"Made In Indonesia" - My Excellent Adventure into the Origins of the Polynesian People

This is a follow-on from my last posting about the NZ documentary "Made in Taiwan: Nathan and Oscar's Excellent Adventure". However, if you find this offering doesn't make sense, read the one below first:

Before I start the story of this adventure, I want to tell you that I have the big guns on my side. In fact, I have Spencer Wells and he's the BIGGEST BIG CANNON in this field.

And here's what Spencer Wells has to say on the subject of the origins of the Polynesian people: "The Express Train from Formosa (the old name for Taiwan) Model has to be modified in light of the discovery of the M130 gene on the Y-chromosome." (That means the males are NOT from Taiwan or anywhere near Taiwan. They are, in fact, from East Africa!)

Wells then goes on to argue that the "Express Train from Formosa Model" is not logical because the Polynesians hit the Pacific as a fully integrated and unique cultural unit with completely different agriculture and planting methods from the Taiwanese. He then says that Taiwan is too far from the Equator for the rice crop to fail and thus for them to come up with their own alternatives, and therefore Hawaii-iki had to be much closer to the Equator.

And his own suggestion for the whereabouts of Hawaii-iki, the mythic motherland of Polynesia, is INDONESIA!!! So there, all you Formosa-Model Fans!!! Go suck eggs!!!


But back to my story:



For me, this whole adventure started when I was ten, on a very crowded Saturday morning at Morris Hedstrom's Milk Bar in downtown Suva, Fiji, when a worried-looking African tourist sitting opposite, out of the blue, said "Do you know where Fijians come from?"

"Somewhere in Africa, I think!" I said, shrugging, slurping on my milkshake.

"Where in Africa?"

"No one knows." I replied, and then, because he so obviously wanted to talk: "Why do you ask?"

Turns out that this guy had, moments earlier, been in Suva Markets when he heard someone shout in Madagascan "Did you get all the fish off the boat?" Elated, thinking he'd found "a homie", he tracked down the source of the shout, raced over and talked twenty-to-the-dozen at him in his native tongue.

But "I don't understand you." the Fijian fisherman replied in English.

"But you were talking Madagassy just now!" said my new friend.

"No! I was talking Fijian!"

"But what did you shout just now?"

"Did you get all the fish off the boat!"

You can see why my new friend was looking so worried. He desperately needed answers so, young as I was, he quizzed me bigtime about the Fijian's ancient sailing methods and luckily, thanks to a recent school trip to Suva Museum in Thurston Gardens, I knew some stuff.

 The drua at Fiji Museum.

Photo taken from their website.

And, in comparison with ancient Madagascan sailing methods, boy, did we tick the boxes: Outriggers? Check! Lateen sails? Check! Movable spar from the mast? Check! Astral navigation? Check! A faceless spirit protector called a Tau? Check! Raw fish dropped into lemon juice overnight? Check! And there were heaps more checks only I've forgotten what they were.

But there was still more. Fijians and Madagascans, he said (and I'll tell you a story later about how I came to agree with him) even looked alike, only Fijians were significantly taller and bigger. As for the language? Sure, it was mostly unintelligible, but every now and again something would come into focus. The conclusion he drew from this was that Fijians had left Madagascar such a long time ago that the language had mostly changed!

It was all so convincing we both filed it away as a simple fact: Fijians originally came from Madagascar!

But what does this have to do with Polynesians?

Well, if you'd studied Ancient History back in High School you'd know all about Consonantal Shift so you wouldn't ask. However, if you didn't study it, here's what you need to know: It was discovered by the Grimm Brothers - of fairytale fame - when they were traveling around the farthest reaches of Eastern Europe gathering old folk tales for their books: that although the Mother Language stays relatively constant, when people move away from their source, their now-isolated language switches a consonant every two hundred years ... and therefore you can tell how long languages have been isolated from each other by counting the number of drifted consonants. Eventually, obviously, given the passage of millennium, a language drifts so far away from source that speakers become unintelligible to each other.

It's pretty amazing, yes? And you'd think it wouldn't happen these days, what with people not being isolated from the source anymore, but I've noticed that Australians are, these days, gradually softening their "d" and, here in HK, the Cantonese are in the process of changing their "l" to "n". Most odd!

But, still, what does this have to do with Polynesians? Easy peasy! The primary example the high school text book gave for Consonantal Shift was that all the Polynesian languages are 5000 year old Fijian!

So, you undoubtedly are drawing the same conclusions I am: the Polynesian people descended from the Fijians! And that the split happened about 5000 years ago.

And if you're not reaching that conclusion, look at what else they've got in common:
1) outriggers with lateen sails and movable spar,
2) astral navigation,
3) a faceless spirit protector called a Tau,
4) giant feet! Well, nearly as wide as they are long, at least!

However, since Fiji is 100% NOT the mythical homeland of Hawaii-iki, and Polynesians are decidedly more Chinese-looking than Fijians, something else HAD to have operated here! But I had no idea what for a very long time!

That brings us back to my Madagassy friend: this interesting interchange stayed with me over the years, and I was reminded of it vividly during my brief foray, in my teens, into the field of blood groups and their connection with race.

This interest was all Mrs Cole's fault. We were doing blood groups in Biology class at St Joseph's, when I found I couldn't match my blood to any of the samples in the text book. When I told Mrs Cole she looked through my microscope and said "Mmmmh! You have weird blood. Your sister does too! Where on earth does your family come from?" "We're Irish, English, German and Dutch!" I said. Then she said "There has to be something else in there as well!"

There was no come-back to that, so, being me - and always unable to resist a mystery - I went on a vastly unsuccessful quest to find out why my blood was so weird. (Still haven't solved it!) (Although I think it may have something to do with being a remnant of a now long-dead race of people!) (Perhaps Scythian!) (Although Samatian would be wwaayyyy cooler!)

But, although my interest in blood-lines was brief, my interest in ancient peoples remained and it was a long time before I gave it up the hunt. Years in fact. And I read so many books on the subject over those years, that .... mmm, wonder if this is why I ended up an Ancient History teacher?!

SIDEBAR: telling race by blood it isn't just about whether you're 1) A, B or O, or indeed AB like most of my family. It's also about 2) Rhesus-factor - whether your blood creates protein, doesn't create protein, or, like mine, destroys protein - and about 3) Duffy - how much oxygen your blood carries - and something called 4) MSN (?) (I was into this stuff so long ago, I've forgotten the details) that does something else which I've also forgotten.

The theory that blood equals race? How it goes is that even people who are from minor divisions within the wider racial categories have slightly different blood: that when people move around, within several generations they develop slight mutations in the blood to adjust to the new conditions they find themselves in, and that these mutations gradually accrue and so, in the blood of descendants, you find the history of what the ancestors have done, who they are and where they've been.

However, by the time I started reading in the field, the early 70s, the whole field of blood-race connection was intellectually out-of-fashion (although I notice it's come back recently because so many of the findings turn out to be supported by DNA evidence), not only because it was endorsed during the 1930s and 40s by the Nazis, but because ...

... and this is fascinating ...

... the scientists discovered, in the early 30s, that there were strong Polynesian blood lines in Madagascar, and in the Carpathian Mountains - yup, up in Dracula territory - and deep in Russia along the Volga in the lands formerly owned by the Vikings and even a bit among the Vikings themselves.

Since this was all so deeply impossible, the scientists instantly threw the whole theory out and were calling it abject nonsense even before Adolph Hitler sounded its death-knell by jumping on the bandwagon!

However, I wasn't so willing to toss it aside. It was that Madagascar thing! Intriguing, huh? Only it's the wrong way round. According to my Madagassy friend, and coupled with Consonantal Shift, it should have been Madagascan blood in the Polynesian peoples and not Polynesian in the Madagascan. Get the difference? The only way it made sense to me was if the Madagascans went off somewhere, bred with different lines, and then, many generations later - giving the blood lines time to adjust - returned home again.

Back then, however, there was then no way to check if my theory was correct, so this had to remain a mystery for a couple of decades!

In the meantime, however, through the intervening years, there were several other beats I came across that made me go "Mmmmm! Interesting!" and kept this all alive for me. Like, Herodotus, right? Ancient Greek guy who was the Founding Father of History! Reading one of his books, I came across something most odd: that the Phoenician sailors trading off the coast of Africa said that they regularly came across black men from an island to the south who claimed they could cross the open ocean by tracing the pattern of the stars. Herodotus added "I myself don't believe it!"

Me? I just thought "Madagassy!!!" and liked the idea of them zooming back and forth across the open ocean ... but to where?

If you look at a map of the world, "crossing open oceans" from Madagascar (and ruling out all the journeys that involve big-time footling around) gets you to:

1) Yemen and other Arab Gulf Countries, via the Seychelles Islands
2) India
3) Sri Lanka, via the Maldives (mmm, pick me!)
4) Sumatra
5) Java
6) The west coast of Australia
7) Thailand (Khmer DNA in Samoa! Maybe this solves Oscar's mystery!)
8) Zanzibar (since the Phoenicians traded with Zanzibar, this could explain where they met!)

However, whether these indeed are the "open ocean" Madagassy journeys, I didn't know, so it all remained speculation!

In fact there weren't any real advances to this story, until, yes!, the human genome was deciphered in the early 90s and finally people were able to genetic sequence and work out, through a pattern of tiny mutations, who was descended from whom, and when, and even, through sampling large numbers of a single population, where.

And, thanks to a happy accident - literally - in the Cook Islands, when one of the top guys in the field, on holiday in Rarotonga, came off a motorbike, smashed his legs and had to remain in hospital there for months, out of sheer boredom, began gathering Cook Islanders blood and thus the Polynesian DNA sequence was one of the first done!

Results? Eureka moment for me! Polynesians had a Fijian male line plus 14 different Tanka women as their female line! If you don't already know, Tanka are the ancient tribe of Cantonese boat-people - who are slightly genetically different from the regular Cantonese and decidedly different from Han Chinese!

This had to mean the ancestors of the Fijians, presumably 14 of them, went off somewhere with their 14 wives, presumably 5000 years ago, and from them came the entire Polynesian peoples!

But where did they take these 14 Tanka wives? To the mythical land of Hawaii-iki the legends tell us! But where is the mythical land of Hawaii-iki? The gorgeous and downright wonderful Ela Koroi of the Fiji Red Cross provided the first hint for that:

Should tell you first that Ela Koroi, although Fijian, comes from Lau, an island group in Eastern part of Fiji. And although, yes, this is Fiji, Lauans actually descend from a war-party of Tongans who decided, after meeting the local women, to make love instead of war, and so married them and lived out the end of their days in these gorgeous islands.

So Ela is actually a Fijian of recent Polynesian male-line descent. And her story? Back in Fiji, after she'd traveled around Indonesia while on secondment with the Indonesian Red Cross, she had an odd and breathless tale to tell: right across the many lands of Indonesia, she encountered nothing but various levels of unfamiliarity until she arrived at ...

... the Molucca Islands.

From the moment she stepped foot on it, she said, there was a strange most-Jungian tingling sensation that "this place is important for me!", and the entire time she was there she kept seeing and hearing semi-familiar things; exactly like what happened to my Madagassy friend, fragments of conversations around her she realised she understood, faces around her were almost familiar, the gardens had the food she knew from the tete at home, she could name all the trees, the cooking smells were the same, gestures and attitudes were the same, the laughter was the same; things kept passing in and out of focus, like almost-things she already almost-knew. She kept thinking "It's Fiji! This place has something to do with Fiji!" but she couldn't quite pin it down.

And then the slow dawning tingling thought that grew into the explosion of a certain conclusion: "This is Hawaii-iki! This is the place where my ancestors were born!"

Was it? Did Ela, clearly operating on her deepest subconscious level - what Jung calls ancestral memory - which always, he says, comes accompanied by that strange tingling sensation - nail it on the head? That answer comes later!

Meanwhile, what was happening to the discovery of the Fijian DNA sequence? That didn't come for ages afterwards but it did come! If you want to look it up for yourself, I think you'll find it in Stephen Oppenheimer's book "Eden in the East" or "Out of Eden"! Or is it one of the others? Damn, I've read so many books on the subject, I can no longer be sure of where my information comes from.

Anyway, if you're interested, you can find it for yourself. In the meanwhile? Results? Again with the Eureka moment!: Fijians are male line East African - Madagascar is East Africa! Air punch! "YES!!!" Happy dance! Happy dance! - with the female line a mix of Chinese, Indian and Cebu ...

... so, because Madagascans are the only East Africans who have an ancient tradition of sailing, particularly across open oceans, my Madagassy friend was undoubtedly right about Madagascan men going off someplace far away and I was right about them breeding with other peoples! But the definitive answer of the where and how of this didn't come for still a great many years later.

In the meantime, I pondered. These Chinese in question weren't Tanka; weren't traveling boat people. They came from China proper, which is exceptionally difficult to get to from Madagascar, what with reefs and shoals and those types of natural barriers. Indians, on the other hand, come from India which is easy to get to. And Cebu are the descendants of the jungle people of the South East Asian islands, like The Philippines and Indonesia, and Indonesia is also easy to get to, although the Philippines, no, not so much.

SIDEBAR: Did you know Fijians have a very ancient insult for promiscuous men which translates directly to "Dirty Sailor" in English. It refers specifically to men who don't care who bears their off-spring, and that is considered a very, very bad thing to do!

So, did our Madagascan "not-dirty sailors" travel to these places and somehow manage to pick up wives along the way?

It's possible, only they don't seem to have returned home with them, at least not for a great many generations.

Mmmmm? Did they take them someplace else?

Difficult one! We aren't talking here about stray DNA left scattered behind by a bunch of passing "dirty sailors"; the results of those sorts of casual inter-breeding vanish into the local population as quickly as possible. Yes? They definitely don't go on to create their own new and unique people and culture. Apart from everything else, they don't have the numbers for it ...

... also these men were from that DNA, which suggests these women had borne many children to the same men, and doing so for generations .... which means a stable home arrangement ... which is the exact opposite of zooming around open oceans ...

... so I asked myself "Is there anyplace in the world where Chinese, Indians and Cebu come together already pre-blended into one people?"

There was only one answer to that: Java!

So that's the place that was hovering around in my mind for several years, awaiting something concrete that would pin it down for me, definitely!

And it came! Strangely, it was while I was trying to solve another completely different mystery; one posed by that idiot Margaret Mead! (I won't bother you with what that stupid woman was on about that I briefly found intriguing!) To solve that mystery involved reading a great many Indonesian myths ... but it all fell to the wayside when I discovered, in among a collection of specifically Javanese myths ...

... THE MYTH OF RATU ...

If you don't already know, Ratu is Fijian for Chief, and I tell you my hair stirred on my neck when I read the title, and it stood further on end the further I got into it! HERE, RIGHT HERE, was the answer to the puzzle! Let me share:

But, first up, here's what you need to know to make sense of the story: Java is known as The Spice Islands because of the vast number of spices that grow there. And for millennium, Chinese and Indian traders have coast-hugged down from their native lands to buy these spices which they then lug home to sell.

Anyway, this legend starts when the Javanese spice growers discovered they were being ripped off; that the pittance they were being paid for their product didn't come close to the massive sums the traders were getting back in their native lands. Decidedly irked, the J.S.G. collectively decided they wanted those big sums for themselves, only the Indian and Chinese traders laughed in their faces and said there wasn't anything they could do about it because they didn't have boats and didn't know how to sail and so couldn't get to their product to those markets themselves, so nah nah nah!!!

But then a miracle happened. On the horizon! A sail!

Yup, coming towards them, across the open ocean, in a different direction from the traders, was a boat!

Turns out it was a load of black men lead by their chief, Ratu. They turned out to be in no way connected to any of the traders and besides they were nice guys so, inspired, "Will you help us out?" the Javanese spice growers asked.

Answer? Affirmative!

So Ratu and co. sailed the J.S.G. over to the island where the Indian traders sold their wares (presumably Sri Lanka) and they all made such a massive profit everyone was very, very happy! It was too good to lose so "Will you stay?" they asked Ratu and his cohorts!

Answer? Affirmative!

So Ratu and his men were gifted with land and took themselves local wives, and built themselves homes, lives and families, while occasionally jaunting off across open oceans to distant lands whenever their Javanese friends needed to sell their wares ...

... and there they lived until the end of their days and, since they taught their children how to sail and build boats and navigate by the stars, their children lived on in Java long after they'd gone, and became the famous Indonesian tribe known for their wonderful ship building, ship sailing, ship navigation skills, and their fearless way of crossing the open ocean!

And then, one day, millennium later, so the legend goes, the tribe of Ratu just vanished! Whhoosshhh! Gone! And it's there the story ends.

But not for us! Since we're assuming this story is more history than myth - as most myths usually are - we need to ask the big question: where did The Tribe of Ratu go?

Well, from the DNA evidence, we can assume that 14 of them took their 14 wives over to some nearby uninhabited islands (that Indonesians called The Moluccas, but, presumably, that they themselves named Hawaii-iki) - and, here in their very own Garden of Eden, they Adam-and-Eved it up bigtime, and ended up producing the entire Polynesian population.

This is pretty definite. To work out where a population started, scientists work on the principal that whereever this place is, it must have a range of old and new mutations. See, mutations happen in individuals and are then passed on to descendants, so the later populations would only have the new mutations, whereas, in original population, there'd be a mix of people with and without that mutation. The Moluccas has it - all the old and the new mutations - so Ela is definitely right! Science backs up what she discovered through a tingly sense of ancestral memory in her deepest subconscious mind!

But what else do we know about this? Well, from the linguistic evidence, that they hied off from their proto-Fijian brethern 5,000 years ago! And we know that the Pacific Jugganaut set sail around 3,500 years ago, so that's 1,500 years in Hawaii-iki and thus heaps of time for their blood to adapt ... blah, blah, blah ...

And somewhere during this time, some of them hied away back to Madagascar, and a whole flotilla went up to Taiwan ... but how on earth some ended up in the Carpathian Mountains among all those Dracula people, or in Russia along the Volga, or got mixed up with the Vikings, as suggested by the blood-line evidence ...

Mmmm, interesting, yes? Since I can't resist a mystery, here are my speculations:

I find no problem whatsoever with the idea of a flotilla of Polynesians going off to colonise Taiwan, nor, indeed returning "home" to Madagasca. Those are so easily solved they're not anywhere near mysterious!

As for the other genuinely mysterious pieces of blood-line evidence, I reckon I can do those too:

"Two Celts"
Sailors who called themselves
"Celts" traveled in Southern China
during the Han Dynasty
around 3000 years ago

Seems there was waayyy more zooming around happening in ancient times than is currently given credit, and there is also evidence of Vikings being in S.E. Asia about 1,500 years back ...

... but this isn't Viking blood in the Polynesians; this is Polynesian blood in the Vikings, which means it came from Polynesian men making out with Viking women. Since Vikings never traveled with their women-folk and, as far as we know, a flotilla of Polynesians never made it to Norway, it makes it seem somewhat more than impossible. But, you know, I can still see it happening! It's always possible that a bunch of adventureous young Polynesian dudes jumped aboard with Olaf, Harald, Erik and co to go off on some big adventure together! And it's also possible that they then traveled up through Russia along the Volga, and then, back in various Viking-lands, married themselves off to some young Gertrude, Inga, Friga, Freya and Helga-types!

As for the Polynesians breeding themselves into the blood-lines of those horrible folk in the Carpathian Mountains, I'm hoping it doesn't mean that a traveling boat-load of Ratu's sailors weren't captured by those Carpathian Dracula-types and forced to work as slaves in their ancient Draco goldmines! That would be too too awful for words! But, you know, I do see it a possibility of what happened. It's just a shame that the Carpathian Mountains are so full of such dangerously psychotic types (I asked a Polish doctor who works around there to see what he could find out for me and his reply was "No. I'm not going anywhere or talking to anyone I don't have to!") it's not likely we'll ever find out!

Oh, and speaking of the Carpathian Mountains and blood, I've just thought of something really strange: Fijians have an Old Old Story about The Blood Bird: a man who turns into a bird at night and goes around drinking people's blood. And "bird" in Fijian is "kula" and "blood" is "dra", so in Fijian this legendary creature is called Dra-Kula! Does that suggest to you as well that Fijians are somehow mixed up in this Carpathian legend? Like, they named The Creature or something? Or is this thread is simply getting too bizarre for words!

But back to the less strange and inexplicable! What happened to the other guys? The ones who didn't go off to play Adam and Eve.

There is still a tribe of Ancient Navigators in Indonesia. They are mentioned - although instantly dismissed as unimportant - in Gavin Menzies "1421" about the journeys of Zheng He. Although the entire book promotes the Chinese as the greatest sailors the world has ever known, Menzies does admit that Zheng He hired Indonesians to navigate for his seventh and final journey. And you'll notice this final voyage is the only one where He stops coast-hugging and crosses the open ocean. Strangely that open ocean journey was from Zanzibar to Java. A familiar one?

When I read this I went "Mmmmm!" and wondered if, in fact, the legend overstated that "Whhossh! Gone!" and that some of the Tribe of Ratu had actually stayed on in Java afterall.

And then I saw the descendants of Zheng He's Indonesian navigators interviewed by that nice Japanese-Canadian historian Michael Yamashita on the National Geographic Channel's documentary "The Journeys of Zheng He" (Hey, turns out these latter-day navigator dudes still have their forefathers' logs for the Zheng He journey? How cool is that!)

But, sadly, they didn't look Fijian at all ...

But then I noticed they were all sitting on the ground, wearing sulus, and being very careful that no one could see the soles of their feet. Totally Fijian! And that's when I wondered if maybe only one or two remained behind, and thus the gene pool was swamped by Javanese and that's why they don't bear a resemblance anymore!

You know, I'd so love it if someone went in and checked these dudes DNA! I betcha, betcha, betcha it turns out ...

As for the others?

Anthropologists suggest that Fiji was populated about 3,000 years ago - although Fijians claim it was much earlier - but since this is about two thousand years after our 14 Adams and 14 Eves got down to business in Hawaii-iki, the time-line is incorrect. Thus, unless the anthropologists are looking in the wrong place for the earliest habitations (and Sister Aikanisa always used to say their assumption that First Landing was in Natadola was wrong and that it was actually much higher up near Labasa, on Vanua Levu), we have a missing two thousand years to account for. (Let's just hope they didn't spend it working in Draco gold mines in the Carpathian Mountains.)

Maybe they went somewhere else first before, but I'm totally convinced that, whenever it happened ...

The Tribe of Ratu hied themselves off to Fiji!


Fijian history is no help. According to the Naukonikoni legend of their arrival in Fiji, the first thing their leader Ratu said when they got off their canoes on the shores of Natadola was "History begins today! Nothing happened before we arrived on this day!"

... and that's the way things still stand ...

Fijians did not exist until the moment they became Fijians!

Such a damn shame really, since they obviously have the most fascinating history of any group of people anywhere on the planet!


Obviously there is vastly more to the story than what I've told here. There are still so many fragments that haven't yet found a place in the Fijian Narrative ...

Besides, this posting is meant to be a Polynesian Narrative, and so it all has to wait for another day ... maybe in a decade hence when more evidence turns up and the pieces finally fall into place and I have a real story that I can tell.

Oh yeah, promised to tell you how I discovered the strange resemblance between Madagassy and Fijians:

If you come from any country that has coups, you know the awful physical and emotional roller-coaster that occurs whenever they happen: the racing heart, the sticky palms, the knotted stomach, the galloping nausea, the awful lump in the throat, and the sheer panic and terror you feel that your country is out of control and anything can happen to the ones you love.

Well, several years back I switch on the news about three minutes late ... and it's deep into the lead story, and I see there's a whole stack of frightened Fijians on the screen standing in the streets of Suva, looking towards the Parliament Buildings, and having desperately worried, hurried conversations, and the voice-over mentions the word "coup" and I'm instantly coup-mode - all racing heart, clenched fists, tightened stomach and nausea and crying "No! No! No!" .... and then the story cuts to an interview with the ousted Prime Minister ...

... and it's some dude I've never seen before in my life! He looked a lot like PNG's former PM Julius Chan, and my mind is kinda boggling and I'm wondering if there's been some PNG invasion that I haven't heard about ...

... and the whole thing is too creepy for words and I'm in a strange state of confused panicking ... and then, finally, I hear the word "Madagascar" and I finally realise it isn't happening in Fiji and I'm totally "Phew!" because I have no loved ones in Madagascar so it's just a regular news story!

But you really can't blame me for making such a mistake because there wasn't anything in the original images to suggest it wasn't Fiji. The streets looked like Suva and there were more than fifty worried-looking people in those first shots as well, and every single one of them looked like ordinary everyday people you'd see every day in downtown Suva! Like, every one and totally!

Normally, I can distinguish a Fijian in a mixed international crowd of people, but these Madagascans fooled me completely. So my Madagassy friend nailed it: Fijians and Madagascans are sssoooo originally the same people!