Now, in the Marquesas, Gattanewa, the friend of Porter, who was
descended from the first colonists of the Tongan portion of the
archipelago, had only eighty-eight predecessors. At Hawaï, the
genealogy of the Tamehameha, according to M. Remy, is contained in
seventy-five verses. In 1840, according to Williams, Rarotonga was
governed by the twenty-ninth descendant of Karika, the founder of
the colony. In the Gambier Islands M. Maigret saw the twenty-seventh
reigning chief since the arrival of the first colonists from
Rarotonga.
Hale has shown very clearly that the Hawaïan genealogy contains at
the outset, like many others in Europe, some fabulous personages. He
considered it necessary to remove the first twenty-two verses. Some
such correction should very probably be made in that of the Marquesas
Islanders. As to those of Rarotonga and the Gambier Islands they are
too recent to have been already contaminated by fable.
Hale, guided by considerations which I cannot here discuss,
attributes to each verse of these genealogies the value of a
_generation_, from twenty-five to thirty years. Thomson and M. Remy,
however, having had time to gather more precise information, regard
them as indicating merely _reigns_. Calculating the mean duration of
these reigns from that given by the list of French kings from Clovis
to Louis XVII., we obtain as a result 21·13 years.
According to these data, the arrival of the Tongans in the Marquesas
Islands must have taken place in the year 417 of our era; that of the
Tahitians in about 701; Karika must have colonized Rarotonga in 1207,
and the Gambier Islands have been peopled in 1270.
For New Zealand we have a double source of information, and the
results thus obtained agree so well that we cannot doubt their
accuracy. The genealogies of the greater number of the Maori chiefs
go back as far as those bold pioneers whose history I have related.
Thomson, who has examined several, considers that the number of
chiefs who have succeeded each other in every family since the
colonization, may be estimated at about twenty. Taking the kings of
England as a term of comparison, he attributes to the _reign of each
chief_ a duration of 22-1/35 years. These data took him back to the
year 1419. The list of French kings would only give the year 1457.
On the other hand, in one of the songs preserved by Sir George Grey,
there is an account of the history of the son of Hotunui, one of the
colonizing chiefs of New Zealand, and of his immediate descendants.
At the fourth generation a daughter was born, “from whom,” the legend
adds, “are descended in eleven generations all the principal chiefs
now living of the tribe of Ngalipaoa.” Taking thirty years for each
generation, we find that the migration of Hotunui took place 450
years before the time when Sir George Grey received the document
(about 1850), which carries us back to the year 1400.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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