quest from abroad, or enforced emigration, a certain number of traditions (larger probably than we should commonly expect) may be handed down in a form little changed for several centuries at least. Each New Zealand tribe still remembers the canoe of settlers from which it took its descent as far back as the twelfth century or earlier, if we may judge from genealogies numerous enough to afford fairly safe means of comparison. For if we get sufficient pedigrees running side by side, with traditions dependent from each step, in one or another, synchronisms will become apparent that will help us to ascertain within a few years the date of a battle or the accession of a chief.[1] It is these synchronisms that in Mangaia (the biggest of the Hervey Islands) enabled Mr. Gill to get back to within a few years of the dates of occurrences that took place as far back as the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, though the Hervey Islanders were wholly unlettered and had no special means save their dramas for preserving tradition,[2] These dramas of theirs are exceedingly remarkable; they are dramas persistent in the precise stage of that the Greek drama had reached before the coming of Aischylos; dramas performed by means of a reciter, a chorus-leader, and a large chorus; dramas dealing with history and mythology, with the tragedies of kings and gods and famous men and women, death-songs, and
- ↑ It was by these synchronisms in the parallel pedigrees of Landnáma bóc that Dr. Vigfússon was able to solve the puzzle of Are Frode's chronology. See Corpus Poeticum Boreale, vol. ii.
- ↑ Basil Thomson concludes that the people of Niné must have been established in that island before 1300, because they have no "certain tradition" of their origins, and the only clues to their provenance are their customs (such as mock circumcision, absence of tattoo, a moko totem, kava preserved for the priests alone, etc.), and the prevalence of certain definite racial types (one, like the Cook Islanders, wavy-haired Polynesian; one, lank-haired Malayo-Micronesian, not more than 10 per cent.; one, in the South West, in Avatele, with some Melanesian characteristics). He would, therefore, believing traditions oral and unassisted to go back no further than 500 years, put the arrival of the first settlers on Niné no earlier than five centuries ago.
