The Thai people are a synthesis of ethnic groups - Tai, Chinese, Mon, Khmer, Lao, Malay, Persian, and some do indeed resemble the "Indians" of Tahiti: the faces of Gauguin's Tahitians can be seen.  At a guesthouse in Bangkok I saw the most beautiful girl, tall with with a long mane of wavy hair, she was the image of a Polynesian vahine.  I said as much to her boyfriend.  Yes, he said, she had a Khmer face, her family came from the Isaan, Northeast Thailand's frontier with Laos.

W.G. Solheim, the pioneer of  South East Asian prehistory, claimed that skeletal remains found at Ban Na Dee and Noen Nok Tha were of strongly Polynesian type. Canoe burial, that most typically Polynesian custom, was excavated in south Thailand by the archaeologist Per Sorensen in 1960-2. 

In the karakia or story of the migration from Atia to East Polynesia, six main places of long sojourn were named where the voyagers stayed peacefully or warred: Avaiki, also defined as Avaiki-te-varinga-nui, Papua, Enua-kura, Avaiki again, Kuporu and Manuka.  The name Avaiki, also rendered Hawaiki and subdivided into Greater and Lesser Hawaiki, was recycled many  times, much as the British scattered New Britain, New Hebrides, New Caledonia across the Pacific.  Hawaiki was the  place where the  voyagers from Atia first made landfall and stayed the longest.  Hawaiki also came to have a mystical significance in the same way that Jerusalem has been defined as both a real place and a spiritual homeland.  This  ancestral homeland or lost paradise was claimed all over Polynesia and was always  defined as in the west.  Captain  Cook observed that,like all the other peoples in the sea, the Maori "affirm that they came from Heawiji".

Java, Jaba, Zaba, Jawa, Hawa are all variants and all mean irrigated rice fields.  According to legend, Great Hawaiki was a mainland with vast plains on the side to the ocean and high snowy mountains inland, watered by the river Tohunga which Smith, ignoring phonetics, decided was Ganga.  River in Javanese is sungai which is nearer the mark.  However  the port areas of Jakarta and Surabaya respectively are called Tanjung Priok and Tanjung Perak, a much closer fit to Tohunga.   The topography is correct, even exact.  The  Java sea would be the voyager's route south, with the mountains of central Java inland.  Jakarta was once the Batavia  which   Cook described as  "the best marine yard in the world", and 5th century Hindu inscriptions have been found at Tanjung Priok, where merchants met for centuries.

Papua defines the far eastern isles of Indonesia.   Here the voyagers found fair people who made clothes of barkcloth and slender black people.  Both in Sulawesi and the Malukus the finest tapa was made by proto-Malay people and the Melanesian population element begins in the Malukus.

Enua-kura means the land of red feathers.  Kura or kula means red and also sacred in the isles east of New Guinea.  Every Pacific race is found in the Solomon Islands, and red feather currency, made from the feathers of the honey eater, is still used on Santa Cruz to pay traditional bride-price.  Red feathers were also exceedingly precious and sacred on Vanuatu, the former New Hebrides, where Polynesians several hundred years ago left their language on Futuna, Aniwa and Emae islands.   Archaeology concurs with the Samoan claim that Savai'i in Western Samoa was the Hawaiki from which Tahiti was settled. Kuporu and Manuka are reasonably Upolu and Manu'a in Eastern Samoa.

So the voyage falls into six stages, each of around a thousand miles.  This does not mean that the voyagers ever sailed a thousand miles non-stop. David Lewis points out that it is possible to sail from South East Asia to all the inhabited islands of Polynesia, except only Hawaii and Easter Island, without once making a sea crossing longer than 310 miles, and many distances are well under 310 miles. The only cultural deterrent to travel was the habit of killing strangers on sight - a ruthless but realistic way to safeguard an island's resources.

Sumet Jumsai, Thai architect and writer, describes the Thai people as more at home on water than on land.  Water is seen as lucky and complementary to life.  Songs and poems present sea travel and flooding as a matter of course.  Jumsai claims that much of Thai literature is the written part of an older oral tradition, unique in its aquatic expression, riverine and oceanic, with literary  images of vast oceanic expanses that can only refer to a distant past.  Up to this century the people of Siam were more at home in what  Western writers called "the liquid element" than on land. Children swam as soon as they could walk and handled small boats with ease.  There were up to thirty types of boats in common use,  and he points out that if  outriggers and  sails were added to the riverine craft it would become the  seagoing canoe of Austronesia.

On the island of Koh Samui, I found evidence of a more recent maritime tradition.  I had been invited to accompany a friend on a snorkelling expedition. I saw that we were to be in an open boat with no life jackets visible but I need not have worried. It was a goodsized wooden boat, broad and beamy with a shallow draught and tapering finely at bow and stern. No Devon shipwright could have crafted a better boat and I at once relaxed in the bob and glide of the waves. Dom, the young boatman, was using a long tailed diesel as propulsion and steering oar, but everything about the boat pointed to a sailing origin.

Yes, he said.  He had built the boat himself, but in just such a boat, his father had sailed to Bangkok with coconuts. That is about 300 miles of ocean, and if this fisherman made the journey, so must have many others in a long tradition of shipbuilding and sailing from little palm fringed islands in the Gulf of Thailand.

To continue the journey, move on to The Homeland.