How came these scattered folk to possess common customs, myths, and, in some cases, genealogies to a certain point, to know the names of many lands they had not seen for long centuries? How came the Hawaiian to speak of his old-time voyages to Tahiti, and relate the deeds of ancestors of the New Zealand Maori; the Samoan to relate his exploration of the Paumotus; the Tongarevan to maintain his descent from immigrants from New Zealand? Why do Moriori and Hawaiian claim the same gods; the Tahitian describe voyages made to Aotearoa of the Maori; and the Maori of these isles recount his ocean wanderings from Tahiti, Samoa, and Raro-tonga to New Zealand?

The answer to these queries is that all these widely separated peoples are descendants of common ancestors, of the Polynesian Vikings, of the Maori voyagers—the bold sea-rovers who broke through the hanging sky in times long past away, who fretted the heaving breast of Hine-moana with the wake of their swift canoes, who ranged over every quarter of the vast Pacific, and marked off the sea roads for all time.

For the Maori is truly a Polynesian, the Polynesians are essentially Maori, and no ethnological quibbles can separate them. This fact lightens our task of describing Maori vessels and Maori voyagers, though it increases the scope of the paper. It teaches us to look abroad for the origin of the Maori canoe as seen here; it compels us to follow the ara moana, or sea roads, traversed by the Maori voyager in the days when the Romans held Britain. In those voyages we shall cross the famed sea-ridge, the back-bone of Hine-moana, and look upon the wonders of the deep. We shall pass through great areas of the “many-isled sea,” and range northward until strange stars rise above the sea horizon; we will seek the rising sun, even unto the land of strange gods. Southward will we go until we view frozen seas and drifting white islands, and the hand of Pārā-weranui lies heavy upon us, and westward to far-distant lands where strange black folk dwell.

For the Maori voyager was no fair-weather sailor, nor was he content to hug the shores of his home-land. He boldly crossed wide seas beneath changing skies, and rode out the fierce ocean gale; or went down to death in the embrace of Hine-moana. But when our voyager was following distant sea roads he was not a New-Zealander—he was a Polynesian of the Pacific isles. After he settled in New Zealand his voyages were apparently confined to expeditions to the Cook and Society Groups—say, from fifteen to eighteen hundred miles distant.

As late as the time of Toi, who flourished thirty generations ago, the Maori of New Zealand did not exist, for Polynesians had not yet settled in these isles. He made his voyages hither as a Polynesian of the northern isles, in the carvel-built Tahitian prototype of the Maori seagoing canoe known to us. All of which leads up to the statement that one cannot study the Maori canoe, or the Maori as a voyager, without including in one's purview the canoes and voyagers of Polynesia.