Note 13 — Chapter IX · The Islands of the Blest

Ellis refers to this voyage because he found that the mythical island and well were believed in by the Polynesians. He refers, in this connection, to the “Hawaiian account of the voyage of Kamapiikai to the land where the inhabitants enjoyed perpetual health and youthful beauty, where the wai ora (life-giving fountain) removed every internal malady, and every external deformity or paralysed decrepitude, from all those who were plunged beneath its salutary waters”. Ellis anticipates the views of modern ethnologists when dealing with the existence of the same beliefs among widely-separated peoples. He says: “A tabular view of a number of words in the Malayan, Asiatic, or the Madagasse, the American, and the Polynesian languages, would probably show that, at some remote period, either the inhabitants of these distant parts of the world maintained frequent intercourse with each other, or that colonies from some one of them originally peopled, in part or altogether, the others”. He adds, “Either part of the present inhabitants of the South Sea Islands came originally from America, or tribes of the Polynesians have, at some remote period, found their way to the (American) continent”.13