New Zealand: The Long White Cloud - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 300

him arriving around 1000 CE from an ancestral home, Hawaikiki (not Hawaii, but an island
somewhere near Tahiti). As his ship approached North Island, his wife, pointing to the far
horizon, shouted Aotearota, Long White Cloud. About 300 years later, the first permanent
settlers arrived. A Polynesian people, they called themselves Maoris.
Figure 20.2. Milford Sound, New Zealand
WHERE DID POLYNESIANS COME FROM?
Polynesians are thought to have migrated into the Pacific from Southeast Asia. They have
a genetic kinship with the people of Indonesia and with the Malagasy of Madagascar (from
the Greek, polys means many; nesos , island.) These people, “Vikings of the sunrise,” as
Peter Buck calls them, established themselves in a vast triangle from Hawaii to New Zea-
land, from Tuvalu to Easter Island, an area of ten million square miles. [264] Why they em-
barked on their hazardous journeys can only be surmised: escape from tribal enemies, a
search for food, or perhaps the call of the horizon. Their double-hulled ships moved by sail
and could carry as many as 200 people along with food and animals: dogs and a species
of rat that when fattened was considered a delicacy. The biggest ships could carry 150,000
pounds. Geneticists suggest that the large girth of many Polynesian women and many of
the chiefs is an inheritance of body fat needed to sustain these Pacific argonauts.