TALES OF THE TAUPO COUNTRY

Taupo Times, Volume III, Issue 110, 5 March 1954, Page 1

TALES OF THE TAUPO COUNTRY

THE COMING OF THE MAORI

(By

R.H.

W.)

III The area which became the home of the people now know as the Polynesians, to whom the Maori folk of Ao-tea-roa, Rarotonga, and other islands belong,, is best pictured as a great triangle. The three cornqrs of this Polynesian triangle contain Hawaii in the north, New Zealand in the sc-uth, and Easter Island in the east. To visualise the way in which the Polynesians peopled this vast area, imagine two corridors, as it were, entering the eastern side of the triangle. The southern-most of these two routes runs through New Guinea, the Solomans and ends about Fiji, near and just outside the maps left-hand sidc of the triangle, which runs from Hawaii to New Zealand, passing between Fiji and Tonga. The northern route parallels the southern, passing through the islands of Micronesia, the Carolines, Marshalls and Gilberts. it is by this northern route that it is generally considered today that the ancestors of the Maori people entered the Pacific. At the centre of the Polynesian triangle lie the Society Islands (Tahiti), and this is regarded as I being the hub from which in general the people spread out over the islands of the triangle. From Tahiti a line drawn through Rarotonga reaches New Zealand, described by its Polynesian discoverer, Kupe, as "a great land covered with high mists in Tiritiri-o-te-moana, the open sea that lies to the south." ! An old Maori proverb" quoted by New Zealand's great anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter H. Buck), says "Waves of the ocean are breasted by the bow of the canoe, Waves of men are surmounted by human courage." As Te Rangi Hiroa implies, it expresses a belief worthy of a people who surpassed the achievements of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean and the Vikings in the North, Atlantic and became the supreme navigators^ of history. What manner of men were they? Scientists, as the result of careful observations and innumerable measurements, have divided human beings into three main divisions, Negroids, Mongoloids, and Europoids or Caucasians. The result of studies made on Polynesian people living in all parts of Polynesia makes it evident that the master mariners of the Pacific are Europoid, and that, like other Europoids (such as the pakeha peoples of New Zealand), they show a wide variation in head form. And, like the pakeha, they are not characterised by the woolly hair, black skins and thin lower legs of the Negroids nor by the flat face, short stature, and drooping inner eye-fold of the Mongoloids.

Obviously, through the centuries during which the Polynesian ancestors moved toward and into the Pacific, intermixture would take place. But sufficient for the moment is the fact that a tall, athletic people without the Negroid woolly hair or the Mongoloid eyefold, had the ability and courage to penetrate the Pacific seaways. (Continued on Page 2)

TALES OF THE TAUPO COUNTRY

(Continued from Page 1) Hawaiki is the Maori People's symbol for the far distant home, lost in the mists of Time, from whence came the ancestors of the first dicoverers of the heart of the Pacific. As it has been put, they set out from Hawaiki on the trail of the rising sun. And to Hawaiki the souls of their dead returned, they believed, along the golden ocean trail of the setting sun. Whither those souls arrived we know not, for, as some nameless Maori poet has said, "They have passed along the path that beckons the thousands, the_j)ath that calls the myriads, the ffath that sends back no messeriger." Almost every Polynesian island has its traditional departing place of spirits, from which the human spirit set out on its return journey to the west. The spirit was regarded as having a homing instinct and always it was to a western homeland that it was said to return. The view of modern research may be summarised by saying that the Polynesian ancestors probably lived in some part of India and worked east. They must have sojourned in Indonesia, and there the sea salt, as it were, entered their blood and they became seamen. When Mongoloid pressure became oppressive they turned their gaze eastward and embarked on one of the greatest of all adventures. (To be continued).