There were, however, some differences of computation in the various isles of the Hawaiian Group.
Hewitt, author of Primitive Traditional History, believes that the Pleiades year originated in southern India, and states that it is still retained by certain peoples on the north-west coast of India. He regards it as having been one of the earliest systems of computing the dawn of the new year. In India the commencement of the Pleiades year was marked by a first-fruits festival, as it was in Polynesia and New Zealand, where it was looked upon as an important function. Some tribes of Borneo take the heliacal rising of the Pleiades as the commencement of the planting season, and in olden times the group was closely connected with agriculture in many lands.
In his work, Ethnology, A. H. Keane states that the primitive Aryans reckoned the years as "winters," divided into moons and nights, not months and days, and that they made no attempt to harmonize solar and lunar time. Surely they must have regulated the year of twelve lunar months in some manner, or they would soon have found themselves in parlous plight. The Polynesians and Maori folk certainly had some system of regulation, and the rising ol the Pleiades was one of its most important points.
J. G. Fraser gives a chapter on "The Pleiades in Primitive Calendars" in his Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild. Therein he remarks that savages appear to have paid more attention to this constellation than to any other group of stars in the sky. In particular have they commonly timed the various operations of the agricultural year by observation of its heliacal rising or setting. Moreover, certain savages who do not till the earth have a strong feeling of veneration for this constellation: this has been noted in Australia and America. Some tribes of Mexico dated the commencement of their year from the heliacal setting of the Pleiades. At Bali Island, in Indonesia, the appearance of the Pleiades at sunset marks the end of the year. Throughout Indonesia and Melanesia this constellation is connected with agriculture, as it is or was in the Americas, in Africa, and in ancient Greece. And here, in our isles of the far south, the Maori looked upon the Pleiades as the providers of food for mankind; hence the secondary name of Aokai applied to the group. As the Maori made his offerings of first-fruits to these stars, how significant was his chanted appeal: "Whangaia iho ki te mata o te tau e roa e."
Dr. Shortland remarks in his Traditions and Superstitions of the New-Zealanders that the Maori people "divide the year into moons, the first being determined by the rising of the Pleiades." Far and wide throughout Polynesia this group is known by variant forms of the Maori name, as Matari'i at Tahiti; Makali'i at the Hawaiian Isles; Mataliki at Tonga; Mata'iki at the Marquesas. In the Cook Group and at Mangareva we find the Maori form in use.
With the Moriori folk of the Chatham Islands the year began with the reappearance of Puanga (Rigel in Orion) in the morning in June. Mr. Shand hints at some faint knowledge of a twelve-years cycle that those natives seem to have retained, but it was little more than a dim memory.
