Northward-pointing Traits in Polynesian Culture

(26) Only a few traces of the memory of a North Pacific origin need be pointed out in Polynesia. Ratzel suggests that as most of the Polynesian and South Asiatic hooks are unbarbed, the barbed ones that we find, especially in New Zealand, are to be assigned to the North Pacific. An occasional ornament is met with in the islands made of walrus ivory. And along with this may be placed the strange figure called the marakihau often found in the carved houses of the East Coast natives; with the lower part of the body like the tail of a fish, and two long tubes or tusks issuing from the monstrous mouth, it might be explained as a reminiscence of the walrus, as Mr. Percy Smith suggests. The use of combined leggings and sandals suggests the Indian mocassin, and the tattooing of the leg from knee to ankle and even to toe so frequent in the islands seems to indicate a former use of leg-coverings in a colder climate. The ancient pihanga in the Maori house, a square opening in the roof covered with a louvre, takes us to the houses of the North Pacific peoples, and so does the takuahi or hearth defined by four stone slabs on end, and the moulding of the earth up the sides and half over the roof, with the floor half underground. The reckoning of time by nights shows a far north origin, in a zone in which the long nights were more than the days and more important. The name for evening, ahiahi, the time of fires, used all over Polynesia has no tropical or subtropical origin; whilst the division of the year into two great seasons, winter and summer, and the half-dozen names for the former and only one for the latter (Raumati), seems to point up to north temperate or subarctic regions, where the winter is the dominant season, and the short summer breaks forth with sudden warmth, page 63dryness, and splendour. And, to close this enumeration, there is a picture of a North Pacific winter in the translation of an Easter Island inscribed tablet, recited by a native to the Americans who visited the islet in 1886: "In that happy land, that beautiful land, where Romaha formerly lived with his beloved Hangora, that beautiful land that was governed by gods from heaven, who lived in the water when it was cold, where the black-and-white pointed spider would have mounted to heaven, but was prevented by the bitterness of the cold." The chief god of Easter Island has the shape of a bird, and the gods mentioned here are probably water-birds.

(27) These are only indications; but, if taken with the large number of ethnological resemblances between the North Pacific and Polynesia, the megalithic route and the spirit-way of the Maoris, we may accept it as certain that they have no mere fanciful significance.