Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/132

120 Tonga-nui, where he became a ruling chief, "without a god, he himself was his own god." But his brother, Turi-pakea, was a tangata araara atua, a worshipper of gods, which gods befriended him in the trouble he got into with his brother Tu-tonga.

In the times of Tu-tonga-kai-a-Iti, who lived in Tonganui, intercourse was frequent with Upolu; we find him sending there a present of kura (red feathers) to induce a seer named Tara-mata-kikite to disclose to him the name of the person who had stolen a valued pig, about which there is a long story in the Rarotongan Native History.

The people—the Tonga-Fijians of Samoan story—at this time had evidently spread all over the groups around Fiji, and had occupied Samoa; but, I apprehend, only the coasts of the latter group. From this period onwards for some twenty-five generations, the intercourse between the Rarotongan ancestors and those of Samoa was close and frequent, for even after the former moved onwards to the east, voyages were constantly made backwards to Samoa as we shall see. The Samoan traditions very frequently mention the intercourse between Samoa and Fiji, and it seems to me that the Rarotonga traditions explain why this is so, the fact being that the Samoans in visiting Fiji, met with people of their own race, and not the Melanesian Fijians who now occupy that group, otherwise the frequent inter-marriages of Samoans with Fijians noted in the traditions of the former would shew in the Samoans of to-day, which they do not; there is little or no sign of a Melanesian intermixture.

I take this epoch to be the commencement of that at which, according to Samoan story, the so-called Tongans and Fijians commenced to occupy the coasts of Savāi'i and Upolu, but who were in reality the Maori-Rarotonga branch of the race—who, in alliance with their Tonga relatives,