PACIFIC HISTORY

Hokitika Guardian, 14 February 1933, Page 7

PACIFIC HISTORY

ETHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH.

CAMBRIDGE CURATOR’S VISIT,

An ethnological investigation • Jffito the history of the Pacific is being carried out by Mr O. B. Humphreys, keeper of the Melanesian collection of the Ethnological Museum at Cambridge University, who is at present in Auckland. Mr - Humphreys ' has just completed a tour of the South Pacific, and will visit the various museums in New Zealand, inspecting the arrangement of the Maori collections.

The museum at Cambridge, Mr Humphreys said, owed its inception to a visit paid to Fiji ill 1874 by an Austrian, Baron von Hugel, who went out as the guest of Sir Arthur Gordon, the first ' Governor of the colony. While there he made a unique collection of curios from the Pacific Islands, and also secured a Maori collection, whjoh included some valuable exhibits. It was proposed to re-arrange the collection, and investigations were- being carried out with that end in view^

AN ABSORBING STUDY. “A study of the Pacific and of the various races which have inhabited it is most absorbing,” Mr Humphreys said. “There is Easter Island, with its huge monuments, the. faces of which are graven in a perpetual sneer. Probably the inhabitants who carved . those images came to the Pacific long before the IPolynesians, and. there is frome slight evidence that they may ' have come from the same stock as the Maya people in Yucatan. However, the evidence on this point may be only coincidence.

“In Tonga, too, there is a great gateway, made of two uprights, 19ft 2in and 18ft 2in respectively in height, and joined by a crossbar lift long. They were hewn out of stone called coraline. To get the erossbai** into position, the natives piled eartli round the base of one of the uprights in the form of an inclined plane and eventually hauled the crossbar up the plane and allowed it to fall into position in slots cut in the top of the uprights. The. remains of the piles of earth are still there.

A MYSTERY GATEWAY. “No one knows definitely why the gateway was built, but there is a legend that- hundreds of years ago a king had two sons. Fearing they would quarrel he had the two uprights erected, each to represent a, son. and then joined the two pillars to signi’y that the two were to live in perpetual amity.” Dr G. Elliot-Smith, of London, had put forward a most interesting theory concerning the origin of the various stone images, in the Pacific, Mr Humphreys continued. His view was that the ships of the Phoenicians had sailed into the Pacific years before Balboa had first gazed on it from a peak in Darien. They had been sent by the ancient Egyptians to the ends of the world to sell gold and precious stones, and Dr El'iot-Smith’s theory was that these sea fearers of history had had taught the natives of Pacific islands to build graven images. Mr Humphreys plans to visit *all the principal museums in New Zealand, and. also to spend a few days at Rotorua before he leaves on his return to England next month.