The First Human Inhabitants of Australasia
At some date of unknown remoteness--it may be a hundred or two
hundred thousand years ago--a primitive type of man entered the
island continent of Australia, coming from New Guinea and the
islands of the Malay Archipelago. The period in human history was
perhaps so distant from our days that the geographical conditions
of the Malay Archipelago were not precisely what they are at the
present day; islands now separated by shallow seas may have been
joined one to the other, the southern projections of New Guinea
and the northern peninsulas of Australia may have been much
closer together, so that men, though living a life of absolute
savagery representing the lowest grade of human intelligence,
were nevertheless able, by making use of floating logs or roughly
fashioned rafts,[10] to enter the Australian continent and to
pass from New Guinea eastwards and southwards into the nearer
archipelagos of the Pacific. Although, doubtless, changes have
taken place during the last hundred thousand years in regard to
the distribution of land and water between south-eastern Asia and
Australia, and even over the surface of the Pacific Ocean; and
although islands or islets may have since subsided that once served
as stepping-stones for adventurous savages: nevertheless there
cannot have been within this period of time--which is scarcely a
second in the age of the planet on which we dwell--the rise of
any continuous land surface between the continent of Asia and the
great Malay islands, on the one hand; and New Guinea, Australia,
New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Fiji, on the other. Because
if there had been any such continuous land connection within the
last two hundred thousand years, sufficient to effect the peopling
of Australasia by the human species without the need of crossing
straits and narrow seas, there would have come into these regions
as well as Man many examples of the modern animals of Asia. But, as
we know, the south-eastern part of the Malay Archipelago and all
Australasia and the Pacific islands are singularly deficient in the
types of mammal now existing in Asia. In New Guinea, Australia,
and the Malay islands to the east of Celebes and Bali, there are
no monkeys, cats, wild oxen, or deer (excepting in the Moluccas
and Timor), no apes, bears, insectivores, squirrels, elephants,
rhinoceroses, or tapirs. Elephants, tapirs, apes, tigers, and
rhinoceroses got as far east as Java (though the two first are now
extinct there), and if there had been continuous land connection
from that region eastwards to New Guinea and Australia, which made
human emigration thither possible without crossing the sea, then
these other large mammals would have equally invaded Papuasia and
Australia. That they did not penetrate farther east than Java shows
that a broad sea strait must have intervened, and the fact that this
strait--or rather a succession of straits---did not prevent the
Tasmanians, the Negroes of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago,
and the aboriginal Australians from reaching the lands in which the
Europeans found them living three hundred years ago, shows that when
they set out on these migrations from Malaysia eastward they could
not have been without some knowledge of human arts and inventions,
since they must have been able to fashion and use forms of transport
across broad stretches of sea, such as logs or reeds fastened
together into rafts, or water-tight vessels made out of the bark
casing of fallen tree trunks.
[10] Dr. W.E. Roth, writing to the Royal Anthropological Institute
in 1908, describes the existing canoes on the northern and eastern
coasts of Australia as being of two kinds: that which was made
from a single sheet of bark, folded in its length and tied at the
extremities (the sides being kept apart by primitive stretchers),
and that which was hollowed by fire and stone axe from the trunk of
a tree. But he implies by his further remarks that these "dug-out"
canoes were originally obtained by the black Australians from the
Melanesian or Negroid people of Papuasia, who are several degrees
higher in mental development than the Australoids. He also alludes
to rafts possessed by the northern and eastern Australians (the
Tasmanians had somewhat similar ones), made of logs of white
mangrove tied together at both ends, but in such a way that the
rafts were narrower at one end than at the other. On top was placed
some seaweed to form a cushion to sit on. These are propelled either
like punts by means of a long pole, or are paddled with flattened
stumps of mangrove or similar trees from the water side. In the
tropical regions natives will make a rough-and-ready raft out of
three trunks of the wild banana tied together with rattans or
flexible canes.
[Illustration: AN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINE NAVIGATING A RAFT]
Nevertheless, though of the same human species as ourselves, the
Australoids[11] and Tasmanians[12] belonged to the lowliest living
types of mankind, both physically and mentally. We know from various
researches and evidence of cave deposits, bone and shell heaps, that
these races had inhabited Australia and Tasmania for a very long
period, that they did not originate in the southern continent, but
evidently came from Asia; and that their nearest relations at the
present day are the savage forest tribes of India and Ceylon, and in
the past--most wonderful to relate--the ancient races of Britain and
the continent of Europe. In his skull features and his very simple
handicraft the Tasmanian resembled closely the people who lived in
Kent and north-eastern France one to two hundred thousand years
ago, in the warm intervals of the Great Ice Age. When races of
superior intellect and bodily strength were developed in Europe and
northern Asia, the ancestors of the Tasmanians and the Australoids
were driven forth into the forests of Africa and southern Asia. From
out of the Tasmanian type was specialized the Negro of Africa and
southern Asia. But the unspecialized Tasmanian meantime was either
extinguished by stronger races or was pushed on, ever farther and
farther eastwards and southwards, until first Australia, and lastly
what was once the southernmost peninsula of Australia--Tasmania--was
his last refuge. The Australoids followed in the Tasmanian's
footsteps, and became the native race of the Australian continent,
prevented or discouraged from crossing over into Tasmania by the sea
passage--Bass's Straits--which had been formed between Tasmania and
the mainland. Other Australoids and Tasmanians no doubt populated
New Guinea and the great Melanesian islands (as they had done all
Malaysia). Here, however, they were followed up by the Negro, and in
course of time Papuasia (as New Guinea and its surrounding islands
is called) became almost as much a domain of the Negro as Africa.
Primitive Negroes (mixed in blood with Australoids, and forming thus
the Melanesian type) travelled as far eastwards and south as Fiji,
the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia. They may even have reached New
Zealand before the Polynesian Maoris came, and in a half-breed with
the Polynesian they extended their ocean range as far as the Hawaii
archipelago. They populated the Philippine Islands,[13] and all the
other islands of the Malay Archipelago, even as far out at sea as
Micronesia, except--curiously enough--Borneo, and perhaps Java.
[11] It is more convenient to give this name to the dark-skinned
Australian aborigines, inasmuch as the term "Australian" now means a
white man of European ancestry.
[12] The Tasmanians have been extinct since 1876 or 1877.
[13] Here being dwarfish in stature they are styled Negrito, a
Spanish diminutive of Negro. The pigmy negro type is not confined
to the Philippine archipelago, but reappears in some of the
south-eastern Malay islands and in New Guinea.
The Negroes or Melanesians improved on the rafts and bark canoes
of the Tasmanians and Australoids by inventing and perfecting the
"dug-out" canoe. This is made of a single tree trunk, hollowed out
by the use of fire and the chipping of stone axes.
In Micronesia and Malaysia these Negroids soon became mixed with or
exterminated by the early Mongolian type of man which, originating
somewhere in High Asia, invaded Europe, America, south-east Asia,
and Malaysia, assisting in time to form that race of mysterious
origin and affinities, the Indonesian or Polynesian, whose invasion
of the Malay Archipelago and Pacific islands occurred long after
the coming of Tasmanian, Australoid, Negro, and Mongol, yet may
have been as far back as five or six thousand years ago. The
Polynesian's ancestors produced very considerable effects on these
regions by bringing to them the first fruits of the white man's
civilization which we associate in Europe and western Asia with
the New Stone Age, or the period beginning perhaps twenty thousand
years ago, in which men began to make beautifully finished stone and
bone implements and set themselves to domesticate animals and to
cultivate plants.
Among the Maoris of New Zealand, the people of Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti,
one or two islands off the west and the north-east of New Guinea,
and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), there are, or rather were, types
amongst the Polynesians, strikingly European in form, feature,
and mental characteristics. I write "were" with the intention of
alluding to the days when there were no European settlers in these
regions who could have modified the population by intermarriage. The
languages spoken at the present day by all more or less pure-blood
Polynesians betray a resemblance and affinity with the Malay
dialects and languages of Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula.
It would seem, therefore, as though Malaysia was the original home
of development of the Polynesian race, and that this remarkable
people, celebrated for their fearless navigation of the ocean in
well-constructed canoes, with masts, sails, and outriggers,[14]
arose from some southward migration of the White Man (Caucasian)
when he was emerging from the condition of the savage into the
beginnings of civilization; a stage which is understood by the use
of the term Neolithic, or the stage of perfected stone implements.
Here in Malaysia the Caucasian type (which in ancient times
populated much of northern and eastern Asia) mixed with the Mongol
or Yellow Man, with the Negro or Black Man, and perhaps even with
what remained of the generalized Australoid stock; and the result
was the Polynesian as he is seen to-day: a tall, well-developed
specimen of humanity with a reddish or yellow skin, large eyes set
horizontally in the head, a well-formed nose and chin, straight hair
(finer than that of the Mongol and with some tendency to curl or
undulate), slight beards in the men, and a good brain development.
In some respects these Polynesians recall in appearance, in mind,
and in culture the aboriginal inhabitants of the three Americas,
North, Central, and South. Indeed, if natives from the Upper Amazon,
Southern Chili, or California were put alongside Polynesians
from New Zealand, Tahiti, or Samoa it would not always be easy
to pick them out at a glance. Where the Amerindian differs from
the Polynesian is in being absolutely straight-haired and having
features slightly more Mongolian, so that there is a still greater
resemblance in body and mind between the Amerindian of South America
and the Micronesians of the Ladrone Islands, the Dayaks of Borneo,
or the Malays of the Malay Peninsula. The indigenes of North America
obviously contain a great deal of Caucasian blood, from ancient
migrations coming from north-east Asia, and therefore sometimes
resemble Polynesians more than they do the Mongols of northern Asia.
[14] The seafaring vessels of the Polynesians were as much of an
advance on the dug-out canoes of the negroid Papuans as these last
were superior to the rafts and bark coracles of the Australoids. The
chief feature in the Polynesian canoe was the outrigger, sometimes
double. This was a long piece of wood floating on the water parallel
to the canoe and fastened to two poles or sticks projecting
horizontally from the side of the canoe.
Many students of the unwritten history of the human past are now
inclined to believe that by the aid of islands since submerged
individuals of the Malay and the Polynesian races must have
penetrated in ancient times into Central and South America,
carrying with them the beginnings of Neolithic culture and many
new ideas in religion. Such theories derive some support from a
comparison between the arts of Borneo and other islands of the Malay
Archipelago, and of the Pacific islands and those of Central and
South America.
Amongst the many problems of the past which we are unable at present
to solve is why, if the Polynesians could colonize every island
or islet in the vast Pacific, including New Zealand and Easter
Island, they should have had so little effect on the development
of Australia. In travelling east and south from their original
homes in Sumatra, Jilolo, and the islands north of New Guinea,
the Polynesians might just as easily have landed on the coasts of
Australia as on those of New Zealand. But though such landings
almost certainly took place, nearly all record of them is lost, and
they had very little effect on the physical and mental character
of the dark-skinned Australian aborigines. As a matter of fact, for
some reasons connected with ocean currents and prevailing winds,
the line of Polynesian migration seems to have been from west to
east across the more equatorial regions of the Pacific, north of New
Guinea, and afterwards from east to west, north-west, south-west,
and due north. New Zealand was colonized by the Polynesians, not
from the direction of New Caledonia, but from Samoa and Tonga.
These Maoris (as they are now called) came at no very ancient
date--perhaps not more than six hundred years ago;[15] but there may
have been earlier Melanesian invasions from the direction of Fiji.
[15] There are legends and evidence--such as shell heaps--in New
Zealand indicating that the islands were first populated by a Papuan
race akin to the peoples of New Caledonia and New Guinea. This is
difficult of belief because of the isolated character of New Zealand
and the exceedingly stormy seas which cut it off from other lands
to the north and west. Yet the existence of a negroid element among
the Maoris of New Zealand is undoubted. It may have been due to the
earliest Polynesian invaders bringing with them slaves and captives
from Fiji. That the Maoris kept slightly in touch with the world
of Asia after their colonization of New Zealand is shown by the
discovery some years ago in the interior of New Zealand of an Indian
bronze bell dating from about the fourteenth century A.C., with an
inscription on it in the Tamil language of southern India. It was a
ship's bell belonging to a vessel presumably manned by Muhammadans,
probably Malays. Either, therefore, a Malay ship or one from the
south of India discovered New Zealand some six hundred years ago, or
reached the Melanesian or Samoan islands of the western Pacific, and
there left its bell to be carried off to New Zealand as a treasure.
The Malays certainly traded to the New Hebrides. It should also
be noted that in many other outlying Pacific islands besides New
Zealand, there are traditions and even the remains of implements to
suggest a former wide migration eastward of the Negroid type--even
as far as Hawaii.
The aborigines of Australia at the present day are usually divided
into two main sections, based on language, affinities, and other
evidence. It is thought possible that the southern half of this
division is the more primitive, and that the northern half has
received here and there some modification by occasional attempts
on the part of Hindu adventurers from Java, or Malay, Polynesian
or Papuan seafarers, to settle on the inhospitable coasts of
north-western, northern, and eastern Australia.
It is in any case practically certain that the Malay people were
the first discoverers of Australia from the point of view of
civilized man and of definite human history. The Malays are mainly
of Mongol affinities. They belong to that great division of humanity
which includes the peoples of Indo-China, Tibet, China, Japan,
Mongolia, and Arctic Asia and America, and which is characterized
by narrow, somewhat slanting eyes; a small, straight, narrow nose;
high cheekbones; lank, coarse head hair, and a relative absence
or scarcity of hair on the face and body. But the word Malay must
be understood in two senses in this and other books treating of
Australasia. It means in a general sense the Mongolian race which
populates so much of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago
(extending on the north-east to the Philippines and Formosa); and
in a more restricted sense a tribe and language which originated in
the Menañkabao district of central Sumatra. The Malay language is
a member of the great Malayo-Polynesian group which may have been
created by an ancient fusion, many thousand years ago, between the
early Caucasian (White men) invaders of Sumatra and the Mongolians
who followed them. At the present day the languages of this group
range from Madagaskar in the south-west to Hawaii in the north-east,
to Formosa in the north, and New Zealand in the south. An early
mingling of the Mongolian Malay and the Caucasian or Indonesian[16]
inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago produced probably not only
this widespread family of languages, but the remarkable Polynesian
peoples of the Pacific.
[16] Indonesian is the name applied to the light-skinned people of
Caucasian features found in Sumatra and Papuasia.
Yet although the Malays proper spoke this Polynesian type of
language (so very different from the Mongolian languages of
Indo-China) they remained chiefly Mongol in their physical features.
But their close association with the Indonesian or Caucasian type
of people in Sumatra seems to have inspired them with some of the
energy and culture--especially in the matter of navigation--which
was already carrying the hybrid Polynesians far ahead in the
colonization of the Pacific islands. At several epochs these Malays
left their native Sumatra on oversea adventure. They seem firstly
to have visited Ceylon, southern India, and the Maldiv Islands.
Then much bolder sea journeys, perhaps in outrigger canoes with mat
sails, took them, via the Seychelles, to Madagaskar--it may be more
than two thousand years ago. Later migrations eastward brought them
to the coasts of the Malay Peninsula and islands, where they became
the celebrated "Sea Gipsies"--the _Orang laut_, or Men of the Sea,
who lived almost entirely on board their canoes, and only came on
shore to trade or to plunder. Finally arose a warlike Malay tribe
of eastern Sumatra (Menañkabau), who, becoming converted to the
Muhammadan faith about six hundred and fifty years ago, left Sumatra
to become a conquering, colonizing, trading people, who in the
course of some four hundred years had settled on the coasts of the
Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Java, and the other Sunda islands, Celebes,
the Moluccas, Philippines, and the north-western parts of Papuasia,
and had founded kingdoms, spread everywhere their Muhammadan
faith, and everywhere between Sumatra and New Guinea imposed their
own Malay dialect as a medium of intercourse and commerce. In
these wonderful adventures--which may have carried them and their
civilization as far east as the New Hebrides, besides spreading
still farther products of the Indian world, such as the domestic
fowl,[17] the orange, lime, and betel pepper-vine--they undoubtedly
discovered the north coast of Australia about five hundred years
ago, and communicated their discovery to the Chinese, the Arabs, and
finally the Portuguese and Dutch.
[17] The domestic fowl had even reached New Caledonia but not any
part of Australia or New Zealand.
Assisted by Persians of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs of southern
and western Arabia revealed East Africa and Madagaskar about the
beginning of the Christian Era, and before this period had found
their way to western India, Ceylon, and even the Malay Peninsula.
After the convulsion and awakening caused by the promulgation of
the Muhammadan religion, Arab voyages to the Far East (largely
instigated by the merchants of Persia) increased to a remarkable
extent; and wherever the Arabs went they endeavoured to spread the
faith of Islam. Thus, as early as the thirteenth century, the Arab
religion, dress, and customs had been introduced into the Island
of Borneo, into the north of Sumatra, and the south of the Malay
Peninsula. By 1470 the whole of Java had been converted to the
Muhammadan religion, and the great mass of the Malay people became
ardent advocates of that faith.
The Arabs, of course, belong to the Caucasian sub-species: they
are emphatically White Men in body and mind, though their skin
colour may have been darkened by ages of exposure to a hot sun and
by occasional intermixture with the Negro. But they have gradually
grown to be distinct in cast of mind and sympathies from the
peoples of Europe; and the institution of the Muhammadan religion
separated them still more widely from the world of Greece, Rome,
Paris, Lisbon, and London. Until the fourteenth century of the
Christian Era they and their Persian allies monopolized the whole
of the trade which had grown up between Asia, Malaysia, and Africa
on the one hand, and Europe on the other. Then the movements of the
Mongols and Tatars in central and western Asia, and their temporary
respect for and curiosity concerning Christian Europe, enabled
Italian commercial travellers to penetrate to the farthest parts
of Asia. Thus there reached Europe not only more or less accurate
descriptions of Java and Sumatra, but vague hints as to a "great
Java" which lay to the south and was a whole continent in itself.
These hints became more precise at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, when not only had the Malay Archipelago been traversed
almost to the limits of New Guinea by adventurous Italians, but
French and Portuguese navigators may even have been driven out of
their course by storms, and obtained some glimpse of the Australian
coastline.[18]
[18] In my volume on the Pioneers in India and Southern Asia I
have referred to the story told to Ludovico di Varthema by a Malay
captain of the vessel in which he travelled, according to which
Malays had penetrated southwards into seas where the ice obstructed
their passage, and the day in wintertime became shortened to a
period of four hours. This would look as though the Malays had
anticipated us in Antarctic discovery.
The names of the French voyagers who may have sighted Australia
in the first half of the sixteenth century were Binot Paulmier de
Gonneville, who, sailing across the Indian Ocean after rounding
the Cape of Good Hope, was blown out of his course and landed
on the shores of a great island, which he believed to be Terra
Australis (perhaps only Madagaskar); and Guillaume le Testu, who,
starting apparently from Marseilles in 1530, also rounded the Cape
of Good Hope, and in directing his course for the Spice Islands
apparently stumbled on the coast of West Australia. The southern
continent is certainly indicated on an old French map of 1542, now
in the possession of the British Museum. But this discovery of the
Provençal sailor is based on slender evidence.
The definite revelation of Australasia will be dealt with in
succeeding chapters. Meantime, before we begin to review the
historical discovery of the Australian continent and the islands
and islets of Malaysia, Papuasia, and of the Pacific, let us first
of all realize what were the conditions of life amongst the savage
or semi-savage inhabitants of these regions before they came into
contact with the men of strong minds and strong bodies who left
western Europe from the sixteenth century onwards to found colonies
in the new worlds of America and Australasia.
In the sixteenth century the distribution and condition of the
native races in Australasia and the Pacific islands stood thus:
Java was thickly populated, far more so than any other island
in Malaysia. This population consisted almost entirely of a
short, yellow-skinned people of MALAY speech and more or less of
Mongolian type, but with some ancient Hindu intermixture. In the
mountainous regions of the interior was a forest-dwelling race--the
Kalangs--(now extinct), a wild people, supposed to be negroid but in
reality more like the Australoids. Java, colonized some two to three
thousand years ago by the Hindus, and at a later date much visited
by Arabs and Chinese, had attained a high degree of civilization
(of a very Indian character) when first visited by Europeans in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under the Dutch from the
seventeenth century onwards it became the great centre of Malaysian
commerce.
Borneo, on the other hand--a very much larger island--was in a
less advanced stage of culture, except on the north coast, along
which both Indian and Chinese--and, later, Arab--civilization
had come into play. North Borneo was a very old colony of the
Chinese, and under Arab influence after the thirteenth century had
become a region of considerable wealth and power. The Muhammadan
religion had spread over the North Bornean kingdom of Brunei and
thence to Palawan and the Sulu archipelago, between Borneo and
the Philippines. The Malays from Celebes wielded a considerable
influence over the south coast; but all this Eastern civilization
did not penetrate far into the interior, which was inhabited
mostly by a Mongolian people (like the Malays and Indo-Chinese
in appearance) generally known as Dayaks. Other tribes were
distinguished as Dusuns, Muruts, Bukits, Kanowit, Kayan, Sagai,
Madangs, Punans, Kennias, &c. All these interior peoples led a life
of relative savagery, though they were very artistic, and never
allowed complete nudity in either sex. They were not cannibals,
but they had a passion for head-hunting and for the collection
of skulls, which they preserved and decorated, and to which they
attached some religious significance. In their appearance, their
weapons (such as the blowpipe), arts, and industries, and this
practice of head-hunting they offered most striking resemblance to
the Amerindians of equatorial South America. Curiously enough, so
far, there has been no trace whatever found of pre-existing Negroids
or Negritos in Borneo, though this race once predominated in the
neighbouring Philippine Islands, and is found in the Malay Peninsula
and even eastern Sumatra. There are slight traces of Negroids in the
population of the great island of Celebes, to the east of Borneo,
and, with the exception of Java, in all the other parts of Malaysia.
The island of Celebes, like Java, was a region of considerable
Malay civilization when first reached by Europeans. The people here
(except the wild forest tribes) had elaborate dresses, steel weapons
and implements, were skilled in weaving, embroidery, gold and silver
jewellery work, and shipbuilding. On the whole, Java and Celebes
were the two most advanced of the Malay islands in the arts and
industries and the amenities of civilized existence when Europeans
first sailed amongst these wonderful islands of spices, of Malay
pirates, of cockatoos, hornbills, and buffaloes.
In Palawan (in which live the most exquisitely beautiful peacock
pheasants), and the Sulu archipelago--between Borneo and the
Philippines--the natives were all Muhammadans and much under Arab
influence; but in the rest of the Philippine Islands the Malays and
the older Mongolian peoples dwelling on the coasts were civilized
pagans, a good deal under Chinese and North Borneo influence, while
the interior was tenanted mainly by the wildest pigmy Negritos,
who were strong enough in numbers to keep the yellow-skinned,
straight-haired people from colonizing the forested mountains. After
the Spaniards came and put firearms into the hands of the Malays,
the Philippine Negritos soon got the worst of it, and at the present
day only number about twenty-four thousand in Luzon and Mindanao out
of a total population of nearly eight millions. Unfortunately the
arms and ammunition thus obtained by the Malays in the Philippines
and Borneo turned them into a bold race of pirates, who began after
the commencement of the seventeenth century to prey on the commerce
of Malaysia and the China Sea.
The eastern islands of the Malay Archipelago--Timor, Flores, Buru,
Jilolo, Ceram, and their adjacent groups of islets--were peopled
by mixed races, partly of Malay and partly of Negrito or Papuan
stock. In the mountainous interior of the larger islands the natives
were still wild and naked pagans, but little distinguishable from
the Papuans of New Guinea. But the coast population was mostly
Muhammadan, or about to become so, and more or less derived from
Malay settlers. In some cases, perhaps, they represented a Mongoloid
stock older than the Malay and related to the Micronesians farther
to the north-east.
These MICRONESIANS were the peoples of the Mariana or Ladrone, Palao
(Pelew), Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert Islands. They were of
mixed elements, partly Polynesian (which is to say semi-Caucasian),
partly Mongolian, and in some degree Papuan, but many of them bear
a remarkable facial resemblance to the Amerindians of North and
South America. This may arise partly from the partial colonization
of these archipelagoes of small islands in the western Pacific
by immigrants from Japan and China, mostly shipwrecked mariners.
This intermixture has imparted a "Tatar" look to some of the
Micronesians, just as the same facial features in the Amerindian
are undoubtedly derived from ancient migrations taking place in
prehistoric times from Siberia and Japan into north-west America. On
the whole the Micronesians are most nearly allied to the Polynesian
group of peoples to the south of them, though their languages form
quite a separate group. Before Europeans discovered them they
ignored the use of metal; their implements were made of stone, of
sharks' and whales' teeth, of sharp-edged bivalve shells, of cane,
and wood. They had a great reverence for stones, both as objects
of worship and as money. This feeling would almost seem to be
due to the remembrance of more remote times, when there dwelt in
these and perhaps other Pacific archipelagoes a wonderful race of
stonebuilders, who may have been the Caucasian ancestors of the
modern Polynesians and akin to that European Neolithic race which
ranged across the Old World from Ireland to Korea, and over the
Australasian islands from Sumatra to Easter Island.
A section of these Neolithic stonebuilders seems to have sojourned
for a time in the Caroline Islands, one of the Micronesian
archipelagoes. Here they constructed forts, palaces, quays, out
of immense blocks of stone, shaped ready hewn, so to speak, by
the hand of Nature: for they were cubes and four-sided prisms of
basalt (like the formations at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland), the
remains of ancient volcanic eruptions on the larger islands of the
Caroline group. Besides the stone buildings (which were erected,
like all ancient stonework, by placing block on block, without any
binding mortar between) this vanished race constructed artificial
canals and harbours. Their prosperity and civilization seem to
have come to an end--perhaps they emigrated to America and founded
some of the prehistoric civilizations there--through the partial
subsidence of the Micronesian islands. Many of these ancient stone
buildings are now partly under water, and there is other evidence
which shows that these and other Pacific groups of islands were
larger in extent several thousand years ago than they are now. The
modern Micronesians may be in part descended from the great race of
stonebuilders, but they have much degenerated in civilization, as
has been the case with the people of Egypt and the Amerindians of
Peru and Mexico.
New Guinea, four hundred years ago, and its adjacent islands, large
and small, of Waigiu, Aru, Timor-laut, the Admiralty Islands, the
Bismarck Archipelago (once known as New Britain and New Ireland),
and the Solomon Islands were peopled almost entirely by NEGROIDS,
that is to say by Oceanic Negroes, Papuans, and Negritos, similar
to the inland populations of the eastern Malay islands. The Papuans
were a tall race, with abundant bushy hair of woolly texture and
with arched, almost Jewish noses. Their skins were very dark,
and their appearance (except for the high nose), their noisy
dispositions, love of excitement and laughter, reminded travellers
very much of African Negroes. The Oceanic Negroes of the Bismarck
Archipelago only differed from the Papuans in being more "negro",
with more tightly curled hair and flatter noses. The Negritos were
like the pigmy Negroes of Africa. But here and there on the coast
of New Guinea, or on the islands off it, were obvious Polynesian
settlements of old times, and even on some isolated island a people
quite pale skinned and Caucasian in appearance.
The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, of New
Caledonia, and the Fiji archipelago are allied to the Papuans more
than to any other stock, but are usually known as MELANESIANS.[19]
Their characteristics when first discovered by Europeans (which for
purposes of accurate description was not much more than one hundred
years ago) were not quite so "negro" as those of the Papuans and the
Negritos. They had dark, almost black skins and broad noses, but the
head-hair was less tightly curled and grew to greater length. They
had often the very prominent brow ridges of the Australoid, and some
indications also of mixture with a higher race--the semi-Caucasian
Polynesian--and were no doubt the result of an early mixture of all
these types. The civilization of the Melanesians was somewhat higher
than that of the Papuans, but inferior to the arts and industries
and social life of the POLYNESIANS. They had developed agriculture
to some extent, and amongst cultivated plants had the taro yam (a
kind of Arum with tuberous roots), the Sweet potato (a Convolvulus),
the sugar cane, the Bread-fruit tree,[20] the banana, the coconut
palm, the sweet roots of a tree-lily (_Dracæna_), and the fruit
of a Pandanus; perhaps also the Kava pepper vine. They possessed
as domestic animals a pig of an east Asiatic species and a dog of
a type like the pariah dog of India or the Dingo of Australia.
They also had fowls of a game bantam type, which no doubt had been
brought eastward by Malay traders till they passed from island to
island into Melanesia, and even to most of the Polynesian islands
_except_ New Zealand. In New Caledonia there were fowls of a big
breed but there were no pigs or dogs. [The domestic fowl was even
found in the remote Easter Island when it was first visited by
Europeans, but had not got beyond that to South America; neither had
the American maize, tobacco, or other cultivated plants reached the
Pacific islands till they were brought there, from Asia or Europe in
recent times.]
[19] This word is derived from two Greek roots meaning "Black
Islanders". There is much difficulty in deciding what is Papuan and
what Melanesian when classifying the peoples of the Solomon Islands
and Bismarck Archipelago. There is a strong infusion of Melanesian
blood in Hawaii.
[20] The Bread-fruit, which will often be referred to in these
pages, is a tree of moderate height (_Artocarpus incisa_). With its
near relative, the Jack fruit, it is a member of the Mulberry order,
and consequently a distant relation of the figs. Dampier gives the
following description of the Bread-fruit of the Pacific Islands: "It
grows on a large tree as big and as high as our largest apple trees.
It has a spreading head full of branches, and dark leaves. The fruit
grows on the boughs like apples; it is as big as a penny loaf ...
of a round shape, and has a thick, tough rind. When the fruit is
ripe it is yellow and soft, and the taste is sweet and pleasant.
The natives of this island (Guam) use it for bread; they gather it
when full grown, while it is green and hard; then they bake it in an
oven, which scorches the rind and makes it black: they scrape off
the outside black crust and there remains a tender thin crust, and
the inside is soft, tender, and white, like the crumb of a penny
loaf. There is neither seed nor stone in the inside, but it is of a
pure white substance like bread. It must be eaten new, for if it is
kept above twenty-four hours it becomes dry, harsh, and choky ...
this fruit lasts in season for eight months in the year." Mr. John
Masefield, who has edited the best and the most recent edition of
Dampier, compares the flavour of Bread-fruit to "apple sauce".
[Illustration: PAPUAN OF SOUTH-EAST NEW GUINEA, NEAR PORT MORESBY
(From a drawing by the late Professor T.H. Huxley)]
[Illustration: OCEANIC NEGRO TYPE FROM THE NORTHERNMOST SOLOMON
ISLANDS
(From a photograph)]
Melanesians, like Polynesians and Papuans, lived much on a fish diet
if dwelling anywhere near the sea. The Papuans of New Guinea do not
seem to have known the Bread-fruit until modern times, though that
tree was the most important staple of life in so many Pacific
islands, and under another name appears anciently to have been a
favourite article of food in the Malay Archipelago. There was,
however, no Bread-fruit among the New Zealanders, though they had
sweet potatoes, taro yams, and gourds. Likewise the New Zealanders
omitted to take the pig with them from their original home in Samoa:
perhaps, however, the pig had not then reached those islands from
the west. The New Zealanders ate their dogs, and the domestic dog
throughout Oceania was bred for eating, and not merely as a hunting
companion. Like the Dingo of Australia, and the domestic dogs of
Negro Africa, the breeds of Malaysia and Polynesia could not bark.
In Melanesia and most parts of the Pacific, including New Zealand,
one or more species of rat were much in request as food, and were
introduced by these different races of men into almost all the
islands, including New Zealand.
All the Melanesians, like the Papuans of New Guinea, and the Negroes
of the Bismarck Archipelago, were thorough-going cannibals, and this
vice--the eating of human flesh--infected some of the Polynesian
peoples, especially the New Zealanders. Cannibalism probably existed
at one time in all the Polynesian islands, but had died out in most
by the time they were discovered by Europeans, only remaining as a
well-established custom in New Zealand and throughout Melanesia. The
New Zealand Maoris used after one of their inter-tribal battles to
collect the bodies of their slain enemies, cut off their scalps and
right ears, and offer these first as a sacrifice to the gods. Then
a row of cooking pits were dug on the right hand "for the gods" and
on the left for humans. The eyes and the brain were removed from a
dead warrior, and were eaten raw by the chief man of the victorious
party. When the cut-up bodies of the vanquished were cooked,
the chief's sons and relations first, and the whole of the army
afterwards, fell on the meat cooked on the left-hand row of pits and
devoured all they could at a sitting. The right-hand section of the
feast was presided over by the priests and the contents of the pits
partly consumed by them, and partly carried off to be stored against
future requirements. What was left over on the left-hand side was
packed up in baskets and sent to friendly tribes, who by accepting
and eating the remains of these slain men took the side in the
quarrel of the victorious force.
In Fiji human flesh was, above all, the food of chiefs, but everyone
partook who could. Slaves were captured in war or purchased from
other islands and were carefully fattened up for the table.
Cannibalism was partly an act of revenge, a desire more completely
to extinguish a fallen enemy, and in part a sacrifice to the gods
of the victorious tribe, or it began as an act of atonement or
propitiation to win the favour of a deity. In New Caledonia and New
Zealand--perhaps also in Fiji--it was often provoked by mere hunger
for meat, a hunger less easy to satisfy than in the large islands of
the Bismarck Archipelago and the mainland of New Guinea, where there
were the great Cassowary birds, large fruit bats, tree kangarus,
phalangers, and an immense variety of pigeons.
In religion there was mostly this difference between Melanesians,
Micronesians, and Polynesians: the two latter had castes of priests
who devoted themselves to the conduct of religious ceremonies, and
were often unmarried; whereas amongst the Melanesians and Papuans
there were no priests, anyone--usually the chief of the village or
tribe--being competent to sacrifice to the gods, or to conduct the
semi-religious ceremonies (so like those of Negro Africa) connected
with birth and death: most of all, the solemn rites observed in the
initiation of boys and girls into the duties of adult life on their
entering manhood or womanhood. The dwarf Negroes or Negritos of New
Guinea and the islands to the west had very little religious belief;
the Papuans more, but not so much as the Melanesians of the Pacific
archipelagoes. These last, no doubt, had been taught and influenced
for many hundred years by the Polynesians. All these peoples
believed in a variety of gods, devils, spirits, and fairies. (The
Fijians even believed in water-babies!) Sometimes the supernatural
being was the soul of a deceased hero or chief, canonized after his
death, and still working for or against the survivors in the form of
a shark, a turtle, a fish, snake, or lizard.
Stones and trees were worshipped as the form or the home of a god;
so were lizards, snakes, birds, the sea, a volcano, the sun, the
moon, stars, and vault of heaven. Nearly everything of fixed form
had a soul, was alive, was connected in some way with the spirit
world. A belief among Papuans, Melanesians, Micronesians, and
Polynesians in the immortality of human beings was almost universal.
Only perhaps among the Negritos was it absent or "not thought about".
As to the arts and industries, all this region lay outside the range
of metal-using countries, except where iron had been introduced
by the Malays, as on the north-west coasts of New Guinea and the
islands of the Malay Archipelago. Otherwise the races of Australasia
and the Pacific were still in the Stone Age. The Papuans and
Melanesians, however, had a great feeling for art and colour. They
carved wood most skilfully with chisels made of bivalve shells,
or stone adzes. There was a great tendency, derived from Malaysia,
especially in New Guinea and Melanesia, to build houses on piles,
with platforms rising high above the ground: a most convenient
architecture both for defending the dwelling against attack (by
drawing up the ladder of approach) and for raising sleeping places
above the range of mosquitoes, centipedes, snakes, and damp. In
some parts of New Guinea the people constructed their houses high
up in the forks of great trees, and used rope ladders to ascend and
descend.
But in Polynesia and those island groups to the east and north-east
of New Guinea much influenced by the Polynesians, the houses were
mostly built on the ground, sometimes with a stone floor, or were
raised on a mound of earth. They were usually oblong in shape, and
of considerable length, with a roof of thatch or palm leaves in
shape like a long boat turned upside down. In the Solomon Islands
the houses (occupied by several families) were occasionally as
much as 70 feet long and 40 wide. The thatched roof was in some
instances carried right down to the ground, in other cases it formed
a veranda supported on posts. But in parts of New Guinea and the
islands adjacent to its eastern half, in Fiji and New Caledonia
there were round or oval-shaped huts, looking like hayricks. The
houses of the New Zealanders had firm walls made of slabs of wood,
and one small window facing eastward. There was a porch over the
door. In the southern part of the great South Island, near the snowy
mountains, there were winter houses made by excavating a square or
oblong pit in the ground and roofing this over. In wintertime a fire
was lighted inside this underground dwelling, and the temperature
under the heavily thatched roof became very high, whilst it was
freezing outside; but as the dwelling was unventilated it was often
unwholesome for its occupants. Except among the wildest Negritos
and Papuans, there were in every village a club house and a guest
house, or the two uses combined in one large dwelling. And on this
club house the men of the village lavished their best ideas of art
and decoration. The beams and posts would be handsomely carved and
painted, or even inlaid with beautifully coloured sea shells; mats
woven of palm fibre or grass covered the walls, and the timbered
floor might be lacquered with some vegetable varnish. Similar
decorations were bestowed on their temples and their chiefs' houses.
The furniture consisted of little else than a rude bed made of
slabs of wood covered with matting; chairs or stools were carved
out of solid blocks of wood, or made from bamboo sections. The
fireplace was a thick cane basket covered with clay. Canes or reeds
and the invaluable bamboo equally made light but firm frames which
did duty as tables in Polynesian households, but the Melanesians
were usually content with mats and stools for all furniture.
Pottery--baked clay--was made by the Melanesians and by most Papuan
(but not Negrito) and Micronesian tribes; it was also known to the
Polynesians, but for some reason had in late centuries almost gone
out of use, its place being taken by wood vessels, gourds, the
halves of coconuts, and the shells of clams. Still, the manufacture
and use of clay pots were retained by the Polynesians of Easter
Island. Food was cooked by placing it between hot stones, which were
then sprinkled with water, and the whole thing covered over till the
food was steamed and cooked. Water was boiled in wooden vessels by
dropping in red-hot stones.
Sharp knives in New Guinea and Melanesia were made from splinters of
bamboo. The ground was tilled and prepared for cultivation all over
these Oceanic regions by wooden implements--pointed stakes, forked
branches made into hoes, flat slabs rubbed down into smooth spades.
Papuans (but not Negritos)--still more Melanesians, Micronesians,
and Polynesians--were industrious agriculturists, and besides food
plants they cultivated bright-coloured flowers (such as the crimson
Hibiscus) and the paper Mulberry tree, from the bast of which they
obtained the famous _tapa_ "bark cloth", as also from the bast of
fig trees and a relation of the Bread-fruit. There was no loom or
idea of weaving anywhere, except here and there on the coast of
New Guinea and in the Santa Cruz Islands (near the New Hebrides),
whither it may have been introduced by Malay seafarers. But the
plaiting of leaves, rushes, and fibre was carried to a fine art
by all these Oceanic peoples. In New Zealand the Maoris made much
use of the now-celebrated New Zealand flax, the fibre of _Phormium
tenax_, a liliaceous plant related to aloes.
Not having any metal (as already related), axes were made of
chipped flakes of obsidian (a glassy, flint-like volcanic stone)
or of other stones ground to a sharp edge, or of hard, sharp-edged
bivalve shells, or sharp-edged bones from the flattened spine of the
tortoise or turtle. Terrible instruments for slaying and beheading
were devised from the lower jawbones of large fishes, with saw-like
rows of recurved teeth; or by implanting razor-edged sharks' teeth
into the sides of wooden swords. Daggers with saw-like edges were
made from the spines of the ray or skate, as well as from very hard
wood rubbed down into a sharp cutting edge by sharks' skin. Spears
and pikes were also made from hard wood and sharpened by burning the
point in the fire. Or the point of the spear was made from the bony
spines in the tail of the great Ray fish, or the wooden haft of the
spear was fastened to a sharpened stone or obsidian blade by means
of resin. Bows and arrows were in use nearly throughout New Guinea
and most of the adjacent island groups; also in the New Hebrides.
But they had not been introduced into New Zealand, and had fallen
into disuse in most parts of Micronesia and Polynesia, though they
were originally used by all these Oceanic peoples. In the eastern
Melanesian islands slings were employed to hurl stones. Clubs and
throwing sticks were common Papuan and Melanesian weapons, some of
the former as executioners' weapons being fitted with stone heads.
Shields scarcely penetrated to Polynesia, but were much developed
and most fantastically carved and painted in New Guinea and some of
the western Melanesian islands. In the northern parts of Oceania
armour made of fibre, cord, or matting, and helmets of fibre, wood,
or basketwork were worn, but more for ornament than to shield the
head.
The Negritos, Papuans, and most of the Melanesians went about in
complete, or almost complete, nudity before they were influenced
by the Malays or by Europeans. On the other hand, the Polynesians
were scarcely ever seen without some covering; they had, in fact, a
sense of decency which was almost entirely absent from the negroid
races of Oceania in their primitive condition. But whether or not
clothing was worn for a covering or for propriety, the men, and in a
lesser degree the women, of all the Oceanic races were passionately
fond of ornaments. The more highly developed Polynesians decorated
the face and body of men and also women by tatuing; that is to say,
by pricking the skin with a sharp implement and rubbing in some
colouring matter. The Melanesians and Papuans, however, were more
addicted to what is called "cicatrization", that is to say, slashing
the skin and raising permanent blobs or blisters by introducing
some irritant. The more or less bushy hair was dressed sometimes
with great elaborateness. Necklaces of teeth (human, dogs', pigs',
kangarus', phalangers', fishes', and whales'), of seeds, shells,
pebbles, bones, and pieces of wood were worn, together with armlets,
bracelets, and anklets; so also were girdles of plaited fibre. The
brightly coloured feathers of birds entered largely into personal
adornments--in breastplates, masks, headdresses, and robes.
All these Oceanic races possessed musical instruments, chiefly
drums, flutes, Pan pipes, and slabs of resonant wood. They loved
singing--especially the Melanesians--and dancing.
In both Melanesia and Polynesia--even also in Australia--there were
the rudiments of picture writing, which in Easter Island became
developed into regular hieroglyphics.
All the Oceanic peoples, except the dwarfish Negritos, were fond
of birds, partly owing to their love of colour and partly due to a
sense of the poetry of nature which thrilled them all, the handsome
Polynesians most of all. In Easter Island the pretty little terns,
or "sea-swallows", were tamed and trained to perch on the men's
shoulders. Some of the island pigeons were partially domesticated.
In New Guinea and the big islands near by a great admiration was
felt for the fantastic Hornbills, and to wear a hornbill's head
and casque was a privilege of brave men only. The New Zealanders
regarded their parrots as semi-sacred. They would seem, however, in
the earliest days of their settlements on these two great islands,
to have exterminated the gigantic Moas. Perhaps, however, Nature
had already begun the killing off of most of these flightless birds
before man came on the scene. Certainly some Moas survived to the
coming of the Polynesian New Zealanders from Samoa and Tonga;
for the legend goes that, when the earliest pioneers of these
adventurous people returned to Samoa with proofs of the discovery of
a vast New Land in the southern ocean, they brought with them the
bones and feathers of a gigantic bird.
Most of these Oceanic peoples had some idea of a currency, except
in the savage interior of New Guinea; that is to say, there were
objects used in trade which had a more or less fixed value, such
as, in some island groups, the red hair-tufts from the necks of
fruit bats, parrots' feathers, the feathers of the starling-like
_Drepanidæ_ (in Hawaii), brightly coloured shells--or, in others,
pieces of bark cloth, rolls of matting, beautiful seeds, disks,
pieces or points of shells strung on fibre (like the wampum of
America), or the teeth of dolphins, whales, dogs, phalangers, and
boars; also the vertebræ of the Dugong. (See p. 40.) In Micronesia
the currency was more in objects like stones, either large
"millstones" made of a yellowish limestone in Palao Island; or small
red stones, polished pebbles, enamelled beads of unknown age and
origin, prisms of polished, baked, red clay (known as _brak_), bits
of glass or porcelain (obviously from China).
How were the Oceanic peoples living, from a social point of view,
before the advent of the European? The Negritos of New Guinea and
those which lingered in the interior of Malayan islands like Buru
led an absolutely savage existence scarcely superior in intellectual
level to that of the ape. They were hunters dwelling in the dense
forest on grubs, termites, wild fruits, roots, and edible leaves; on
the flesh of such birds and beasts or monitor lizards as they could
snare or slay. They built rough shelters as temporary dwellings, and
wandered from one part of the forest to another in search of food.
They were expert at catching fish or climbing trees after birds'
nests or honey, but they had no canoes, no implements, no religion
(only a vague belief in a life beyond the grave), and no ceremonies
connected with birth, puberty (or the "coming of age"), marriage,
death, or burial. They belonged to the human species, but were
primitive human types who had degenerated rather than advanced, and
were almost drifting back into the life of the beast.
Then there were the jolly, ferocious, excitable, laughter-loving
vigorous Papuans, with their nearly black skins, their mops of
frizzled hair, their big arched noses and tall, well-made bodies.
The Papuans lived in small tribes and passed their lives raiding
other tribes, eating their captives, hunting ground kangarus, tree
kangarus, phalangers, cassowaries, Birds of Paradise, parrots, and
Crowned pigeons. They came to trade with the Malays on the coasts,
where sometimes they settled down under Malay sultans. As often as
not, however, they would turn treacherous, fall on some band of
traders (if they could take them at a disadvantage), slay, and eat
them.
On parts of the north-west and north-east coasts of New Guinea,
as on some of the outlying islands of the Jilolo group and of the
Bismarck Archipelago, there were settlements of Caucasian-like
people, called by anthropologists INDONESIAN--a term scarcely
distinguishable from Polynesian. They were of the same stock as
the similar folk (with faces like dark-complexioned Europeans) to
be met with on the islands off western Sumatra. These Indonesians
had broadened out into Polynesians eastwards of New Guinea. They
had mingled in most of the Melanesian islands with the primitive
Negroes, and had introduced many new ideas in religion, warfare,
and art. They were a little less cruel, perhaps, than the Papuans.
In the extreme limits of their range to the north-east--Hawaii
archipelago--and to the south-east--Easter Island--they had
developed a considerable civilization, though it is by no means
certain whether they were the first inhabitants of those islands
(the existing Hawaiians, according to their traditions, came from
Samoa and had only been in the Hawaiian archipelago for about nine
hundred years when they were discovered or re-discovered by Captain
Cook). They may have been preceded in both groups by the ancient
race that built in huge blocks of stone, but which either passed on
to America or died out, leaving, however, its mixed and slightly
degenerate descendants in the Polynesians, who from some such centre
as the Marquezas Islands and Tahiti spread westwards to Samoa, and
thence to nearly all the Pacific islands.
Both in Easter Island and in Hawaii the development of religion
was a development of terror. The common people were especially
harassed by their belief in evil spirits waiting to torture them
cruelly after death (a belief engendered in the Hawaii archipelago
by the terrible earthquakes and the active volcanoes with their
seething craters). And at any moment they were liable to be seized
by the priests, the nobles, or the king to be offered up as human
sacrifices to the gods of sky, earth, mountains, and sea. The
priests and kings or chiefs (and in some islands a king or chief was
not merely a high priest as well, but was often worshipped as a god
during his lifetime) had immense power over the community by being
able to establish "tabu". To declare a thing or a person "tabu" was
equivalent to saying that it was sacred, under the protection of the
gods--might not be touched, drunk, eaten, smelt, or even looked at,
without risk of death, through the action of some supernatural force
or as a punishment administered for impiety by the human authority.
This practice penetrated to New Zealand and spread its influence
over much of Melanesia. It could be wielded with great benefit in
keeping the people in order, but it also checked their enterprise
in many directions, and was shockingly misused by both priests and
chiefs for their own advantage.
All the Oceanic peoples were immoral, and their numbers were slowly
decreasing in the Pacific islands as the result of superstition,
vice, and selfishness. In order that there should be no scarcity
of food in the smaller islands families were often limited to one
or two children, many infants being killed at birth. They were
particularly averse from daughters, so that in not a few tribes and
communities the women were much fewer than the men, perhaps only one
woman to four men; thus not a few of the men (priests, generally)
were unmarried. Women were very unfairly treated, as is frequently
the case among barbarous peoples. They were often forbidden to eat
the more nourishing forms of food, in case there should not be
enough for the men. In Hawaii, for example, they were put to death
if caught eating bananas, coconuts, or the flesh of pigs or turtles.
Their husbands (in Tahiti and Samoa) sometimes made them wean their
children and bring up instead young pigs or puppies. (A similar
practice is referred to in my book on the Pioneers of Canada in
regard to the rearing of young bears by Amerindian women.)
Wars were constantly being waged between island and island, tribe
and tribe--especially in the Melanesian division of Oceania. In
the western Pacific, indeed, the lives of the natives, before
the establishment of the White Man's rule, was one perpetual
acquaintance with terror. At any moment in the offing might appear
the war canoes of an enemy, and ensue the sudden invasion of a
village, the defeat of its fighting men, the cannibal feast on
the bodies of the slain, the carrying off of the young women and
children into captivity, there perhaps to be fattened up and killed
for more cannibal feasts. Or when bathing and swimming (which nearly
all these people delighted in) they might be seized and devoured by
sharks; or their islet or island coast was suddenly swamped by an
enormous tidal wave, or a mighty earthquake swallowed up the village
in an earthcrack or landslide; or red-hot ashes and burning lava
from a suddenly active volcano destroyed several communities; or
hurricanes devastated their settlements and swamped their fleets of
canoes. It is true that they never suffered from cold (except in New
Zealand), and seldom from famine; for the sea provided bountifully
fish and edible seaweed, there were the sea birds' eggs on the
rocks, innumerable oysters, clams, sea slugs[21], crabs, langoustes,
and prawns; there were pigeons, parrots, rails, plovers, ducks, on
most of the smaller islands, and a bewildering abundance of bird
life in New Guinea and the big islands. There was the Bread-fruit
tree, there were bananas, yams, the invaluable coconut--giving
food and a wholesome drink; and in New Zealand, where tropical
products were mostly lacking (though the Maoris introduced sweet
potatoes and taro yams), there was the bracken fern, which from root
stems yielded a palatable substance like that sago which in west
Melanesia and Fiji, as in Malaysia, was an important article of diet.
[21] Holothurians, a starfish-like creature, called in commerce
_bêche de mer_.
Yet in spite of an abundant food supply and a genial climate,
these Oceanic peoples suffered a good deal from disease before the
Europeans came. There was leprosy, which was a terrible plague in
some islands; there were various forms of germ fevers introduced
into the blood by mosquitoes; smallpox had come from the west,
spread by the Malays. Mostly these primitive Oceanians led short
lives; and if they were mainly merry and irresponsible, these spells
of light-heartedness, of dancing, immoderate feasting and drinking,
song-singing, lovemaking, gambling, and living the life of mermen
and mermaids in the foaming breakers of a warm sea, alternated
with heart-breaking struggles against the forces of nature, panics
in regard to new diseases, terrors of unseen devils, torturing
sacrifices to malevolent gods, murders, cannibal feasts, poisonings,
and enslavement.
In this description of the condition of man in Oceania I have made
no allusion to Australia and Tasmania, for the reason that the
natives of the southern continent (of which Tasmania recently formed
an outlying peninsula) differed so remarkably from the peoples of
the Malay islands, New Guinea, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia
(including New Zealand) as to require separate treatment.
The aboriginal Australoids are the most primitive, the least
improved of existing human races: although peculiarly developed
in some points, they are the lowliest form of real mankind known
to us. They were considered at one time to be the descendants of
a brutish but big-brained type, a veritable "ogre" which dwelt in
Europe some hundred thousand years ago: the Man of Neanderthal. But
this impression was wrong; the Australoids more nearly resemble
the less specialised, ancestral human race of Europe. Australia was
originally peopled by two distinct types of men: the Australoids
and the negroid Tasmanians. These last had the curly black hair
and depressed noses of Negroes, though they were also akin to the
Australoids; which last people, except that they are dark-skinned
and brutish-looking, are remarkably like savage white men! They
have head-hair which is neither lank like that of the Mongolian
nor frizzly or tightly curled like the "wool" of Negroes and
Papuans. Unlike the Papuans, moreover, and still more unlike the
smooth-skinned Mongolian and Amerindian, the Australoid has much
hair growing on the face and body, as is often the case among
European and Indian peoples. But they also exhibit a feature present
both in primitive man and in the modern European--an exaggerated
projection of the brows, of the bones of the forehead which shade
the eyes. The stature is not much below the European mean, but the
lower limbs are usually short and rather slender. The forehead
is retreating, the large jaws prominent, and the teeth bigger in
proportion than in other races of modern men.
Considering the great area of the island-continent on which the
Australoids must have lived for many thousand years, there is
considerable uniformity of physical appearance amongst them, and a
general resemblance in the structure and sounds of their languages,
though these last are divisible into two main groups: those of the
north and north-west, and the speech of the remainder of Australia.
In considering their language, to some extent, and still more in
examining their rudimentary arts and religious ideas, it is obvious
that the people of the north-east of Australia have been visited for
centuries by Malays, Papuans, and even Polynesians, yet that none
of these superior races succeeded in getting a permanent foothold.
So far as any sense of shame was concerned, the Australoids of both
sexes went quite naked, or merely wore a girdle round the hips, to
which strings or strips of fur were attached; but in cold weather or
at night they put round their shoulders cloaks made from the skins
of marsupials, skins sewn together after being scraped, softened,
and dressed. Their own bodies they decorated or mutilated in various
ways, such as knocking out two of the upper front teeth, passing a
bone nose pin 5 or 6 inches long through the septum of the nose,
cutting off the end joints of their fingers, and marking the skin of
the upper arm, chest, and belly by terrific scars of raised skin.
This was "cicatrization", so often referred to in describing the
skin decoration of savages, especially the negroes of the Congo
basin. The Australoids did not tatu their bodies (with pin-pricks
and paint) like the Polynesians and Malays. They painted their skins
for warfare or for ceremonial dances with red and yellow ochre,
white and grey clay, and black mineral substances or charcoal. Also
the men would gum to their bodies the white down or fluff of certain
birds and beasts.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL POLYNESIAN
(A man of Tongatabu, Tonga Archipelago)]
[Illustration: AN AUSTRALOID TYPE FROM NORTHERN QUEENSLAND
(From photographs)]
They had no agriculture, and no domestic animals but the Dingo.
This dog they kept as much for eating as for hunting. Although
each tribe occupied a definite area, they had scarcely any settled
homes or permanent villages. They roamed about looking for food,
and living for days, weeks, or months alongside their food supply,
which consisted of the produce of the chase--kangarus, phalangers,
wombats, koalas (tailless phalangers), emus, bustards, swans,
parrots, and pigeons; fish, snakes, lizards, turtles (on the
coast), and shellfish. They ate a good many insects--fat-bodied
moths, beetle grubs, termites (white ants), the pupæ of real ants,
and the larvæ of bees. Honey was, of course, much liked and much
sought after, and from it they made with water a sweet drink which
sometimes became slightly fermented like mead. Their women obtained
from the ground wild yams, truffles, and the roots and tubers of
various plants or the seeds of others. They cooked their food by
broiling, by baking in the ashes, and by the use of hot stones.
Although they did not know tobacco till the Europeans introduced
it, they already possessed the idea of inhaling the smoke of other
dried leaves through a bamboo pipe, and chewed some leaves for their
soothing qualities.
When hard up for food, they occasionally became cannibals, and after
an inter-tribal fight the slain were generally eaten. They had a
vague sense of religion, believed that there was a life after the
grave, that men's spirits mostly went to a land beyond the visible
sky, and sometimes returned again in the bodies of newborn children.
But some of these men--famous chiefs in their day--stopped in the
sky and became gods. There was one principal God, who was sometimes
identified with the creator of all things, and who might be seen
at night time in the form of a very bright star. Much of their
religion was associated with the discipline of the community, and
was manifested in elaborate dances. Nearly every clan or tribe had
"medicine" men--individuals who were learned in the customs and
laws of the tribe, and who had some rough knowledge of medicine and
surgery. Their tribal organization was based on the association
for common purposes of defence of a number of groups, which last
were either united by family ties or formed a brotherhood because
they all inherited or adopted the same "totem"[22] or crest. It
was usually forbidden for a man to marry a woman who belonged to
the same clan or totem group as himself; he must secure a wife from
another coterie. Marriage was actually or generally pretended to be
an affair of capture, though frequently based on a bargain; and the
unwilling young woman was sometimes dragged to her new home by the
hair of her head, or knocked senseless by a club and then hoisted
on to her husband's shoulders. The women, in fact, were very badly
treated, and did all the hard work of the community.
[22] The "totem" system is explained in my work on the _Pioneers of
Canada_. The totem was some animal, plant, or natural object chosen
as the imaginary ancestor or symbol of the clan.
The Australoids when first discovered were a degree or two farther
advanced than the "Eolithic"[23] Tasmanians. They were, in effect,
in a "Palæolithic" stage of culture, similar to that of Europe some
fifty thousand years ago. Their weapons and utensils were made of
wood, stone, and bone. They did not know the bow and arrow, but
used a rather elaborate wooden rest for throwing their spears with
greater force than by the unaided arm. The spearhead was either
of finely pointed hard wood, carved with notched barbs, or it was
a separate piece from the haft and made of stone, bone, or shell,
tied strongly on to the haft, and further fastened by resinous gum.
This gum from the Eucalyptus trees was very useful for attaching the
blades of stone axes and knives to their handles.
[23] "Neolithic" means the age or stage of highly finished stone
weapons and implements, "Palæolithic" refers to an earlier period
when the stones were very roughly shaped, and "Eolithic" means the
very dawn of culture, when the stones were merely broken fragments,
not artificially shaped at all.
But the Australoids were specially celebrated for two things: their
"bull-roarers" and their "boomerangs". The bull-roarer was a carved
and flattened piece of wood or stone something in the shape of an
axe blade. At the narrow end of this implement (which had a sacred
character, as it was usually inscribed or painted with the "crest"
or device of the clan's totem) were indentations, to which a piece
of fibre string or strip of hide could be tied. The "churinga" (as
it was called in south-east Australia) was then whirled round and
round in the air till it made a loud booming noise. This the women
were persuaded was the voice of a spirit, and only youths after
their initiation, or full-grown men, were in the secret. [All over
the world of savagery in ancient times, and in the few places where
savages now remain, women have been very easily "gammoned", and have
been made to believe much nonsense which the men invented to scare
them and keep them in submission.]
The boomerang was a wooden throwing stick, very thin and flat, and
curved or crooked in the middle. Although more or less fiat in
surface, it nevertheless had a slight twist, a little like the plane
of a bird's wing. Hurled flat-wise through the air it was a very
effective weapon; and some kinds, if they did not hit the object
aimed at, would return and fall near the place from which they
had been thrown. But both boomerang and bull-roarer, though they
seemed very novel and unusual to the early pioneers in Australian
discovery, were really not peculiar to this savage people. They have
existed in many parts of Negro Africa, and even anciently in Europe,
India, and in Egypt.
The houses of the Australoids were rough shelters of sticks, fronds,
and grass. In warm weather the natives did not bother to put up
huts, but slept with their feet towards the fire and their heads
against a low wind screen of boughs and grass. The aborigines of
Australia had some gift for painting and drawing objects, and had
even invented a rough alphabet of symbolic signs or primitive
writing, with which they marked their "message sticks" or churingas.
These message sticks, in fact, were the germ of letters.
Finally, it might be mentioned that, even when first discovered,
Australia--an island continent of 2,946,691 square miles--was very
sparsely inhabited, and the bulk of the population was confined
to the districts near the seacoast. If there are, as is sometimes
computed, one hundred thousand aborigines still living in Australia
at the present day, there were probably not more than double that
number a hundred years ago. They did much to limit their own
increase by killing or abandoning their children; they were often
engaged in civil wars; in times of scarcity they turned cannibal.
What, however, is so remarkable about this isolated people is their
having gone on living with very little change or improvement in
the life which was that of our ancestors fifty thousand years ago.
While the races of Europe and northern Asia have tried so many
experiments, have achieved so many conquests over nature, have had
such a marvellous insight into the workings of the universe--have,
in fact, for ten thousand years or so, been leading the lives of
demigods, the Tasmanians and the Australoids have been content
just with the day's provision of food, a fairly dry sleeping place
at night, a little fighting and dancing, lovemaking of a more or
less brutal kind, and a span of life which, owing to its excessive
hardships and the callous if not cruel treatment of the men and
women past their prime, was seldom more than fifty years. They have,
it is true, seen God in the stars, and they have felt like us the
tragedy of death and the hope of a resurrection; but, unlike us
(their far-off cousins, whose "Tasmanian" and "Australoid" ancestors
stayed in Europe), they achieved no conquest over nature, their
lives were scarcely better than the lives of beasts.
The Tasmanians shared some of the physical features of the
Australoids. Like them they were dark-skinned--a very dark
brown--and of brutish appearance, especially in the women. The
men were usually better looking than the females, but both alike
represented perhaps the lowest type of humanity which has been known
to scientific men in a living state--for they just lived long enough
to be photographed. The Tasmanians were distinctly more negroid than
the Australoids. They were of medium height. The nose was broader,
shorter, and more depressed than that of the Australoid, and the
hair inclined to be tightly curled. They looked, in fact, with their
long and large upper lips, their receding chins, projecting brows
and jaws, big teeth, woolly hair, small, deepset eyes, and hairy
faces and bodies (even the women had slight whiskers) like the most
primitive form of _Homo sapiens_, and the joint ancestor of the
Negro and the European.
Probably they entered north-eastern Australia at a very remote
period, and were pushed down by the succeeding Australoids into the
south-easternmost extremity of the continent--first the peninsula,
then later the island of Tasmania. They were then (and they
remained) in the lowest stage of human culture, like the Negritos
or pigmy Negroes of Malaysia and Africa. They had no dwelling good
enough to be called a hut: merely a circle of sticks stuck in the
ground with their points converging. On to the top of these bent
wands was thrown a mass of fern or grass, which made a rough thatch.
Or the savages contented themselves in fine weather with a mere wind
shelter of branches and bark strips. Whenever there was a cave or
a cranny in the rocks handy to their hunting ground, they lived in
that. They had no agriculture and no domestic animals, not even the
Dingo or semi-wild dog of Australia. They lived much on shellfish,
on the cray-fish of the streams, and the flesh of kangarus and other
marsupial beasts, and such birds as they could bring down with
their throwing sticks; though they also ate roots, fungi, fruits,
gum, and the sweet sap of certain trees. This even they sometimes
allowed to collect in hollows at the base of the trunk till it
became slightly fermented. Their method of cooking was by broiling
over a fire or placing the dead beast to cook in its skin in the hot
ashes. Their only weapons and implements were heavy stones used as
hammers; flaked stones--big chunks of sand-stone with sharp edges,
held in the hand as scrapers or choppers; long stakes, their points
sharpened and hardened by being charred in the fire, and their stems
straightened by heat and pressure; stems of small trees fashioned
into rough clubs; and short, straight, thin but heavy sticks used as
missile weapons for hurling at birds or small mammals.
Their language was never properly written down by the Europeans.
It is described as being full of rough sounds and not possessing
a great number of words, but we really know very little on the
subject. They were without any sense of shame, and if they wore any
clothing it was for warmth or ornament. As a matter of fact, it was
limited in the men to strips of kangaru hide tied round the neck or
ankle, and other pieces of hide which were fastened round the legs
like gaiters when travelling through thorny bush country. The women
tied an undressed kangaru skin round the neck and waist, in which
they carried their babies. Both sexes wore necklaces of shells,
flowers, or seeds; and the men decorated their hair with kangaru
teeth. The bodies--especially of the men--were anointed with kangaru
fat and coloured with red ochre, and this red dust and fat were also
rubbed into the hair and beard.
They had no religion, other than a vague belief in a life after the
death of the body. Yet they were not cannibals, as was the case
with the Australoids and the Oceanians; and they treated their
women better than did the brutal Australoids. But their tribes or
clans were constantly at war with one another, and this fact rather
than any scarcity of food was the cause of their being in small
numbers after many thousands of years of settlement in this large
and fertile island. At the end of the eighteenth century--when
Tasmania was first explored by Europeans--it was estimated that
the aborigines numbered a total of between six and seven thousand.
Between 1800 and 1830 they were reduced to only two hundred by
warfare with the invading English settlers, by murder, by the
effects of alcohol, and the spread of European diseases. After 1830
the two hundred gradually died out, till in 1876 the last of the old
Tasmanian race expired.