tongue, viz., 

 an Arabic infusion co-eval with the era of Mahomet and the 

 Mahometan invasion of the East. Now, of this copious Arabic 

 infusion in the Malayan language, which may be dated as high as 

 the seventh century of our era, there is no trace in the Polynesian 

 tongue — a circumstance which proves incontestibly that the 

 Polynesian race had been struck off from the Malayan tribes of 

 the Indian Archipelago before the era of Mahomet. But there 

 is another and much more ancient foreign infusion in the Malayan 

 language, of which also there is no trace in the Polynesian dialect, 

 I mean the Sanscrit infusion. This, therefore, throws back into 

 the very highest antiquity the origin of the Polynesian race as a 

 distinct family of mankind. 



To retrace our steps for a moment, we have now established the 

 important fact, that under the influence of causes that are still in 

 operation throughout the South Sea Islands, the Polynesian race 

 has spread itself in the course of long ages past over the whole 

 extent of the Pacific Ocean— from the Sandwich Islands in 

 the northern to New Zealaad in the southern hemisphere, and 

 from the western shores of the Pacific, to Easter Island, within 

 1,800 or at the utmost 2,000 miles of the American land. 



At the time when I was earnestly pursuing my investigations 

 into the origin and migrations of the Polynesian race, I was 

 myself crossing the Pacific, on my second voyage from Sydney to 

 London, in the year 1830, having carried with me to sea for the 

 express purpose, such works bearing on the subject as I could 

 then procure in the Colony. We had encountered on that 

 occasion a strong southerly gale of seven days continuance 

 after rounding the North Cape of New Zealand ; and for 

 part of that time we had the mountains of that island 

 clearly in sight. We then got a strong westerly gale that 

 carried us the whole way right across the Pacific to Cape Horn, 

 with close-reefed topsails, at the rate of ten or eleven knots an 

 hour. In these circumstauces, when reading De Zuniga's work, in 

 which he tells us that the aboriginal languages of Tagala, in the 

 Philippines, and of Araucania, in Chili, were remarkably similar 



