The first colonists of New Zealand were brown men from the South Seas.  It was from Eastern Polynesia that the Maoris unquestionably came.  They are of the same race as the courteous, handsome people who inhabit the South Sea Islands from Hawaii to Rarotonga, and who, in Fiji, mingle their blood with the darker and inferior Melanesians of the west.  All the Polynesians speak dialects of the same musical tongue.  A glance at Tregear’s Comparative Maori-Polynesian Dictionary will satisfy any reader on that point.  The Rarotongans call themselves “Maori,” and can understand the New Zealand speech; so, as a rule, can the other South Sea tribes, even the distant Hawaiians.  Language alone is proverbially misleading as a guide to identity of race.  But in the case of the Polynesians we may add colour and features, customs, legends, and disposition.  All are well though rather heavily built, active when they choose, and passionately fond of war and sport.  The New Zealanders are good riders and capital football players.  The Samoans are so fond of cricket that they will spend weeks in playing gigantic matches, fifty a side.  Bold as seamen and skilful as fishermen, the Polynesians are, however, primarily cultivators of the soil.  They never rose high enough in the scale to be miners or merchants.  In the absence of mammals, wild and tame, in their islands, they could be neither hunters nor herdsmen.  Fierce and bloodthirsty in war, and superstitious, they were good-natured and hospitable in peace and affectionate in family life.

There is no reason to think that the New Zealanders are more akin to the modern Malays than they are to the Australian blacks; nor have attempts to connect them with the red men of America or the Toltecs of Mexico succeeded.  They are much more like some of the Aryans of Northern India.  But the truth is, their fortunes before their race settled in Polynesia are a pure matter of guess-work.  Some centuries ago, driven out by feuds or shortness of food, they left their isles of reef and palm, and found their way to Ao-tea-roa, as they called New Zealand.

On the map their new home seems at first sight so isolated and remote from the other groups of Oceania as to make it incredible that even the most daring canoe-men could have deliberately made their way thither.  But this difficulty disappears upon a study of the ascertained voyages of the Polynesians.  Among the bravest and most venturesome navigators of the ocean, the brown mariners studied and named the stars, winds and currents.  As allies they had those friends of the sailor, the trade-winds.  In cloudy weather, when the signs in the sky were hidden, the regular roll of the waves before the steady trade-wind was in itself a guide.[1] Their large double-canoes joined by platforms on which deck-houses were built were no despicable sea-boats, probably just as good as the vessels in which the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa.  Even their single canoes were sometimes between 100