July 8 , 1911] 
FORES! AND STREAM. 
57 
Migrations of the Maoris 
Authentic tradition — history and genealogy, 
passed by word of mouth from generation to 
generation and taught with scrupulous exactness 
by the Tohungas, or priests—places the arrival 
of the Maoris in New Zealand at about the 
twelfth century, .and before that time they had 
discovered and settled other islands in the South 
Pacific. I 
The Polynesian race, of which the Maoris, 
Hawaiians, Samoans and some other islanders 
are branches, has been traced back to a prob¬ 
able origin in Northern India, and is in no de¬ 
gree related to the negroid races of Australia 
or of the “black” islands of the Pacific. Traces 
of their visits to the west coast of the American 
continent have been found, and Charles Nelson, 
of Whakarewarewa, an ethnologist and philolo¬ 
gist of remarkable attainments, who spent a year 
in searching the globe for evidences of the origin 
and wanderings of the Maoris, assured me that 
he had found in the Smithsonian Institution evi¬ 
dence that pointed to their penetration even to 
the Rocky Mountain region or to contact with 
the race that peopled this continent. 
Certain it is that the old Maoris were bold 
and adventurous navigators and had sailed the 
South Seas in their canoes centuries before the 
first European crossed the Atlantic. One of the 
first Maori canoes to reach New Zealand was 
the Arawa, and one of the clans or tribes takes 
its name from that craft and preserves in oral 
history the names of the captain and crew. The 
Arawa is the Mayflower of Maori history, and 
the descendants of the people constituting her 
crew and passenger list are the blue bloods of 
the race. 
How did these hardy sailors find their way 
without compass or knowledge of astronomy 
across the vast waste of water in vessels fash¬ 
ioned from the hollowed trunks of trees? That 
is a question that has puzzled and amazed all 
who have sought to learn the origin of the 
Maoris and traced their course from India and 
the Malay archipelago through Polynesia to New 
Zealand. 1 rue, their canoes were staunch and 
seaworthy craft, some of them eighty to one 
hundred feet in length, and two of them lashed 
together in the manner of a catamaran could 
" eather the fiercest storms of the Indian ocean 
and carry provisions for long voyages. It is 
km i\\n that the Maoris provisioned their canoes 
chiefly with the tuber resembling the sweet 
potato, which they brought to New Zealand, and 
t tat they carried water in bamboo logs that 
"ere laid in the bottom of the canoe and thus 
''erved as ballast. But how did they find their 
"■\v, and what definite purpose did they have 
" ten they put to sea and pushed hardily into 
the vast unknown ? 
It is haidly credible that any people con’d be 
aimlessly adventurous as to undertake voyages 
unknown thousands of miles without any defi- 
te object, in view and without plausible reason 
expecting to find anything but an illimitable 
G ° _ ( Water. When the Maori left port, in 
auaui or some island in the Malay group. 
and pointed the prow of his canoe east or south, 
he was going somewhere and had some notion 
of how he was going to get there. 
The only plausible theory to account for the 
remarkable canoe voyages of the Polynesians 
that I have ever heard advanced I came across 
in the most unlikely place. The pages of a New 
Zealand Government report on the habits and 
characteristics of native birds, made by the care¬ 
taker of an island off the coast of the South 
Island that has been set apart as a sanctuary 
for birds and is visited two or three times a 
year by Government vessels to leave supplies for 
the lone resident. 
The caretaker of Resolution Island, Richard 
Henry, is a keen observer, an open-eyed and open- 
minded naturalist and a philosopher of a rare 
sort. His reports are the most interesting pub¬ 
lic documents I have ever read, and they are 
buried in formidable volumes that nobody reads. 
I have given some of his observations on the 
birds to Forest and Stream from time to time, 
and I am sure that the readers have found them 
worth while and quite different from the work 
of some of our own eminent nature fakirs, who 
have found crows setting up boards of educa¬ 
tion and teaching their young to caw in little 
red school houses of the woods. 
Richard Henry, marooned upon a lone’y island, 
studies his birds and thinks of many things, and 
he writes down what he thinks and puts it into 
his official report, and the Government of New 
Zealand has sense enough not to edit all the 
soul out of his copy and to print it just as he 
writes it. In one of Richard Henry’s reports 
on the birds of Resolution Island, printed about 
eight years ago, I came across the subhead 
“Seals,” and this, in part, is what he had to 
say about seals: 
“In olden times, no doubt, seals were very 
numerous, and when all trave’ing toward their 
breeding islands at one season, the old natives 
may have followed them, or steered the course 
the various parties were going, and thus dis¬ 
pensed with chart and compass and provisions, 
for even now some natives can catch seals with 
a harpoon at sea. To show how tame they used 
to be, one of the old voyagers wrote as follows 
of the seals on Mas-a-fura in 1767: ‘We went 
ashore, but could hardly set a foot down, the 
seals lay so thick. * * * We had to kill a 
notable number of them, because they were con¬ 
tinually running against us.’ And, again, ‘The 
seals on the southern islands were so tame that 
they played fearlessly about the men who were 
skinning those they had just killed.’ That was 
only a hundred and fifty years ago, and with 
millions of such seals as those, there is not a 
shadow of a doubt but that five hundred or a 
thousand years ago the natives could have fol¬ 
lowed them and caught them in the ocean for 
food when on their voyages of discovery. 
“Seals may have inhabited the world for ages 
before man, and have had a hereditary knowl¬ 
edge of all the islands in the sea. They may 
have been as numerous as man is now, for they 
would not care for land animals so long as they 
had sacred breeding places on islands off the 
coasts, and we may have no idea of the number 
of seals that existed before man started to 
butcher them. 
“Norfolk Island is a mere dot in the great 
ocean, and about five hundred miles away from 
anywhere, and to show how hard a thing it is 
to find a small island like that, we may cite the 
hunt our swift steamers had for the ‘Perth¬ 
shire,’ and they might be as long finding Nor¬ 
folk Island if they did not know where it was 
located, yet the old canoe men found it and lived 
there for a while, although they had all left it 
before Captain Cook found it in 1774. Perhaps 
Norfolk Island is Hawaiki (the traditional start¬ 
ing point of the Maori), but we cannot tell, as 
there was no one there to tell us the name of it. 
From its lonely position I have no doub.t it was 
once a great seal rookery, and that the natives 
found it by following the seals w'hen they were 
going home to breed and lived there until they 
were all eaten or driven away. After the seals 
had gone, the natives, who were accustomed to 
the fleshpots, would say: ‘Our soul abhorreth 
bananas and fish; there are plenty of splendid 
trees; let us make a lot of big canoes and follow 
the seals to the southeast at their next breeding 
season.’ This might account for the Maori mi¬ 
gration to New Zealand, because with the pre¬ 
vailing winds they could hardly miss it from 
Norfolk Island. 
“Before the advent of man, New Zealand, 
being without any offensive land animals and 
having abundance of fish, was probably the great¬ 
est old seal rookery in the world, and _ would 
have been quite easy to find by those who could 
keep afloat in canoes, but such people would 
never have been able to go back to Hawaiki if 
there were no seals going to point them out the 
way, and for the same reason they would not 
go willingly to Austrajia. The ‘darkies’ were 
too handy with their spears to suit the seals. 
“The Sandwich Islands were still more lonely, 
for they were about a thousand miles away from 
anywhere, yet the old natives found them, and 
I think brought pigs there. They must have 
known where they were going, or at least were 
confident of finding land somewhere. Those 
islands were almost sure to have been seal 
rookeries, and the seals may have been so tame 
and got so used to the canoes that they would 
come alongside within reach of the clubs and 
spears. 
“If this theory be correct, it would put the 
whole mystery of navigation in a nutshell, be¬ 
cause it would supply' chart, compass and pro¬ 
visions. 
“It is well known now that the seals go away r 
from the Pribiloffs for two-thirds of the year 
and make journeys of many thousands of miles 
and return at the proper time almost to a day. 
This implies that they must always have a so- 
called “instinctive” knowledge of their position 
at sea. 
“According to Dr. Conan Doyle the hair seals 
in the arctic ocean perform a more difficult feat 
than this, which also gives a hint of how the 
native navigators may have used other seals. He 
writes: ‘For breeding purposes the seals all 
come together at a variable spot which is evi¬ 
dently prearranged among them, and as this place 
may be anywhere within many hundreds of 
square miles of floating ice, it is no easy matter 
for the sealer to find it. The means by r which 
(Continued on page 74.) 
