AUSTRONESIAN ORIGIN

Calabash, Lagenaria siceraria，is one of the crops which human beings have cultivated since very early times more than  5,000 years ago.  The calabash has many uses. The young fruit is edible as a vegetable. The mature fruit, after drying, can be used as a container for water and other things. It's a perfect material for making various kind of musical instruments, including wind, string and percussion instruments. Calabash is one of the indispensable crops of the early people. Wherever they moved, human beings have always had brought calabash seeds with them, to plant in the new frontiers in which they have arrived.  The distribution of calabash is just the same as human beings’, starting from Africa, Asia then to the Americas.

 

It's an important linguistic technique to compare the cognates between different languages to determine their relationships. For calabash, there are 10 words in Maori and 13 words in Hawaiian that depict the same thing.  Both the terms “ipu” and “hue” are found in Maori and in Hawaiian.  So we can deduce these two languages had come from a common proto-language, or from the same origin. When the pioneers who departed from Taiwan, either  staying or moving on, they migrated island by island, with some settling down and others kept going. Finally they had arrived at the Marquesas Islands. From there they had migrated again and divided into two groups and took two different routes. One route headed towards NNW to Hawaii, the other route went towards SW to New Zealand. Additionally, the Taiwanese word for calabash, “pu” is also the cognate for “ipu” of Maori and Hawaiian, that’s to say there's a common origin among these languages.

 

Those people departed from Taiwan 5,000 years ago, and headed to the islands in the Pacific, obviously they had already brought the seeds of the calabash with them. Without doubt it’s a well prepared immigration. The result is that nowadays, calabash has become a commonly cultivated crop in New Zealand and Hawaii.  This is the conclusion derived from the evidences of anthropology, genetics, archaeology and linguistics.  The language spoken by those people was the proto-Austronesian language.  Throughout 5,000 years of evolution, we're fortunate to find there are some Taiwanese words which have been retained in the original proto-Austronesian cognate.  We can say also that Maori and Hawaiian have an advanced culture of the calabash, for they have so many synonyms depicting the same object, the calabash.

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The historical legends of both Maori and Hawaiian have mentioned that when their ancestors arrived in New Zealand and Hawaii by canoes, they had already brought some useful plants to cultivate in the new places.  The calabash was one of the listed plants on the “Canoe Plants List” , dated AD 900 and AD 1,200.  Accordingly, the history of cultivation of calabash in these two locations are about 1,000 years old.

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In the descriptions of calabash found in the “Hawaiian Ethnobotany Online Database”, it’s said that they had always kept dried calabash on board, since they believed it kept the sharks away by using it as a decoy to attract the sharks’ attention.  Also, the calabash can float on the sea, allowing drowning people to grasp on it and wait for rescue if the boat capsized.

 

 

​Links for further information：

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• Lagenaria siceraria

• The "Canoe Plants" of Ancient Hawai`i

• Ipu - Bishop Museum - Ethnobotany Database