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The “Frail Canoe” Theory.

A local writer speaks of the impossiblity of the Maori of New Zealand having come from the Sandwich Isles, on account of the long distance against the prevailing winds, in their frail canoes, thus showing that he had studied neither Polynesian canoes nor Polynesian navigators. The open boat in which Bligh made his four-thousand-mile trip across the Pacific was a very much frailer craft than the deep-sea-going Polynesian vessels. Now, we do not want to bring our Maori folk from the Sandwich Isles to New Zealand, inasmuch as we know that no such movement took place; but we do know that they could have made the voyage had they wanted to do so. We know that voyages occurred both ways between the Sandwich Isles and Tahiti, as also between Tahiti and New Zealand; and hold that, had those Hawaiian folk from the Sandwich Group wanted to prolong their voyages past Tahiti they would certainly not have lost themselves in coming on to New Zealand. They would have obtained sailing directions from the Tahitians, and made the run southward in the usual way by Rarotonga and the Kermadecs. We must object to the many statements made concerning the “frail open canoes” of the Polynesians. Their ocean-going craft were not frail, and even the term “canoe” is really a misnomer; the Polynesian deep-sea vessel more resembles the prau of Indonesia. Moreover, tradition tells us that they were not open—at least, not in foul weather—for when the keen-cyed adepts noted the signs of coming storms, then was heard the cry of “Runaia te waka!” and the trained fitters leaped to the task of fixing the stanchions, the roof-supports and tie-poles, of unrolling and lashing the mat covers, placing the sea-anchors ready for use; and then, with the saving outrigger to prevent capsizing, with sea-anchors down to steady the vessel and lift her bow to stormward, with mat awnings lashed down, two long steer-oars out, the Polynesian voyager calmly awaited the wrath of Hine-moana—the storm at sea.

A famed writer on the Maori has stated that our Polynesian voyager could not have made any regular migration from Indonesia to Polynesia owing to the frailness of their vessels and to the prevailing trade-winds and equatorial currents being contrary. Now, we know that the Malay prau made voyages as far as Australia, and that the Polynesian prau went as far west as New Caledonia and the Solomons, and that both returned to their starting-points. We also know full well that the voyagers who roamed over eighty degrees of the Pacific would not be stopped by another thirty degrees; that the vessels that ranged the rough seas from the Cook Isles to New Zealand and the Chathams, and recrossed them to eastern Polynesia, would reck little of the passage of Torres Straits or the skirting of the northern coast of New Guinea.

I hold that a study of Polynesian philology, religion, technology, sociology, general customs, and physical characteristics, as also the origin of most of their cultivated food plants, calls emphatically for a western origin for the Maori, and is decidedly against the assumption that he came originally from an eastern fatherland.