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Notes and documents

2004; Routledge; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00223340410001684877

1469-9605

Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration

Abstract Niue Island is a 70‐m high emerged atoll, 275 km east of the Tonga‐Kermadec Trench axis. The island has been rising for approximately the last 500,000 years, but there is little information available about the nature of uplift. Several (groups of) myths concerning the origin and early human colonisation of Niue can be interpreted as recalling uplift of the island, or alternatively uplift of those islands where early Niueans (or their ancestors) once lived. Owing to the inclusion in Niuean myths of details suggesting coseismic uplift, which is considered unlikely to affect Niue, it is concluded that an early (the first?) group of Niueans came from the limestone islands of Tonga. Coseismic uplift is a common myth motif here and well documented in geological studies of these islands. It is concluded that the early Niueans who developed the myths concerning the formation of Niue incorporated details derived from observations of coseismic uplift in the limestone islands of Tonga because of the similarities in form between these islands and Niue. This study demonstrates the potential importance of myth in reconstructing the geological history of Pacific Islands. Notes Sione Lātūkefu, ‘Oral traditions: an appraisal of their value in historical research in Tonga’, Journal of Pacific History, 3 (1968), 135–43; P.M. Mercer, ‘Oral tradition in the Pacific: problems of interpretation’, Journal of Pacific History, 14 (1979), 130–53; N. Gunson, ‘Understanding Polynesian traditional history’, Journal of Pacific History, 28 (1993), 139–58. Margaret Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (New Haven 1940); R. Finnegan and M. Orbell (eds), South Pacific Oral Traditions (Bloomington 1995); B. Flood, B.E. Strong and W. Flood, Pacific Island Legends (Honolulu 1999); S. Savill, Pears Encyclopaedia of Myths and Legends. Oceania and Australia (London 1978). P.W. Taylor, ‘Myths, legends and volcanic activity: an example from northern Tonga’, Journal of the Polynesian Society (hereinafter JPS), 104 (1995), 323–46; D. Luders, ‘Legend and history: did the Vanuatu–Tonga kava trade cease in A.D. 1447?’, JPS, 105 (1996), 287–310; Patrick D. Nunn, ‘Early human settlement and the possibility of contemporaneous volcanism, western Kadavu, Fiji’, Domodomo, 12 (1999), 36–49. Richard Walter and Atholl Anderson, ‘Archaeology of Niue Island: initial results’, JPS, 104 (1995), 478. S. Percy Smith, ‘Niue Island, and its people’, JPS, 11 (1902), 196; Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology. Smith, ‘Niue Island, and its people’, 197. Katherine Luomala, Maui‐of‐a‐thousand‐tricks: his Oceanic and European biographers (Honolulu 1949). Pulekula, ‘The traditions of Niue‐Fekai (Translated by Smith, S. Percy)’, JPS, 12 (1903), 22–4. Walter and Anderson, ‘Archaeology of Niue Island’. E.M. Loeb, History and Traditions of Niue (Honolulu 1926). V. Kumitau and M. Hekau, ‘Origins of the Niue people’, in Government of Niue, Niue: a history of the island (Suva 1982), 83–90. Reported by G. Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia (London 1861), 468–9. T.H. Hood, Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. ‘Fawn’ in the Western Pacific in the Year 1862 (Edinburgh 1863), 24. T. Powell, Savage Island: a brief account of the island of Niué, and of the work of the gospel among its people (London 1868); E. Tregear, ‘Niue, or Savage Island’, JPS, 2 (1893), 11–16; Basil Thomson, Savage Island (London 1902); M. Morris, ‘The history of Niue‐Fekai, a New Zealand dependency’, MA thesis, Auckland University (n.d.). Niue Education Department, A Resource Book for Teachers (Alofi 1972), 47–9. Luomala, ‘Maui‐of‐a‐thousand‐tricks’, 136, 270; R.W. Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia (Cambridge 1933) Vol. 1, 32 ff.; Patrick D. Nunn, ‘Fished up or thrown down: the geography of Pacific Island origin myths’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93 (2003), 350–64. Smith, ‘Niue Island, and its people’, 197. J. Cowan, ‘The story of Niue: genesis of a South Sea island’, JPS, 32 (1923), 238–43. Thomson, Savage Island, 85–6. Walter and Anderson, ‘Archaeology of Niue Island’. Ibid. Lorimer Fison, Tales from Old Fiji (London 1907), 144–5. Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), Vikings of the Sunrise (Christchurch 1954); Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia. Yoko Ota, ‘Marine terraces and active faults in Japan with special reference to co‐seismic events’, in Marie Morisawa and J.T. Hack (eds), Tectonic Geomorphology (London 1985), 345–66. Patrick D. Nunn, Oceanic Islands (Oxford 1994). Patrick D. Nunn, William R. Dickinson and Akio Omura, unpublished work on the geological history of Niue. Loeb, ‘History and Traditions of Niue’, 24. M.M. Trotter, Niue Island Archaeological Survey (Christchurch 1979) Walter and Anderson, ‘Archaeology of Niue Island’. J. Dubois, J. Launay and J. Recy, ‘Uplift movements in New Caledonia — Loyalty Islands area and their plate tectonics interpretation’, Tectonophysics, 24 (1974), 133–50; Nunn, Oceanic Islands. Examples include the effects of the coseismic‐uplift events in Vanuatu (R. Howorth, ‘Baseline coastal studies, Port Vila, Vanuatu’, United Nations ESCAP, CCOP/SOPAC Technical Report 51 (1985)), Solomon Islands (J.C. Grover, ‘Seismological and volcanological studies in the British Solomon Islands to 1961’, British Solomon Islands Geological Records, 2 (1965), 183–8), and New Zealand (Brad Pillans, ‘A late Quaternary uplift map for North Island, New Zealand’, Bulletin of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 24 (1986), 409–17). S. Percy Smith, ‘Notes on the dialect of Niue Island’, JPS, 10 (1901), 181; Smith, ‘Niue Island, and its people’. Pulekula, ‘The traditions of Niue‐Fekai’, 100. Smith, ‘Niue Island, and its people’, 81–2. Loeb, History and Traditions of Niue, 12. The informant was Uea of Liku Village. Cowan, ‘The story of Niue’, 239, 161. Pers. comm., 2000. Quoted by Smith, ‘Niue Island, and its people’, 202. E.g. Ota, ‘Marine terraces and active faults in Japan’; Yoko Ota, ‘Coseismic uplift in coastal zones of the western Pacific rim and its implications for coastal evolution’, Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, Supplementband, 81 (1991), 163–79; Patrick D. Nunn and Felise Tonga Finau, ‘Late Holocene emergence history of Tongatapu island, South Pacific’, Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, 39 (1995), 69–95. Nunn, Dickinson and Omura, unpublished work on the geological history of Niue. Trotter, Niue Island Archaeological Survey, 50. Toshio Kawana and Paolo A. Pirazzoli, ‘Holocene coastline changes and seismic uplift in Okinawa Island, the Ryukyus, Japan’, Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie, Supplementband, 57 (1985), 11–31; Yoko Ota, Alan Hull and Kelvin R. 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Nunn, ‘Holocene tectonic histories for five islands in the south‐central Lau group, South Pacific’, The Holocene, 5 (1995), 160–71. J.G. Sawkins, ‘On the movement of land in the South Sea islands’, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, 12 (1856), 383–4. Leon P. Zann, W.J. Kimmerer and R.E. Brock (eds), The Ecology of Fanga 'Uta Lagoon, Tongatapu, Tonga (Suva 1984) Nunn and Finau, ‘Late Holocene emergence history of Tongatapu island’. Patrick D. Nunn, Pacific Island Landscapes (Suva 1998). Luomala, Maui‐of‐a‐thousand‐tricks. J.B. Stair, ‘Jottings on the mythology and spirit‐lore of old Samoa’, JPS, 5 (1896), 33–57 (emphasis added). J. Martin, Tonga Islands: William Mariner's account (London 1817), repr. 1981 by Vava'u Press, Neiafu, Tonga. Fison, Tales From Old Fiji, 145. F.X. Reiter, ‘Traditions tonguiennes’, Anthropos, 2 (1907), 230–41, 438–48, 743–50; A.W. Reed, Myths and Legends of Polynesia (Wellington 1974) Luomala, Maui‐of‐a‐thousand‐tricks. E.W. Gifford, Tongan Myths and Tales (Honolulu 1924), 15. G. Forster, A Voyage round the World in his Britannic Majesty's Sloop ‘Resolution’ (London 1777), 166–7. Hood, Notes of a Cruise in H.M.S. ‘Fawn’, 24. J.L. Brenchley, Jottings During the Cruise of HMS Curacoa Among the South Sea Islands in 1865 (London 1873), 24. Thomson, Savage Island, 85–6. Charles R. Darwin, Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and parts of South America Visited During the Voyage of HMS ‘Beagle’ (London 1844). Trotter, Niue Island Archaeological Survey. Patrick D. Nunn, ‘On the convergence of myth and reality: examples from the Pacific Islands’, The Geographical Journal, 167 (2001), 125–38. E.g. Russell J. 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