The legends allege war as the cause for the flight to New Zealand. The accounts of some of the migrations are circumstantial in the extreme, and describe the first planting of the yams, the astonishment of the people at the new flowers and trees of the islands, and many such details of the landing. The names of the chiefs and of the canoes are given in a sort of "catalogue of ships," and the wars of the settlers are narrated at length, with the heroic exaggeration common to the legends of all lands.
The canoe fleet reached New Zealand in the fifteenth century it is believed, and the people landed chanting a chorus-speech, which is still preserved:
"We come at last to this fair land--a resting-place; Spirit of the Earth, to thee, we, coming from afar, present our hearts for food."
That the Maories are Polynesians there can be no doubt: a bird with them is "manu," a fish "ika" (the Greek [Greek: ichthus], become with the digamma "piscis" and "poisson;" and connected with "fisch," and "fish"), as they are throughout the Malayan archipelago and Polynesian isles; the Maori "atua," a god, is the "hotua" of the Friendly Islanders; the "wahrés," or native huts, are identical in all the islands; the names of the chief deities are the same throughout Polynesia, and the practice of tattooing, the custom of carving grotesque squatting figures on tombs, canoes, and "pahs," and that of tabooing things, places, times, and persons, prevail from Hawaii to Stewart's Land, though not everywhere so strictly read as in the Tonga Isles, where the very ducks are muzzled to keep them from disturbing by their quacking the sacred stillness of "tapú time."
Polynesian traditions mostly point to the Malay peninsula as the cradle of the race, and the personal resemblance of the Maories to the Malays is very strong, except in the setting of the eyes; while the figures on the gate-posts of the New Zealand pahs have eyes more oblique than are now found among the Maori people. Strangely enough, the New Zealand "pah" is identical with the Burmese "stockade," but the word "pah" stands both for the palisade and for the village of wahrés which it contains. The Polynesian and Malay tongues have not much in common; but that variations of language sufficiently great to leave no apparent tie spring up in a few centuries, cannot be denied by us who know for certain that "visible" and "optician" come from a common root, and can trace the steps through which "jour" is derived from "dies."