Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/75

Rh Hindoos in the sixth century, whereas the Koro-tuatini, if we may trust the genealogies, was created long before that. It may perhaps be suggested that the ancient ruins at Ponape in the Caroline group, so fully described by Mr F. W. Christian in his work, "The Caroline Islands," 1899, and said to have been built by a strange people coming from the south, are possibly the remains of the Koro-tuatini, built by Tu-te-rangi-marama. But I think there is nothing to justify this idea; the style of building (see illustration) is quite different from that of any of the erections made by the Polynesians.

Wherever this Avaiki-te-varinga may be, it is clearly not Avaiki raro in the Western Pacific, one piece of evidence of which is, that in returning to Samoa thence, Tangiia the Rarotongan voyager, first made the land (or the land first noticed on his return) at Uea or Wallis Island, directly west of the Fiji group. I have no doubt the country he visited was Java, Celam, or some of the other islands of the Archipelago.

So much for the geographical evidence of the ancient Father-land of the Polynesians. We will now proceed to show what some of the best informed have thought on this subject, and amongst them a learned and scientific observer who paid much attention to the question of the origin of the people; and in doing so, I make no apology for a lengthy quotation because the works in which Mr. Logan's papers appear, are extremely rare and indeed appear to have been quite unknown to many writers on this subject, amongst them most of those who are referred to below.