50 
POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES. 
covered in recent years, such as Pitcairn’s, on which the 
mutineers of the Bounty settled, and on Fanning’s 
Island near Christmas Island, midway between the 
Society and Sandwich Islands, although now desolate, 
relics of former inhabitants have been found. Pave¬ 
ments of floors, foundations of houses, and stone entrances, 
have been discovered ; and stone adzes or hatchets have 
have been found at some distance from the surface, 
exactly resembling those in use among the people of the 
North and South Pacific at the time of their discovery. 
These facts prove that the nations now inhabiting these 
and other islands have been, in former times, more widely 
extended than they are at present. The monuments or 
vestiges of former population found in these islands are 
all exceedingly rude, and therefore warrant the inference 
that the people to whom they belonged were rude and 
uncivilized, and must have emigrated from a nation but 
little removed from a state of barbarism—a nation less 
civilized than those must have been, who could have 
constructed vessels, and traversed this ocean six or seven 
thousand miles against the regularly prevailing winds, 
which must have been the fact, if we conclude they were 
peopled only by the Malays. 
On the other hand, it is easy to imagine how they 
could have proceeded from the east. The winds would 
favour their passage, and the incipient stages of civiliza¬ 
tion in which they were found, would resemble the con¬ 
dition of the aborigines of America, far more than that 
of the Asiatics. There are many well-authenticated ac¬ 
counts of long voyages performed in native vessels by the 
inhabitants of both the North and South Pacific. In 1696, 
two canoes were driven from Ancarso to one of the Phi¬ 
lippine islands, a distance of 800 miles. In 1/20, two 
