- IJ
Sidestep: Melanesians were here first
The headline suggests we are sure, but we aren't (I was just pretending to be a NZ journalist using inaccurate bait click headlines). However the evidence heads more in the direction of Melanesia than in any other. We have presented many physical items that strongly suggest this. However, lets see what others say...
A new Hawaiian study suggesting Maori may have migrated to New Zealand from Melanesia, not Polynesia, backs up the findings of a controversial new book on New Zealand history. Even Ian Wishart believes that New Zealand may have an unexplored Melanesian connection, but the book has been attacked by some New Zealand academics who dispute the findings, but academics dispute anything they don't come up with to be fair.
Hawaiian linguistics professor William Wilson has published a groundbreaking study indicating early Maori (not the fleet Maori) used atolls around the Solomon Islands in Melanesia as a stepping point to colonize the Pacific, including New Zealand. Such findings fit hand and glove with rock paintings in the South Island of creatures like crocodiles and snakes. “Scientists like Julius Haast and others in the nineteenth century were convinced ancient Maori must have had some cultural memory of Melanesia, because these cave drawings show animals that did not exist in Polynesia. They did exist in Melanesia, however. “The Solomons and the waters around it are home to large saltwater crocodiles,” Wishart says, “and it follows that if you’ve come on a long sea voyage and ended up drawing on a cave wall in the South Island, you might draw pictures for your children of the life you left behind.” Wishart says mainstream academia in New Zealand have been in denial on the Melanesian links for over a century, but the evidence is becoming harder to ignore.
The Manaia shown on the Kaitaia lintel are reminiscent of crocodiles as well. There are Aussie pelicans in the Kaipara, but is the Maori ‘taniwha’ or Ngarara based on encounters with another Aussie migrant? An old scientific study from the 1980s indicates Australian saltwater crocodiles are occasional summer visitors to New Zealand and probably the cause of ‘taniwha’ stories. A new creature appearing such as a 'salty' would terrify them and it would become folklore and then legend.
This extract from a report written by archaeologist Simon Best in 1988 lays out the case:
Even so, the suggestion that New Zealand might have been a landfall at the end of such a journey would be of no more than academic interest had it not been for an incident off the North Cape of New Zealand in 1970. In the last few days of February of that year the second officer of – 252 the M.V. Parera, a coastal trader of the Holm Shipping Company en route from Auckland to Brisbane, was the first to spot an object in the sea over two miles ahead and to starboard of the ship. The sea was “like glass” (Capt Brown: personal communication) and the ship’s course was altered to investigate the sighting. The captain, second mate and bosun had a clear view of the animal as the vessel passed, and, after the Parera reached Brisbane, Captain Brown wrote to the Marine Superintendent of the Holm Shipping Co. in Auckland reporting the sighting. Part of the letter is reproduced below: About 300 miles from the North Cape and 800 miles from Brisbane, off the Wanganella Bank we passed a crocodile about 15 feet long in broad daylight. The Second Mate saw it first ahead of the ship and we passed it about 20 feet off alongside the bridge. It was swimming quite strongly. We did not see its head clearly as that part of it was in the wash from the bow, but the body appeared to be that of a crocodile so presumably it had a crocodile’s head. If not then your guess is as good as mine as to what it was. As the wash touched it it sounded, showing a whitish-grey belly. It had a row of triangular spikes three or four inches high running down its back on each side of the spine. I had the binoculars on it so at that range I got a good look and there is absolutely no chance that it was a turtle, whale, porpoise, shark, tree, or anything else but what I have described. . . . (letter from Capt C. A. Brown to Capt R. Jackson, 4/3/70).
A copy of this letter was sent to Dr Turbott, then Director of the Auckland War Memorial Museum, and also to Professor J. Robb at the University of Auckland. Both identified the sighting as that of a specimen of C. porosus, Robb in both a newspaper article (N.Z. Herald 1970) and later in her publication on reptiles and amphibians in New Zealand (Robb 1980:98), although in the latter the month of the sighting is incorrectly given as April.
This animal is most likely to have come from the Australian coastline, the nearest point of which is some 1300 km from the sighting. The southern limit of C. porosus on the eastern coast is about 100 km north of Brisbane (Cogger 1979:118), although it is possible that the animal came from considerably further north, as the crocodile population in the lower part of the east coast is not as dense as that around the top part of the country. An open ocean journey of at least 1300 or 1400 km was thus achieved, and that the animal was still swimming strongly indicates that it was by no means at the end of its tether, and, barring accidents, could have made a landfall in New Zealand a short time later.
The question arises that, assuming such an event took place, how would the animal fare in the colder climate of its new surroundings. Firstly, the larger the crocodile the less it would be affected by the cooler climate. Cott states, “size is an important factor in an animal’s thermal relations with its environment. The larger the animal, the lower is its surface-to-bulk ratio and the greater its capacity for heat storage” (Cott 1961:227). He also points out (p.226) that as a heat source, solar radiation is far more important than air temperature. Thus, a crocodile will climb out of water and sun itself before the air temperature has reached that of the water just left, it being “. . . so delighted with the sun-shine, & lieth therein so immoveable, that a man would take it to be stark dead” (Topsell 1979:119). Another factor that could influence the likelihood of a successful landing is the general weather pattern. In the last 1000 years maximum temperatures have fluctuated up to 1.5 °C. between crest and trough, with the highest peak in the 14th century, some 0.7 °C. above the next highest, in 1950. Recent temperatures, however, have been even higher (Burrows and Greenland 1979:331,332).
There is little doubt that a large crocodile, arriving today on the New Zealand coast in the summer months, would be able to survive and function normally, at least until the onset of winter. If it landed in the upper part of the North Island, probably the most likely area, then it is also possible that it could survive mild winters. Such a situation would probably mean that the animal spent more time out of water than normal (see above).
From the sightings described above, it thus appears not only that is it possible for a large specimen of C. porosus to cross the stretch of ocean between Australia and New Zealand, but also that this event may well have occurred at some time in the past. The arrival of such a totally unknown and terrifying creature, five to six metres long and weighing up to a tonne, catching its victims with bone-crushing force and taking them out of sight into another world, is surely the stuff of which legends are made. New Zealand, however, is not the only Polynesian island group with stories concerning giant man-eating lizards.
It’s not the first time crocodiles appear to have made the crossing. In early February 1869 newspapers reported an “alligator” in a coastal lake north of Wellington. The a more detailed newspaper account followed. In 1886 there were reports of a child’s arm being bitten off, and a crocodile sighting in the Waikato river (Which means this report from Taranaki could have been the body of one of these).
In 1989, reports Scientific American, a study confirmed another crocodile had been seen literally at the tip of New Zealand’s North Cape: “Saltwater crocs often frequent estuaries, lagoons and mangroves, but animals in some populations spend some or all of their time at sea. Extralimital records from the Cocos Islands southwest of Sumatra, from Fiji, and even from 48 km north of North Cape in New Zealand (Steel 1989 [Steel, R. 1989. Crocodiles. Christopher Helm, London.]) demonstrate an ability to travel far out to sea.”
Then there is the Kaitaia Lintel (above)
The South Island cave drawings
The Pelorus stone eggs
The Marlborough spiked stone mace
The Melanesian bow found underground here
Various artifacts that have no bearing of anything Polynesian but are very close if not identical to Melanesian design, including Melanesian tattoos identical to dendroglyphs in the Chatham Islands.
Melanesian Elements in Polynesia.
The natives seen by Capt Beechey at Bow Island in the 1820's are described by him as being of a repulsive type. “Their noses were broad and flat, their eyes dull and sunken, their lips thick…long bushy hair well saturated with dirt and vermin...their limbs bony, their muscles flaccid.” And this is said of the people of the Paumotu Group, in eastern Polynesia.
Bougainville believed in the existence of two races at Tahiti, one of a tall people with European-like features, the other a people of middling stature, with coarse curling hair, and resembling mulattoes in complexion and feature.
Of the natives of the Disappointment Isles, in the far north-east of the Paumotu Group, Wilkes wrote: “Since we have seen all the different Polynesian groups, these appear, however extraordinary it may be, to resemble the Fijians more than any other.”
Cook noted that the natives of Moorea appeared to be of lower stature, and darker-skinned, than the Tahitians, and not so good-looking.
Hale remarks on the peculiar foreign element in the language of the Paumotu Group. This fact, taken in conjunction with their manner of sailing canoes either end foremost—a custom obtaining among the Tongans, Fijians, and Micronesians, but not among other Polynesians—as also some evidence in regard to a curious foreign ethnic mixture in the far-eastern isles, as noted by early voyagers, and apparently preserved in Maori tradition at New Zealand, presents to us an interesting problem. Where did this foreign element come from? If the non-Polynesian words found in Paumotuan dialect were borrowed from some western tongue. Melanesian or Indonesian, how is it that they have not been recognized, now that we are acquainted with so many of the oceanic vocabularies? Again, who were the negroid-like people of Maori tradition spoken of as dwelling on various isles of eastern Polynesia thirty generations ago? If Melanesian, were they a remnant of an original population of those isles, or were they new-comers? If the latter, how is it that we see nothing in tradition pointing to Melanesian navigation of wide seas at that period?
Cook remarked that the natives of Ra'iatea (Rangiatea) seemed in ‘general smaller and blacker than those of the neighbouring islands.
Dieffenbach noted the two racial types among the Maori of New Zealand, and states that the darker race “has undoubtedly a different origin. This is proved by their less-regularly-shaped cranium, which is rather more compressed from the sides; by their full and large features, prominent cheek bones, full lips, small ears curly and coarse although not woolly hair, and a much deeper colour of the skin, and a short and rather ill-proportioned figure. This race, which is mixed in insensible gradations with the other, is far less numerous; it does not predominate in any one part of the Island, nor does it occupy any particular station in a tribe, and there is no difference made between the two races among themselves; but I must observe that I never met any man of consequence belonging to this race, and that, although free men, they occupy the lower grades.” (the above writer errs in speaking of two races as though they had remained distinct in some cases, whereas what we have in the Maori is the blending of the two races. No Maori in these isles is free from the aboriginal Mouriuri blood, though some show it to a marked degree, others scarcely at all.)
In a paper on “The Osteology of the Aborigines of New Zealand and of the Chatham Islands,” by Professor J. H. Scott, published in Volume 26 of the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute, occurs the following passage: “We know the Maori to be a mixed race, the result of the mingling of a Polynesian and Melanesian strain. The crania already examined leave no room for doubt on this point.” Further on he says: “The Melanesian characters are therefore more accentuated in the North than amongst the natives of the South Island.” The more extended researches of Dr. P. Buckin the field of Maori somatology will assuredly cast much light on this question of a Polynesian-Melanesian admixture in New Zealand.
In Volume 14 of the Journal of the Polynesian Society is a short paper by Mr. G. Graham containing particulars of a strange people, probably castaways, who settled on the east coast at some unknown period in the past. These folk, called “Ngutu-au” by the Maori, arrived at Whare-kahika many generations ago in a canoe of remarkable construction. They possessed peculiarities of speech and manners. They settled at Matakawa, where they cultivated the kumara and remained for some time. Owing to some trouble with the local tribe of Ngati-Porou, these folk launched their canoe one night and set forth to return to their distant home across the ocean. Three of them remained behind for some reason, one of whom was named Mou-te-rangi. From another source we have a tradition that a man of that name left that district long ago in order to cross the ocean to Hawaiki—that is, to the isles of Polynesia.
The natives of the Bay of Plenty district have preserved a tradition of a vessel having reached Whakatane many generations ago the crew of which was composed of a very-dark-skinned people. These immigrants, probably castaways from a drift voyage, are said to have settled at Omeheu, on the Rangitaiki River.
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It seems recorded 'academically accepted' history never teaches or talks about the above things. Are the skeletons we seek in that cave actually Melanesian in origin or something far older still? There is something they are not...Polynesian! That we can assure you, even without seeing them. How do we know? If they were Polynesians, therefore Maori, they would have been studied, a paper released and the cave caved sealed in a normal way. Oh no, be assured, these skeletons that will be revealed sometime in 2020 are not Polynesian.
