Robert McNab’s New Zealand book collection, donated to the Dunedin Public Library in 1913, included a substantial gathering of books about chiefly European voyaging in the Pacific. His collection also included 19th and early 20th century studies on voyages of exploration by Pacific Island seafarers. Subsequent works on Pacific Island voyaging have been added to the McNab’s collection during the past century.
In 1834, the missionary John Dunmore Lang (1799-1878) first put his case that the first inhabitants of the Americas originally came from the Pacific Islands. Picking up the issue of periodic westerly gales across the Pacific, he claimed that ‘Malays’ settled the islands by being blown across the Pacific.
Some, Lang claimed, reached Chile, and from there they eventually established the great empires throughout North and South America. There was some sporadic but not major support for this view.
John Dunmore Lang. View of the Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation. London: Cochrane and M’Crone, 1834.
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Lang continued to defend his ideas and in the 1870s published a considerable expansion and revision of his original thesis of Asiatic-Malay origin of Polynesians.
John Dunmore Lang. Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation. Second edition. Sydney: G. Robertson, 1877.
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The Aryan Māori was a controversial book by Edward Tregear (1846-1931), who claimed to find in Māori language, mythology and customs remnants of an ancient Aryan heritage.
Tregear argued that Sanskrit-speaking Aryans in India moved through the Southeast Asian archipelago and out to the islands of the Pacific. In the mid-1880s, many scholars believed that Polynesian cultures had some degree of Aryan ancestry or influence, and this view was held by some well into the 20th century.
Tregear’s migration theory, like that of Lang and others, relies on the idea of accidental migration with the aid of “some temporary wind from the north or northwest.”
Edward Tregear. The Aryan Māori. Wellington: G. Didsbury, Govt. Printer, 1885
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