K.R. Howe: The Quest For Origins...

Reviewed by HUGH LARACY

(Full title: The Quest For Origins: Who First Discovered New Zealand and the Pacific Islands?)

This is not just a good book, it is an important one. Indeed, there has been an explicit need for it since Sunday, June 14, 1722. On the afternoon of that day the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen chanced upon Samoa, and was surprised to find it inhabited by people similar to those he had already met at Easter Island. (Namely, Polynesians, although that term did not come into usage until more than a century later.)

Roggeveen thereupon committed his puzzlement to his journal. He asked from whence they might have originated and by what means they could have reached their remote Oceanic strongholds. In so doing he initiated what has become a major historical enquiry.

Later in the century, James Cook and his associates supplied tentative, but sound, answers: the Polynesians had come out of the west, from Asia, voyaging skilfully by canoe.

Subsequent research, especially over the past 20 years, has greatly refined this response. It has yielded a comprehensive, if not complete, answer that is replete with dates and details.

The Polynesians were the last of the world's peoples to emerge as a distinctive ethno-cultural group. Deriving from south China, their ancestors moved southeastwards along the island chain, developing advanced maritime skills along the way. Then, about 3500 years ago, some of them ventured from Vanuatu to hitherto uninhabited Fiji, and later to Tonga. From there they proceeded to occupy a vast area bounded by Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand, and so became the first settlers of the last remaining unclaimed human habitat. Their final landfall, about 800 years ago, in this universe of unknown seas was New Zealand.

It is a heroic story and Howe presents the current state of knowledge worthily and well. But his aim is greater than that. He is especially concerned to trace the growth of our knowledge of the subject, for answers have varied mightily. This is not just because of the kind and quantity of data used as evidence but because of the wild (not to say, crazy and irresponsible) pre-suppositions of many of the respondents. Professor Howe found in some of their recent excesses a scholarly call to arms.

The Polynesians have had the rare fate for a native people of being generally favourably viewed by those of an incoming culture. The Europeans have consistently admired not only their sailing abilities, but their stratified society, their physique, their women, their military prowess, their taste for ceremony, their readiness to learn new ways and the places they live in. This favourable disposition (which was not without considerable influence in shaping the Treaty of Waitangi) was shown in early efforts to explain the Maori past by including it in that of the settlers.

Thus, the first representation, attested in voluminous writings and designed to explain why the Polynesians were such agreeable natives and possessed of superior abilities, was that they were descended from a lost tribe of Jews. In the 1870s the notion of the Semitic Maori (and Hawaiian, etc) was replaced by that of the Aryan Maori; that is, that they were merely sun-tanned cousins of the Europeans and descended from the same ancestral stock. This notion, accepted by Peter Buck, the greatest of Maori scholars, endured into the 1960s.

By that time, though, an assault on what was essentially 19th-century thinking was stirring. In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl, arguing erroneously but dramatically for American origins, undertook the highly publicised Kon Tiki expedition; and in 1957 Andrew Sharp upset cherished romantic myths by suggesting that accident and uncertainty influenced the settlement of Polynesia more than was commonly acknowledged. Whatever their shortcomings, these efforts demonstrated - productively, as it happened - the need for much critical research.

In what is, among other things, a study in the history of ideas, Howe explains the intellectual contexts in which the various interpretations of Polynesian pre-history have arisen. He then moves on to the professionalisation and institutionalisation of the study, which brought with them the carbon dating, genetic analysis, sophisticated linguistic analysis and experimental voyaging on which current knowledge is based. Thanks to their findings, the questions still remaining about the origins of Polynesians pertain mainly to their pre- or proto-Polynesian condition, and the answers lie in Southeast Asia.

In tracing the advance of knowledge by relating the quest to the results, Howe makes his subject accessible to a wide range of readers. He also deals sympathetically with those whose ideas have since been discredited. It is a further merit of the book, though, that he is much less indulgent towards the New Age enthusiasts of the occult and the esoteric who have also been drawn to construct their own ill-founded versions of Polynesian history. Like Christ clearing the money lenders from the Temple, he deals efficiently with the votaries of Waitaha, of the Kaimanawa wall, of pre-Tasman explorers, of advanced ancient visitors from Egypt, of lost civilisations, of Celtic colonists and of other such fabulists who might ensnare the naive and the ill-informed. Wilfully defying any careful, research-tested consensus, they do not deserve any sympathy. But their presence and pertinacity does highlight the need for continued historical vigilance, and intellectual industry.

The Quest for Origins is not only informative. It is extremely useful. If Howe does not get a literary award for it, he should at least get the Queen's Service Medal.

Penguin $29.95

* Hugh Laracy teaches Pacific history at the University of Auckland.