Pacific Islands began when the first European navigators entered the region, but it was not institutionalized until the late nineteenth century when some European scholars became alarmed that, because of a decline in and possible extinction of the Pacific peoples, their traditional lore would be lost. This concern led a small band of enthusiasts, headed by the surveyor-general of New Zealand, Stephenson Percy Smith, to form a society and publish a journal to record the lore, languages, and cultures of the Maori and other Pacific peoples.

Although their morbid prognosis did not prove true and the Maori and other Polynesian populations have gradually recovered, the Polynesian Society also survived, though it has never flourished. Its membership has never exceeded 1,500, and it has relied for the most part on voluntary contributions from a few active members. For the first forty years the society and journal were managed by the founders: Smith himself, who was usually president of the society and editor of the journal until his death in 1922; then by a fellow surveyor, W. H. Skinner; and later by Elsdon Best, New Zealand’s preeminent ethnologist. Smith was mainly interested in the publication of Maori lore and traditions, and Best, who had carried out extensive fieldwork among the Tuhoe Maori of the Urewera country, published articles about them and about general Maori ethnography. Both men were competent in Maori and even recruited some of their Maori informants as members of the society and contributors to the journal. They were also interested in archaeology, particularly with that great obsession of nineteenth-century scholars of the area, whether it was the Maori or some earlier race who had known and exterminated the flightless bird, the moa. However, it was not until the 1920s that New Zealand archaeology began to progress beyond the realm of speculation and general exploration.

Although the Polynesian Society and its journal remained New Zealand based, coverage extended well beyond the Maori branch of the Polynesian peoples. Smith was assiduous in recruiting overseas members for the society, particularly in Hawaii, and some prominent overseas scholars were corresponding members or contributors to JPS. Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii was the first patron of the society until after she was deposed in 1893. She was replaced by New Zealand’s governors-general until 1981 when another Polynesian queen, Dame Te Ariki-nui Te Atairangikaahu of New Zealand, became patron.

Smith made several tours of the Pacific, including a trip to the Cook Islands in 1897 where he collected migration traditions, and he traced Maori and Polynesian origins to India and used genealogies from New Zealand and the Cook Islands to calculate the dates of the supposed Maori/Polynesian migration from that subcontinent. His findings were published first in JPA and later in a celebrated book, Hawaiki: The Original Home of the Maori, with a Sketch of Polynesian History (1904). Such findings seem ridiculous today, but Smith, Best, and others were merely following the lead of renowned European scholars. Moreover, they should not be condemned as mere amateurs since there were no opportunities, at least in New Zealand, for professional training in anthropology.

That professionalism was to become influential in the society and journal after World War I. The first professional anthropologist to become involved was H. D. Skinner, son of W. H. Skinner and a graduate in anthropology from Cambridge University, who was appointed as a part-time lecturer in anthropology at Otago University in 1919. Skinner and several of his students, including the archaeologist roger duff, were frequent contributors to JPA. Skinner was briefly a co-editor of the journal and later president of the society, but he was never a dominant force since the journal and the society were still under the sway of amateurs. The most notable leader was Best’s understudy, Johannes Andersen, who was librarian at Wellington’s Alexander Turnbull Library, the largest repository of Maori and Pacific material in the country. The association between the library and the society was continued by his successors at the library, especially Clyde Taylor, who was at times both editor of the journal and secretary of the society. The society also benefited from another Wellington-based organization, the Maori Purposes Fund Board, formed largely through the lobbying of the politician Sir Aprirana Ngata.