A Snare and a Delusion (Or, Danger, Europeans at Work)

Abstract

This minor revision in Polynesian scholarship, the undermining of the authenticity of the traditions as historical … is one of the most significant developments in New Zealand archaeology.This [belief in a Great Fleet] arose out of the desire of European scholars to provide a coherent framework by which to interpret the prehistory of New Zealand.As heavily as historians must rely on orally-derived data for their study of the African past, historians of Oceania are far more in thrall to such materials in attempting to reconstruct the history of the various Pacific island groups. Although archeology and historical linguistics can sometimes help to provide broad sequences and interrelationships as well as evidence concerning origins, neither can, of course, provide circumstantial local detail or close dating. Oral traditions, often supported by genealogies of sometimes extraordinary length and complexity, have been collected in all parts of the Pacific almost since the time of Cook, but the latter part of the nineteenth century was a period of particularly feverish activity. The result is a vast body of material, much of it still in manuscript form. Of this corpus far more relates to the Maori people of New Zealand than to the inhabitants of any other island group.In the course of the first half of this century a homogenized orthodox view of New Zealand's more remote past developed -- an interpretation based on three pivotal events, each of which came to be dated calendrically by means of Maori genealogies. The first was the arrival of the “discoverer” of New Zealand, one Kupe, who was dated to ca. 950. Then, two centuries later, came Toi and his companions. Finally, so this version goes, the so-called Great Fleet, comprising about seven large canoes (the number varies slightly) arrived in about 1350, and New Zealand began to be well and truly peopled by Maori.