Steven Wurm, the Pacific linguist, gave his views on what is likely to happen when two languages come into contact, one an aboriginal language and one that of invaders.  If the aborigines were numerically superior then the invaders could give up their language in favour of the aborigines' language.  As examples, Wurm cited the Norman conquest of England, the Mongol conquests of Turkic speaking peoples in the 13^th century, and the Mongol and Manchu conquests of China in the 13^th and 17^th centuries.

The Thai language is an amalgam of Mon and Khmer and the ancient Indian languages Pali and Sanskrit, influenced also by Chinese dialects and Malay and there is strong academic disagreement as to whether it is a Sino-Tibetan language or more nearly linked to Austronesian languages. The Thai are also not mono-lingual, there are over 80 languages spoken in Thailand and great diversity in linguistic terms.  The Malayo-Polynesian language was also flexible, and a mixed language - like English - and it spread from Indonesia to the far corners of two oceans, absorbing the language of incomers, conquered and conquerors alike. 

Good  speech and eloquence were valued throughout Polynesia.  In Tahiti, to lack eloquence was to lack the ability to rule and there were masters of rhetoric and schools where the art of oratory were taught.  If eloquence was honoured, poetry was a passion. In 1813 the Dutch navigator Moerenhout wrote that the Tahitians had bards and travelling mistrels who sang chants of gods and heroes and songs of lovemaking.

The dictionary of the London Missionary Society records that the natives sang songs and rhymes;   "They amuse themselves singing couplets, they sing alternately, two persons or parties".

This recalls the Thai poetry game Sakrawa in which people chanted back and forth in spontaneous rhymes.

In 1964 Stewart Wavell, a Cambridge ethnologist, recorded songs, poems, stories and dances in rural South Thailand.  He wrote;    "It was evident that there are many natural poets among the rural Thai.  Rhymes are invented, spun from the air like a spider's web…the least hesitation invited jeers…we were  to record every type of improvised poetry".

Thailand had a rich tradition of dance.  The  lakhon  was a stage play or drama performed by men or women, graceful with expressive movements of hands and arms, and the lakhon chatri    troupes were strolling players and comedians.  Lakhon chatri had a southern origin and was danced originally by men.  At temple festivals dancers were garlanded with flowers.  The  Burmese pwe  was also folk entertainment with playacting and clowns and dancers "as perfect as the best trained ballet",  all as in the dance and drama contests of Tahiti . 

Tahitian women wore flowing tapa robes with arms and shoulders bare and feet carefully covered and a headdress of flowers. This is the costume of Balinese classical dance except that tapa will not wrap as tightly as silk or cotton.  Dancers  made little use of feet or legs but the body was in continuous motion, standing or sitting.. and the hands and arms moved with extraordinary agility and grace with long pliant fingers pulled from infancy by loving mothers so that the dancers could bend them back to their hand.  In old Thailand mothers did exactly the same, pressing back their daughter's fingers from the age of five to enable them to perform the movements of classical dance..

The Tahitians wore tapa ponchos which were stamp printed in geometric patterns.  Tapa is not recorded in ancient Thailand and none could have survived the humid climate. But the paper mulberry from which tapa is made grows in Thailand and tapa is well attested in ancient China.  Early Chinese annals record that Thai people wore clothes printed or painted in geometric patterns.  Cotton and silk were not so treated but were woven in patterns.

An art that has never made the history books is massage, which was called rumi in Tahiti and universally practiced. Yet it is a living link, as I discovered when I visited Wat Po pagoda in Bangkok, where King Rama of Thailand ordered that all that was known of the ancient art of Thai massage should be engraved on stone tablets so that it should not be forgotten.  It hasn't been.  I was tired  and ill tempered after a missed standby flight but after an hour in the massage pavilion  at Wat Po I was sorted out, fine tuned and smiling.  Both Cook and Wallis experienced the benefits of Tahitian massage, and all the techniques they described are used in Thailand today, and even a simple shampoo and set is attended with expert skull massage and gentle hair tugging.

It may be argued that the Tahitians had neither ceramics nor metals.  Clay is not found in Tahiti and pottery would have fared badly on a voyage.  Though seaworthy, the pahis of Tahiti sailed at wave level, constantly doused in salt spray.  Metal would have corroded and been useless.  The Tahitians  knew of iron and traded for it, and stole it, eagerly. But what of religion?  Buddhism was not found in Tahiti. It may well be in those early semi-pagan days that formal religion sat more lightly on native animism, and was soon forgotten.   Nevertheless, the ture or maxims of the Arii do a little resemble the precepts of  early Buddhism. 

These ture were orally transmitted, as indeed was Buddhism, and they informed the Arii first of his duty to his family and then the rules for governing the people.   Marau-Taaroa, a  woman Arii, in her Memoirs, quoted the  lengthy and solemn advice given to the young Arii.

"Break the sudden rage that shakes your body, that clouds your brow.  Reflection is a good master".

"The head of the government must not be seen with lifted voice, with frowning brows, with passion-shaken body…"

"Meditate before speaking.  Your words…cannot be recalled".

Such advice to a young Polynesian warrior could have straight from the Dhammapada, the handbook of Buddha's sayings   Thumbing my well-worn copy, I found;

Kodhavagga -Anger  "One should give up anger, one should renounce pride….the wise are restrained in deed, in speech too, they are restrained….

Thai Buddhism today has a  remarkable and  striking  resemblance to the fare atua or spirit house of Tahiti.  This was a miniature shrine carried on poles, shaped like a house, exactly like the miniature spirit houses that stand on poles outside Thai houses and shopping centres.  

The Thai spirit house is exactly similar in intent to the fare atua or Spirit House of Tahiti.

The death of ancient Tahiti  began with Captain Samuel Wallis' landing at Matavai Bay in 1767, followed by Captain Cook's three voyages.  European traders and American whalers followed.  Within twenty years, old customs were abandoned as the Tahitians became dependent and demoralised by alcohol.  Metal tools and cast off European clothing  replaced stone axes and clean white tapa.  Firearms, given or traded made wars dreadful with wounds that the skilled Tahitian priests could not heal. In 1792 Captain Bligh found many natives addicted to drink and dressed in dirtied, cast-off European clothing.   "No longer do they wear that cloth which formerly they had in such abundance and wore with such elegance"; one observer wrote sadly.  

The arrival of the London Missionary Society in 1797 hastened the end of traditional society. A rigid Protestant theology  coupled with unswerving sexual puritanism was the summit of missionary zeal.  They had no interest  in anthropology or art or custom or history and were utterly opposed to dancing, music, nudity and lovemaking - to anything in fact that did not emanate from lower-middle class Victorian England.   

In 1820 Captain Bellingshausen, a Russian navigator, visited the island. He found peace and charm with women wearing clean white "Otahitian dresses" but noted "there was not one of the islanders, male or female that did not drink…a glass of grog". He was astonished to see that a great ancient marae, a massive terrace of stone, described by Captain Cook had been destroyed, and the islanders after they converted sang only Christian hymns and psalms. "The islanders regard it as a sin to sing their former songs…and have…abandoned not only all their old songs but also their former dances", he wrote, "It seems a pity that the instruction of the people has been accompanied by the suppression of all their old amusements"

It was imported diseases that finally destroyed the Tahitians.  Between sailors and alcohol, guns and syphilis, tuberculosis and smallpox, the Tahitians were devastated.  A missionary reported that it was useless to preach the joys of Heaven as all they wanted was to live in the health they formerly enjoyed.  Seventy years after that first contact, four out of five had died, as had the traditional crafts of Tahiti.  

The skills of navigation and astronomical knowledge were lost. As David Lewis notes; "not all Polynesians were navigators and after a short experience of civilisation many were not seamen either". When the missionaries Daniel Tyreman and George Bennet visited the islands in 1840 they wrote that "the inhabitants had a scanty idea of astronomy".  No longer were there any artisans to build or warriors to man the  great double hulled canoes and the last high proud  vessel rotted on the shore early this century.  Pagan idols were sent home to England as trophies to stand in museums, though the virile ones were usually castrated.   And the links with Hawaiki were severed for ever.

Apart from identical and unique artifacts and legend and customs and pastimes, it is in that intangible called personality that the people seem most akin from all the descriptions of early voyagers to both countries.  Some early writers on Tahiti saw influence from China and Java, others from distant India.  All, needless to say, were found in ancient Thailand.   It seems  a sad, extraordinary, almost fated  coincidence that in 1767, the  same year that Captain Wallis dropped his anchor in Matavai Bay and, albeit innocently, heralded the death of ancient Tahiti,  Ayutthaya was destroyed and razed and in that fire and destruction all the records of a kingdom perished and the history of ancient Thailand was lost.

Quite to the East Indies appeared in part as an article in Muang Boran Thailand  Vol 25  No 1  1999 

© Julie Barrie  1992,1997

With  thanks to Sumet Jumsai for kind encouragement in the early stages of a discovery

Further chapters will reveal  the true sensational identity of the Arioi, the strange sacred sect of Tahiti.   Also, the location of Hawaiki-Iki or Lesser Hawaiki, one of the  voyagers' islands of sojourn; and the exploits of Te-turangi-marama's bold captains, the legendary adventurers who sailed on the karakia into the Pacific.