Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/411

Rh home (or stopping-place) in Micronesia to Samoa. And to the Au-ria-ria folk we may safely add the Tabu-rimai folk—the breed of the men of the north—mentioned in section 7 of my exhibit. The return to the Gilbert Islands of these folk can, by reference to genealogies and a mass of extraneous traditions, be identified with the very "coming from Samoa," which my exhibit and many similar tales demonstrate. The boast of the text that Samoa was the pristine ancestral land is therefore an empty one; and curiously enough, the chronicle that contains it has preserved, in its references to the "breed of the men of the north," enough material almost alone to refute it.

Long before the forefathers of the race came to Samoa they were in Micronesia, and, as has been indicated in Part I of this paper, the fair-skinned element of the ancestral stock had invaded Micronesia from the West. Thus, we may prick out the migration-chart of a fair-skinned folk of great stature through the western islands of Oceania, along the line to the Gilbert Group, and thence down the chain of Ellice atolls by easy stages into the heart of Polynesia.

The reflux of a part of this swarm from Samoa to its old stopping place in the Gilbert Group is the "coming from Samoa" to which the general consensus of tradition and opinion attributes the first population of the islands. To give reasons for that reflux would be to turn away from our subject to the study of a very rich period in Samoan history; for the migrants to the Gilbert Islands may with great accuracy be identified as fragments of the so-called Tonga-fiti host, which was driven out of Samoa by the patriot Savea in the thirteenth century of our era. If then, these refugees were Tongo-fitiTonga-fiti [sic], and if their coming to Micronesia was but a return along the ancient migration-track of their ancestors, it follows that the Tonga-fiti had swarmed into Polynesia not only along the western route