After living in the central Pacific for many centuries, the bold and restless Polynesians sailed eastward, probably to the Marquesas Islands, anf from there, in about 400 A.D. to Easter Island and Tahiti. Before the settlement of Tonga there were no Polynesians. There were black people in Fiji and Melanesia, and small brown peole in Indonesia. Somewhere in this part of the world were the ancestors of the people who later became Polynesians. This knowledge comes from the study of archeology, ethnology and linguistics.
Language provides a ready clue to history, since it changes more slowly than much of the culture.
Hawaiian h corresponds to j in Tongan and to b in Malay Hundreds of other Hawaiian words have been traced back to the Indonesian area or elsewhere in Polynesia. He wrote that Tongan was a simple and childish language, and he considered Hawaiian to be even more childish than Tongan, having too few sounds and almost no tenses. In 1838 Chamisso made a c omplete about-face and wrote a detailed Hawaiian grammar, which was not based on the structure of Greek or Latin. He even intimated that the lack of inflections in Hawaiian was not a fault. He expanded the early grammar in 1864 but retained his Latin bias.