94 Origin and Migrations oftlie Polynesian Nation. 



At the time when I was pursuing tho^e investigations, that 

 have led to the present lecture, I was myself crossing the Pacific, 

 on my second voyage to England from this port, in the year 

 1830. "We had encountered a strong south-easterly gale of seven 

 days' continuance, after rounding the North Cape of New 

 Zealand ; and for part of this time we had the mountains of that 

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

 that carried us right across the Pacific, with close reefed topsails, 

 at the rate of ten or eleven knots an hour. On reading the por- 

 tion of De Zuniga's work I have just quoted in these circum- 

 stances, it struck me at once with prodigious force, from glancing, 

 as I could not help doing at the moment, at the possible results 

 to which the suggestion might lead, that if there were really so 

 striking a conformity as the Spaniard alleged between the 

 language of the Araucanian Indians of South America, and that 

 of <ihe Indians of Tagala, in the Philippine Islands, the remark- 

 able circumstance might be due to the very opposite cause to 

 that which De Zuniga had indicated, and that some unfortunate 

 Polynesian canoe, blown off from the native isle of its inmates, by 

 some such str®ng westerly gale as the one before which our vessel 

 was then careering over the great waves of the Pacific, might 

 have carried the first cargo of human beings to America. 



I have observed, in my former lecture, that the farthest east- 

 ward of what are commonly called Captain Cook's discoveries in 

 the Pacific * was Easter Island, which is inhabited by a branch 

 of the great Polynesian family, and is situated within eighteen 

 hundred miles of the continent of America, but at the distance of 

 eight thousand miles from the Philippine Islands. Are we not 

 warranted, therefore, I asked myself, on first striking out this 

 idea in the midst of the boundless Pacific, to conclude that the 

 same causes that have operated during a long succession of ages 

 in carrying families and individuals of the Malayan race across 

 so extensive an ocean, and to so vast a distance from the earlier 

 settlements of their nation — filling every solitary isle in their 

 trackless course with a numerous population — may have also 

 operated in carrying other individuals of that amphibious nation 

 across the remaining tract of ocean to the coast of America ? 

 How many a canoe must not have been engulphed in the wide 

 Pacific, and how many a feast of blood must not have been 

 enacted amid its billowy boundlessness, ere the solitary Easter 

 Island was discovered and settled. The event of a battle in that 



* Easter Island is said to have been discovered in the year 1686, by an 

 Englishman of the name of Davis, -who called it Davis Land. It was after- 

 wards visited by the Dutch Commodore Roggewein, in the year 1722, by 

 whom it was called Easter Island ; and afterwards by a Spanish captain, and 

 by Captain Cook in the year 1770. The Spaniard called it Carlos Island ; 

 but Commodore Roggewein' s is the name now generally used. 



