Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/60

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48
HAWAIKI

and they spread from there, spreading from that Paparoa-i-Hawaiki, spreading to the islands of the great ocean and dwelling there." Hikurangi, one of the mountains mentioned above, is also connected with the Deluge legends, and its name has been applied by the race to several other mountains in their later homes, e.g., Tahiti, Rarotonga, New Zealand, etc. Hawaiki-atua is another name for the Father-land—Hawaiki-of-the-gods—where the gods originated from Rangi and Papa—the Sky father and Earth mother, and where is "the meeting place of gods and men," as we shall see later on—where spirits foregathered with their deified ancestors.

Mr. J. R. Logan, the Ethnologist and Philologist of Indonesia, has the following remarks bearing on the name Hawa-iki—vide "Journal of the Indian Archipelago," Vol. iv., p. 338. "The great island of Halmahera (or Gilolo) was in the oldest historical and traditional times, the seat of the predominant tribe which included Ceram in its dominions and had its chief colony there in the fine bay of Sawai. From Sawai, it is probable the principal of those migrations went forth, which spreading along the northern coasts of the Melanesian chain, at last reached and colonised the Samoan islands, and thence diffused the S.W. Indonesian races throughout Polynesia. The name of Sawai or Sawaiki, is literally Sawa-the-little, and Sawa is identical with Java; so that the name was first given (to that bay) by a Polynesian colony from Java; just as the modern name of a country on the south coast, Seran, Selan, Seram, Ceram, which Europeans have extended to the whole island—was bestowed by the Javenese colonists at a period when Singhalese seem to have been the leading Indian settlers or traders and civilizers in the Archipelago, if we may judge