The Origin and Destiny of the Maori.

Maori Record : a journal devoted to the advancement of the Maori people, Volume I, Issue 5, 1 November 1905, Page 7

The Origin and Destiny of the Maori.

CHAPTER lll.— (Continued.) The Batta have been identified by recent investigators as the people who expelled the last emigrants from Sumatra, but not before considerable fusion had taken place between the two people. The Maori tradition says of this emigration that it was a result of internal troubles, not of foreign invasion. Ages after the Caucasian race came from Asia, after their intermixture with autochthones of Sumatra, the Papuans. probably long generations after they had received other white and mixtures of Caucasic and Mongoloid peoples coming from the East, from Annum or Formosa, possibly after they had sent out. a colony to Borneo of which the Dyaks are the descendants, came the Battak. Originally of Caucasic origin, they probably reached the sea via tire Annum Peninsula, for they brought with them, I think, the cannibal and savage rites which characterised other peoples, such as the Orang Benua, which reached the ocean by that route. In Sumatra they

mixed with the Polynesian people there established, for 1 look upon Sumatra, the first Java, as undoubtedly Hawaiiki, and the cradle of the Polynesian race. The fact that the original immigrants into Samoa had no Sanscrit in their language tells of a prior emigration, possibly 1000 years prior to the emigration of the Rarotongan Maori people in the time of Tu-te-rangi-marama. J low many emigrations had taken place before that, how far the people had become changed in type during ages of residence, and a long series of migrations arriving and leaving their shores, till the pure Caucasic original type became gradually more Papuan or more Mongoloid by intermixture, it is impossible to say. But it is reasonable to suppose that the pure type of Caucasic people the earliest arrivals in countless isles of the Pacific, reached the sea from Asia by way of Sumatra. When Uenga or Tangiia, for the names are identical, returned to Hawaiiki to consult the chiefs and tohungas of the home land, he was directed by Tonga-iti to the island of Rarotonga in these words: — “There’s a land named Tumu-te-var-varo ; thither shaft thou go, and there end thy days.” (Percy Smith.) And following instructions, after many adventures, and at least once missing his way. he arrived there, and “lands at Nga-tangia, where, like a good and true Polynesian, he at once proceeds to build a niarae for his gods at Miromiro, close to the present church there.” (Hawaiiki, p. 185.) There had been probably numerous emigrations and many returns, and an oral record kept of the many adventurers’ wanderings. AUTHOR’S NOTE. — I have in my mind the possibility of the Maori word “Wi” meaning iron and “kura” copper, and also the possibility that the Maoris might have forgotten metals they used in Hawaiiki, in the nearly 2000 years they have been separated from that cradle of the race. But I want to know whether the purest form of Polynesian, spoken when the first Samoans left, contained words' for the metals. And I cannot myself find any knowledge of metals by their ancestors, believed in by tlie Maoris I have asked. As to their forgetting, I cannot, think so, and I shall subsequently state reasons. But I can assure my readers that I shall only be too happy to throw open a column of the Maori Record to discussions of any moot or doubtful point, as I hunger only for truth and the establishment of reliable history. But as I don’t insist myself, where decision is uncertain and hard to acquire, I hope to be untroubled with the prejudiced man, who is cock-sure he is right. In such investigations the most valuable aid is the admirably open mind apparent in Mr Percy Smith. CHAPTER IV. THE NEOLITHIC MAORI. Isolation from civilisation has kept the Maori neolithic through the ages, whilst the more favourably situated of his Caucasic race have risen to be the rulers of mankind. Te Whiti says that the gods withheld the taonga (proper-t-es, attributes) from the Maori and gave them to the tauiwi (Gentiles). The Southern Hemisphere in Oceanica has also filled a felt want of scientists by providing specimens of men of

a paleolithic age. In the Encyclop. Brit., Vol. XXV. (1902) we find “ ... Too little is known of the ruder ancient tribes of Africa to furnish a definition of the state of culture which might have co-existed with the use of paleolithic implements. Information for this purpose, however, can now be furnished from a more outlying region. This is Tasmania, where, as in the adjacent continent of Australia, the survival of marsupial animals indicates long isolation from the rest of the world. Here till far into the 19th century the Englishman could watch the natives striking off flakes of stone, trimming them into convenient shape for grasping them in the hand, and edging them by taking off successive chips on one face only. . . . The Tasmanians, when they came in contact with the European explorers and settlers, were not the broken outcasts they afterwards became. They were a savage people, perhaps the lowest in culture of any known, but leading a normal, self-supporting, and not unhappy life, which had probably changed little during untold ages. The accounts, imperfect as they are, which have been preserved of their arts, beliefs and habits, thus present a picture of the arts, beliefs and habits of tribes whose place in the Stone Age was a great deal lower than that of Paleolithic man of the Quarternary period.” The Tasmanians were probably autochthones, and isolation had preserved to them the credit of such progress as they had made. There is no record of the migration of the Tasmanians from any other country. The Maoris, on the contrary, have well-authenticated traditions of a migration from the mainland of Asia, they speak a language which has it® home in Central Asia, and isolation has kept them, in point of culture, confined to the civilisation of the land they left at the period they left it, together with any progress they may themselves have made, or picked up from other neolithic peoples with whom they came in contact in ages of wandering. In that progress the knowledge and use of metals had not- been reached. The culture of Asia as they saw it and left it was in all probability that of the Dolmen -builders, though even some of the latter had entered the bronze age. The contention is that the Maoris are a Caucasic people, of non-Aryan language, and that they reached the Pacific from one of the primitive homes of the Caucasic race, and the Alpine branch of it, in Central Asia. To discover the time of their migration it is necessary to discover th© age of the civilisations of Asia, which in sequence used bronze and iron in warfare, the maufacture of implements of agriculture, ornaments, etc., etc. I think that it will be found that these civilisations had, for many tnousands of years, been barriers across which in Asia neolithic man could not pass, without coming into contact, and unpleasant, contact, with weapons of iron and bronze. £

The facts adduced by Logan are sufficient to warn off the anxious and discriminating inquirer from India and the Ganges Valley at so late a date as B.C. 450. In a former contribution to the Press of Canterbury, quoted by the writer in the New Zealand Magazine, Mr Smith also says :“The incursion of an Aryan race into India about 4000 years ago forced the Poly-

nesian race to retreat, but not at once. They were gradually forced southwards and seawards, and eventually to Indonesia.” Here Mr Smith has reached nearer the remoter period when the Eastern Polynesians came first to view the Pacific Ocean, but the inhabitants whom the Aryan® defeated were not apparently those warrior clans.

The passage I alluded to in Logan’s writings is this:“lt is not probable that the Aryan became predominant in the basin of the Ganges more than 2000 years B.C. But it is equally improbable that a race which gave civilisation and a ruling caste to Egypt 2000 or 3000 years previously did not begin to affect the ethnology of India until this period. The preservation of such a race, during so long a period of rigid seclusion, would be an ethnic anomaly.” That is exactly my contention, and similar as well as other considerations have evidently driven scientific men to place the departure of the Maori Polynesian from the mainland of Asia in neolithic times. As it is most important that the antiquity of the civilisations of adjoining countries, and for my purpose particularly, that of the ancient kingdom of Irania, should be fully understood, I go further into the question. This is also necessary in order to identify the continental nations from whom the Maoris acquired Semitic manners and customs, probably some noses, and it was thought the fishing-net, but most certainly the art of faring on the sea and the mechanical means to do so. It is probable that the Semitic customs of the Maoris outnumber their Far Eastern ones, and the latter receive special mention by Logan. The Semitic origin of many so convinced Te Whiti and Tohu that the claim the Bible as the record of their race. Nevertheless it is very necessary to account for the possession of Burmese habits as well as Semitic, and this will be thoroughly done, I believe, in a way satisfactory to others besides myself, and, 1 hope, to the conviction of all.

But first as to th« civilisations they did not acquire. Dr Samuel Laing, in “Human Origins,” has devoted much space to a consideration of the length respectively of the historical period and the neolithic. Of the most ancient e:vilisations he thus concludes his investigations:— “Chaldean chronology therefore leads to almost exactly the same results as that of Egypt. In each case a standard or measuring-rod of authentic historical record, of certainly not less than 6000 and probably 7000 years from the present time; and in each case we find ourselves at this remote date in presence, not of rude beginnings, but of a civilisation already ancient and far advanced. We have populous cities, celebrated temples, an organised state of agriculture and of the industrial and fine arts, writing and books so long known that their origin is lost in myth; religions in which advanced philosophical and moral ideas are already developed; astronomical systems which imply a long course of accurate observations. How long this pre-historic age may have lasted, and how many centuries it may have taken to develop such a civilisation, from the primitive beginnings of neolithic and paleolithic origins, is a matter of conjecture. Bunsen thinks it may have taken 10,000 years, but there are no dates from which we can infer the time that may be required for civilisation to

grow up. by spontaneous evolution among nations where it is not aided by contact with more advanced civilisations from without. All we can infer is that it must have required an immense time, probably much longer than that embraced by the subsequent historical record.” (To be Continued.)