Is p’ú ‘to shoot’ from Polynesian pidgin?

I’ve just read linguist Derek Bickerton’s fun memoir, “Bastard Tongues”, which inadvertently gave me an idea about Chinook Jargon.

Inadvertently, in that he doesn’t mention Chinuk Wawa at all.

Different word, different Hawai’ian pidgin (image source: Amazon)

But Bickerton quotes a Hawai’ian from 1791 as saying in Pidgin Polynesian to an American, in regard to a treacherous chief (page 215):

< Enoo, nooe nooe poo, make kanaka. >
bad   many many   gun    kill      men
‘He’s bad, he has many guns [to] kill people [with].’ (The brackets are Bickerton’s.) 

That word < poo > is remarkably similar to the ideophone (onomatopoeia) for ‘shooting’ a gun in Pacific Northwest languages.

In Chinuk Wawa that word is p’ú. (At Bay Center, WA, it’s pú.)

The 2012 Grand Ronde Tribes dictionary is dead-on in commenting that this would appear to have been treated as a foreign word by Lower Chinookan speakers.

The foreign-language source of it can be called the nebulous Nootka Jargon, in which we find < poo > reported by Captain George Vancouver’s expedition in 1792 from Puget Sound Salish people.

Vancouver, and a number of other European and American explorer/traders, had already been visiting Hawai’i for some time since Captain Cook’s arrival there in 1778.

Linguist Emanuel Drechsel has made a very good case that there existed in that era a

Maritime Polynesian Pidgin used aboard such sailing vessels.

How crazy would it be to suggest the e.g. Hawai’ian-language pū ‘gun’ got transported to the Pacific NW by crews such as Vancouver’s?

Māori of Aeotearoa / New Zealand has the same word, also meaning ‘blow’ and ‘flute/pipe’. In fact the word could well be from any of several Polynesian languages, considering the wanderings of the White folks’ sailing vessels.

This would’ve been the exact moment when the first, quite unstable pidginlike vocabulary for region-wide intercultural communication — our “Nootka Jargon” — was coalescing into being.

Hawai’i would’ve had nearly a generation-long headstart on the PNW in coming up with a word for ‘guns’ and ‘shooting’ them. There were Hawai’ian males, and Tahitian women, on board ships such as Vancouver’s and on Captain Baker’s Jenny in 1792 in our waters.

So why not bring this readymade terminology to the North American mainland, where none of the language groups had yet encountered firearms?

Of course it’s totally conceivable that in Polynesian languages as well as PNW ones, a sound like pu independently arose to convey something like a ‘gunshot’.

But I think that we have here another logically quite possible source for a Chinook Jargon word whose etymology has remained uncertain.

This could be an exciting addition to our tiny known stock of Polynesian words that came into Chinuk Wawa, alongside the ethnic names Wahu, Wayhi, and Kanaka.

It would also be, as I understand things, the first Polynesian word ever proposed as having been used in Nootka Jargon.

• Need to check this some more, but it looks as if the word for ‘gun/shoot’ is related to pū, but is of different form, in some of the Polynesian languages. This may help us narrow down the potential donor languages…

íkta mayka chaku-kə́mtəks?
Ikta maika chako-kumtuks? 
What have you learned? 
And, can you express it in Chinuk Wawa?