Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  There are still debates about where, exactly, these ancient Aryans lived, but again something can be deduced from their vocabulary. They had words for mountain, river, lake, and marsh, and for animals associated with forests: bear, wolf, fox, beaver, otter, and elk. In several of the daughter languages, the word for wolf has undergone what is known as “taboo deformation” (which is what happens when people replace a word like “damn,” which is blasphemous, with the inoffensive “darn”), suggesting that the creature was highly feared. They seem to have had words for only two kinds of fish—trout and salmon—but for many types of birds, including raven, eagle, falcon, crane, thrush, crow, sparrow, pheasant, owl, and stork. They had words for honeybees and leeches, words for hornets, mice, and fleas. They had a word for snow and a word for berry. They had a story about the slaying of a dragon and a myth about the theft of fire.

  Quite unexpectedly, what was in essence a highly technical field—philology is a matter of rigorous phonological and morphological comparison—had opened up a whole new historical vista, giving Europeans a vivid and romantic new sense of who they were. It also offered a new way of thinking about their relationship to other peoples in a vision of kinship that extended across half the world. “To learn,” wrote one enthusiast, “that many nations, separated by distance, by ages of strife and bloodshed, by differing religious creeds, and by ancient customs, yet had a common source of birth, that their forefathers spoke the same tongue, and sat in one council-hall, was as delightful to the man of pure intellect, as it was valuable to the student of history.”

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF the comparative method of linguistics has been described as one of the great intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century, contributing enormously to our understanding of world history. But it also resulted in a number of inanities, one of which pertains directly to the problem of Polynesian origins. Advances in Indo-European philology were achieved by adding more and more languages for the purpose of comparison, but outside of Eurasia, most of the world’s languages were poorly documented. (In some regions of the world, including much of Melanesia, this is still the case.) Polynesia was one of the exceptions. So much linguistic data had been collected by explorers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that by the mid-nineteenth it was possible to establish with some certainty that there was an identifiable Oceanic language family, which came to be known as Malayo-Polynesian.

  Then, in 1841, the celebrated German philologist Franz Bopp, a pioneer of Indo-European studies, made the further startling suggestion that there was a direct link between the Indo-European and Malayo-Polynesian language families. Specifically, Bopp argued that Malayo-Polynesian was a decayed form of Sanskrit. A second, even more radical suggestion followed: that Malayo-Polynesian actually predated Sanskrit and that all the languages of the Indo-European family were in fact descended from an earlier incarnation of the languages of the South Seas. According to this theory, Polynesians were the “remnants of a race once extensively dominating in Asia,” who had colonized the Pacific in “very very remote antiquity.”

  This suggestion was taken up in some very influential quarters, including by Max Müller, Oxford University’s famous Sanskritist and translator of the Vedas. “Strange as it may sound,” he wrote, “to hear the language of Homer . . . spoken as an offshoot of the Sandwich Islands, it was not very long ago that all the Greek and Latin scholars of Europe shook their heads at the idea of tracing the roots of the classical languages back to Sanskrit.” No one could demonstrate decisively which way it went—whether Malayo-Polynesian was a form of Sanskrit, or Sanskrit a form of Malayo-Polynesian—but by the end of the nineteenth century the most influential scholars writing about Polynesia were convinced that, one way or another, the languages of Europe and those of the remote Pacific shared a common root.

  In fact, this was incorrect. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, vast quantities of ink were spilt in attempts to prove the validity of the thesis. One of those who embarked on this project was the New Zealander Edward Tregear. Tregear was both a student of Polynesian languages and a devotee of Müller’s, and in 1885 he set out his claims in a little volume entitled The Aryan Maori. In it he argued that the Māori were descendants “of a pastoral people, afterwards warlike and migratory,” and that this could be proven using nothing more than Māori language and myth. The Māori language, Tregear wrote, had preserved, “in an almost inconceivable purity,” a memory of various aspects of Aryan life—“animals, implements, etc.”—which had been “lost to the Maori for centuries.”

  Tregear’s goal was to demonstrate the existence of what are known as linguistic “survivals,” echoes of lost knowledge or forgotten experience that remain obscurely encoded in modern words. (An English example is the word “footman,” which in common parlance means a male household servant but which once referred to a servant who literally ran on foot beside his master’s carriage.) Noting that the ancient Aryans had been herders and that most if not all Indo-European languages have words for animals like cow, horse, and sheep, Tregear argued that traces of terms for these important beasts ought to be discoverable in Māori. He was aware, of course, that no cow, horse, goat, sheep, or pig had ever set foot in New Zealand before they were brought in European ships, but this only reinforced the argument. “Knowing that the Maoris were strangers to the sight of certain animals,” he wrote, “I resolved to try to find if there was any proof in the verbal composition by which I could trace if they had once been familiar with them.”

  Combing the Māori lexicon for traces of the Latin equus (horse), the Greek ois (sheep), and especially the Sanskrit gaus (cow), Tregear found what he believed to be many instances. “I found kaupare, to turn in a different direction,” he wrote, “and was struck by its resemblance to [Sanskrit] go-pala, a herdsman.” He looked at kahu, meaning “surface,” and the expression kahu o te rangi (sometimes translated as “cloak of heaven”) and recognized “‘cow of heaven,’ a sentence to be met with in every work concerning the Aryans.” In the Māori word kahurangi, meaning “wandering” or “unsettled,” he discovered “sky-cow,” an Aryan metaphor for clouds. In kahupapa, meaning “bridge,” he found “flat cow,” on which the ancient Aryans crossed their streams. In kauruki, meaning “smoke,” he saw “cow-dung,” used for fuel by pastoralists the world over. In kauhoa, meaning a “litter” or “stretcher,” he discovered “cow-friend”; and in mata-kautete, meaning “sharp teeth of flint lashed to a piece of wood,” he astonished the reader by deciphering “cow-titty,” a reference, presumably, to the implement’s shape.

  One doesn’t have to be a linguist to recognize that The Aryan Maori exhibits some pretty fanciful etymological reasoning. It was the subject of a wicked satire in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute by a “crotchety but highly intelligent” lawyer who was conversant in both the principles of comparative linguistics and the Māori language, and who parodied Tregear’s method with his own pseudo-derivation of the phrase “a cock-and-bull story.” (This involved an absurd tale about a group of Aryans who visit New Zealand and discover a “large grunting ground parrot” known as a kakapo. When they return to their homeland, their account of this creature is “received by their stay-at-home Aryan countrymen with ‘incredulity and ridicule,’ hence the first ‘cock and bull story.’”)

  Stung by this criticism, Tregear nevertheless refused to concede that there was anything wrong with his methodology. But the truth is he was not doing it right. The comparative method of linguistics works, but only if it is performed according to the strictest conventions. In order to prove that words in different languages are related, correspondences between them must be consistent and predictable. If p in one language becomes f in another under certain circumstances, it must do so in all comparable cases. This principle of regularity of sound change is considered the foundation of the method and the one unbreakable rule. Tregear, who was entirely self-taught, did not fully grasp this, but he was not alone. Even man
y people who should have known better were swept away in the latter half of the nineteenth century by a “mania” for tracing everyone—Brits, Balts, Celts, Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Polynesians—back to the “cradle in Central Asia.”

  TODAY IT IS quite difficult to see how anyone could ever have supposed that the oceangoing peoples of the remote Pacific, with their outriggers and their fishhooks and their mother-of-pearl, could have been descended from the ancient herders and horsemen of the Eurasian Steppe, those wolf-fearing, bride-leading, milk-drinking tribes, with their axles and chattels and their imperishable fame. But the Aryan theory of Polynesian origins made sense to nineteenth-century Europeans in ways that it could never make sense to us. It dovetailed with their passion for folklore and history, which new methodologies in comparative linguists were expanding in fascinating new ways. And it fit the Romantic zeitgeist of the period, with its love of foreign and exotic subjects and its fascination with anything ancient, primitive, or remote.

  For writers and thinkers in Europe, the Aryan theory of Polynesian origins was part of a much larger thesis about language and history, a small but intriguing piece of a vast intellectual puzzle. For that subset of Europeans who sought a home for themselves in the remote islands of the Pacific, it may also, as the historian K. R. Howe has argued, have represented a means of taming these strange new worlds. Once brought into the Indo-European fold, Polynesians were no longer “primitive aliens,” but people with a history, mythology, and culture that Europeans “could understand, relate to and willingly embrace.” One can see this as an act of usurpation: the annexation of Polynesian history by Europeans and “a feat of intellectual occupation, possession and control.” But it was also an assertion of kinship. In tracing the source of Polynesian culture to one of the oldest branches—if not, indeed, the very trunk—of the Indo-European family tree, the Aryan theory reflected a nineteenth-century desire for a shared point of origin—a sort of folkloric equivalent of Darwin’s Descent of Man—that would unite the various peoples of the world in a kind of grand universal genealogy. Europeans and Polynesians, as Tregear liked to think of them, were just two branches of one great family—the Aryans of the East and the Aryans of the West, met again in the wide Pacific, to which they had both come as voyagers and colonists, “seeking new homes beneath strange stars.”

  A Viking in Hawai‘i

  Abraham Fornander

  Abraham Fornander, ca. 1878.

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SWEDEN, STOCKHOLM. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

  THE ARYAN THEORY of Polynesian origins can look like little more than a crackpot detour in the history of debates about who the islanders of the remote Pacific were. But its fiercest proponents were also some of the best nineteenth-century scholars of Polynesian languages, the most committed recorders of Polynesian traditions, and the staunchest defenders and champions of a heroic narrative in which Polynesians star as the greatest seafarers in human history. The man who was primarily responsible for this story line was a Swede named Abraham Fornander, who cast up on the islands of Hawai‘i in the mid-nineteenth century and died one of the foremost collectors of Hawaiian lore.

  Fornander was typical of a certain kind of European who could be found roaming the Pacific in this period. Born in 1812 into a middle-class family on an island off the coast of Sweden, he was sent to university at sixteen. There he fell under the spell of Sweden’s Romantic poets, whose popular historical ballads depicted the ancient Scandinavians (newly christened “the Vikings”) as a rugged and daring tribe of adventurers with a restless love of the sea. In 1831, for reasons that may have had to do with a failed love affair, Fornander abandoned his university studies and ran away to sea. For the next decade he lived the life of a wanderer, making his living as a sailor out of ports in Europe, North America, and the West Indies. He sailed to the Azores, Saint Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, and up and down the coast of South America. He doubled Cape Horn three times and crossed the Pacific from California to Kamchatka. Of this period of his life he later wrote, “I will say nothing of the hardships, the escapes from danger, the vicissitudes of life which I experienced . . . I have stood beneath the portals of death several times, ashore and on the sea.”

  In 1841, at the age of twenty-nine, Fornander signed on with the Ann Alexander, a whaler out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The ship was bound for the South Seas fishery by way of Cape Horn, and he joined as a harpooner. In whaling stories of the nineteenth century, the harpooner is a man of unusual strength and daring who is often depicted as an outsider, set apart from the rest of the crew by the danger and difficulty of his job. The four pagan harpooners in Moby-Dick are good examples of the type: Daggoo the giant African, Tashtego the Indian from Gay Head, Fedallah the Zoroastrian, and, of course, Queequeg the tattooed South Sea Islander. Fornander, who was tall and broad-chested, could almost have been a character in one of Melville’s books, as the two men actually crossed paths in the spring of 1843, the one shipping out of the port of Lahaina just as the other arrived.

  When Fornander jumped ship in Honolulu after more than a decade at sea, he had found the home from which he would never depart. In 1847, he took the unusual step of swearing an oath of allegiance to the then-reigning monarch, King Kamehameha III, and becoming a naturalized citizen of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. This was something few Europeans of the period bothered to do; barely a third of the foreign-born residents of Honolulu were citizens. But naturalization was required of anyone who wanted to work for the government or marry a Hawaiian, and Fornander, who was then thirty-five, was in love with a twenty-three-year-old Hawaiian named Alanakapu Kauapinao.

  Pinao, as she was familiarly known, was the daughter of a former governor of the island of Moloka‘i. She had a distinguished genealogy, with chiefly ancestors on both sides and strong connections to the ruling Kamehameha dynasty. She was Fornander’s first teacher of Hawaiian, and the first chants and genealogies he learned were those of her family. But Pinao’s influence extended beyond the historical and linguistic knowledge she was able to impart. Fornander’s politics were consistently pro-Polynesian and anti-Evangelical. Like Melville, he disliked the humorless brand of Calvinism imported to Hawai‘i by missionaries from New England, and he was a strong supporter of the Hawaiian monarchy. Culturally and temperamentally predisposed to side with the Hawaiian elite, he was also influenced by his attachment to Pinao. “I have a native wife and family,” he wrote, “thus the native interest is my interest.”

  In 1849, the Fornanders’ first child, a daughter named Catherine Kaonohiulaokalani, was born. In 1851, a second daughter, Johanna Margaretha Naokalani Kalanipo‘o, was born, but died before her second birthday. In 1853, a third daughter, Anna Martha Alaikauokoko, was stillborn. In 1855, a son, Abraham Kawelolani Kanipahu, was also stillborn, probably prematurely. In 1857, two months before her tenth wedding anniversary, Pinao gave birth to her fifth child, a boy named Charles Theodore Kalililani Kalanimanuia. Four days later, she died from complications of childbirth, and a week and a half later the baby also died. Fornander, who was only in his mid-forties, was shattered. Though he lived to be almost seventy-five, he never remarried and would write that his “holiest memory lies in a Hawaiian grave.” Of the five children born to him, the only one to survive was Catherine, a solemn-looking child who inherited her mother’s dark hair and dark eyes.

  Such a shocking succession of infant and maternal deaths was by no means unheard of in the nineteenth century, but it is important to see these events in the Hawaiian context. Inhabitants of isolated or remote regions where there has been little or no contact with the outside world are often described as “epidemiologically naive.” What this means is that they have limited immunity to diseases like influenza and measles that are endemic in other parts of the world, and when exposed to them they often suffer high rates of death. One of the best-known examples comes from the pandemic of 1918, in which certain populations, notably indigenous Alaskans and Pacific Islanders, died at rates that were four, five, and in
some cases even ten times those of other populations. The pandemic is thought to have killed between 3 and 6 percent of the global population; in Western Samoa, 20 percent of the population died.

  In the nineteenth-century Pacific, this scenario played itself out over and over. As early as the 1830s, missionaries in the Society Islands were already beginning to speak of depopulation. There were major epidemics in Tahiti of smallpox in 1841, dysentery in 1843, scarlet fever in 1847, measles in 1854. Much the same story can be told of Hawai‘i, which was also subject to wave after wave of imported disease. In 1848 and 1849, when Pinao was pregnant with her first child, a series of devastating epidemics struck the Hawaiian Islands. Measles, arriving from Mexico on an American frigate, and whooping cough, on a ship from California, hit at the same time, killing an estimated ten thousand people. Whole villages were prostrate, wrote one observer, “there not being persons enough in health to prepare food for the sick,” while “a large portion of the infants born in the Islands in 1848, even as large a proportion as nine-tenths in some parts, are supposed to be already in their graves.” No doubt there were other diseases in the mix as well; mumps, which had been in the islands some years earlier, was reported again, as were “pleurisy,” “bilious fever,” and something that was probably dysentery. The combined assault was especially hard upon the very young and the very old. “The aged,” wrote one observer, “have almost all disappeared from among us.”

  Although the absolute size of pre-contact populations in the islands of Polynesia is often debated, the overall trajectory is not. From a high of something like 250,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the population of the Hawaiian Islands had been reduced to less than 40,000 by the century’s end. In New Zealand, the Māori population declined by nearly two-thirds over the same period. And in the Marquesas, where estimates put the number of inhabitants before contact with Europeans at approximately 50,000, the population crashed so completely that by 1926 there were just 2,225 Marquesans left. Robert Louis Stevenson, visiting the Marquesas toward the end of the nineteenth century, remarked gloomily that songs and dances could no longer be performed, because there was no one left who knew the words and movements, and that coffins, newly arrived in the islands, had become objects of prestige.