Origin of the Polynesians

Tin* following interesting speculation occurs in an article on Tonga, in the May issue of the magazine Corona: THERE is relatively little disease and almost no crime of any consequence.

In fact, the only blots on an ap parently model society would seem to be a shortage of pure water and a plethora Df corrugated iron, both of which seem to be inevitable features of even the most carefully regulated tropics.

It would be interesting to know where :he Tongans qame from in the very far 3ff days. The official account, given in ;he Annual Reports, says that their early listory is “shrouded in myth,” except -hat an authentic list of Kings goes back or a thousand years. These Kings ruled )ver “a vast area of Polynesia,” their >ower was absolute, and they left mem jrials of great stones and their royal )urial grounds.

The greatest of these memorials is the tfa’amonga, which probably dates from he thirteenth century. It consists of wo great upright coral stones, about six een feet tall, with another, nineteen feet ong, laN. across the top and mortised into hem. The uprights are thought to yeigh between 30 and 40 tons.

The royal burial grounds are four-sided nounds, faced by huge blocks of coral and ismg in terraces to a height of up to wenty feet. These stones are of immense /eight and could only have been built by arge numbers of men and a people skilled i the use of rollers and levers. Tradition ays that many of the stones came from he reefs of distant islands.

It was, in fact, these and other island raditions of migration from the East—

and the monoliths on Easter Island— which led Thor Heyerdahl to organise the Kon-Tiki expedition in an attempt to solve this mystery of Polynesian origins.

A s to the value of his contribution we must await the verdict of the scientists, but meanwhile no one who has sat up in the small, still hours, enthralled by his great stor y’ could bear not to believe

that Heyerdahl is right and that the Polynesians did come on rafts of balsa wood from the coast of South America.

Speculation apart, it is known that about the fifteenth century one of the Tui Tonga, as the ancient kings were called, devolved most of his executive powers on to his brother and retained only his spiritual functions. For four hundred

years thereafter there were two kings in Tonga, one priestly and the other secular.

The islands were discovered by Tasman in 1643 but were not visited again until Wallis arrived in 1767. Cook went there twice, in 1773 and 1777 (and christened them the Friendly Islands), and Bligh in 1789. It was, in fact, in the waters of the Ha-apai Group that the crew of the Bounty mutinied.