AN ACCOUNT OF THE POLYNESIAN RACE ITS ORIGIN AND MIGRATIONS AND THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE HAWAIIAN PEOPLE TO THE TIMES OF KAMEHAMEHA I. BY ABRAHAM FORNANDER, CIRCUIT JUDGE OF THE ISLAND OF MAUI,' H. I. VOL. II. LONDON: TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL. 1880 portfolio [All rights reserved.] 154 22-29 RUS Patter 10-25-29 GN 670 1F73 PREFACE. IN issuing this, the second volume of "An Account of the Polynesian Race," &c., and the "Ancient History of the Hawaiian People," the author gratefully acknowledges the kind reception which the first volume received. It was a hazardous undertaking to publish a work of that kind ten thousand miles away from the author's residence, with no opportunity of revising the sheets as they came from the press, or preparing an index when the volume was finished. The well-known ability and care of his publishers, the world-known Messrs. Trübner & Co., grappled bravely and successfully with the difficulties of a MS. which, owing to peculiar circumstances, had not been clean copied for the press before it was sent away. To Stephen Spencer, Esq., formerly Chief Clerk to the Interior Department of the Hawaiian Government, and now residing in London, the author is under great obligations for the kind and vicarious supervision that he gave to the proof-reading, and for the thoroughly faultless rendition of the Polynesian words, phrases, and entire chants occurring in the work. To the gentlemen who compose the staff of such lead ing literary journals as the "Westminster Review," the "British Quarterly Review," and the "Academy," the author sends his warm Aloha for the notices of kindness and encouragement with which they met his efforts to bring the Polynesian folklore within the zone of scientific research; to collect the broken and distorted rays of that folklore into one historical focus; and, by following the indications thus obtained, to seek the homesteads of the earlier Polynesians, where they themselves say that they ought to be found. The author may have startled some and shocked others by seeking a Polynesian ancestry beyond the Malay Archipelago; but their own undoubted folklore, their legends and chants, gave no warrant for stopping there. They spoke of continents, and not of islands, as their birthplace. They referred to events in the far past which have hitherto been considered as the prehistoric heirlooms of Cushites and Semites alone. And the language in which that folklore is conveyed, whatever its subsequent modifications and admixtures, will be found, on a critical examination, to be fundamentally Arian of a pre-Vedic type before the inflections were fully developed or generally adopted. If the author has not in every instance secured the consensus of his reader to those conclusions, which to him seem the only possible ones, from the data that he has collected, the fault must be ascribed to the author and not to the data. He may have failed in his manner of presenting them; they still remain, a now imperishable heirloom of the Polynesian |