Notes in Legends of the South Seas:

 

"Easter Island

 

Such oral literature as survived the calamitous destruction of the Easter Island culture in the nineteenth century was nearly all 'local history', concerned with Hotu matua's migration, the origin of the island's tribes, etc.

 

One fragment of ancient mythology which did come through was this creation chant, which I have adopted from Métraux's reconstruction of the garbled version given by Paymaster Thomson of the U.S.S. Mohican, who obtained it from Ure vaeiko in 1866.

 

It proves its own antiquity: neither coconuts nor eels were known on Easter Island (which has no streams of any kind) and the word for coconut, 'niu', was used for the fruit of the miro tree. Yet the eighth line of the chant preserves a memory of both, in an allusion to the extremely ancient myth about the eel and the coconut.

 

Tiki and his wife the Woman of Earth are also mentioned toward the end, and the cryptic last three lines again refer to eels, according to Métraux.

 

A chant of almost identical pattern is recorded by Buck from Mangareva. Both doubtless had a common source in the Marquesas, whence the Easter Islanders evidently migrated in about the fourth century [Métraux, 99: 320-322]."