Oceanian people

“ They landed at various points and wandered ever farther south, increasing and multiplying in numbers, until at last some of the most adventurous crossed Cook Strait and began to people the Middle Island. And these Polynesian immigrants were the ancestors of the race of men whom we now know as Maori. ”

“ What is worse yet, the mandate over the South Seas has brought Japan closer by hundreds of miles to both New Zealand and Australia, and has thrown open the question of admission of Asiatic people to these islands. The Australasians feel that they are obliged to protect not only themselves from Asiatic competition, but the native races as well. If they are to carry out the provisions of the mandate to rule the islands for the good of the natives, they feel that they cannot introduce Asiatic labor, which undermines the natives economically and morally every time it is attempted. ”

“ In many tribes the people live in communal houses like those of the Pueblo Indians of America.
A large part of the population of Oceania is of Malay origin. As a rule the Malaysians are intelligent and take readily to western civilization. They are confined chiefly to the larger islands south and west of the Asian continent. In such parts of Malaysia as have become European possessions, they are farm laborers, and in this employment they have no superiors.
A Malay boy
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Of all the native peoples of Oceania, the Polynesians are perhaps the most interesting. ”

“ The island is of great interest from the point of view of the history of the Pacific, since there are remains on it of stone monuments, weapons, and images which prove that even in this distant corner of the ocean some early people must have settled long before the Polynesians. ”

“ The position of the British in the South Seas demands special consideration, as being immediately related to our subject. In 1800 the only part of Australasia occupied by white people was Norfolk Island and the small area at Port Jackson shut in between the sea and a precipitous range of mountains that for thirteen years to come presented an unconquerable barrier to inland exploration, despite repeated endeavours to find a way across them. ”

“ The facts now before us make clear that the present inhabitants of the island are derived from a union of the two great stocks of the Pacific, the Melanesian and Polynesian races, and that the Melanesian element has played a large part in its development. All the evidence gathered, whether derived from the stone remains, through the surviving natives, or in other ways, points to the conclusion that these people are connected by blood with the makers of the statues ”

“ There does not seem to be the same activity, energy, and business aptitude that exists in the Australian colonies. The Auckland people seem languid and half asleep. Perhaps their soft, relaxing, winterless climate has something to do with it.
Having nothing else to occupy me before the ship sailed, I took leave of my Australian friend, gave him my last messages for Maryborough and Majorca, and went on board. I was wakened up about midnight by the noise of the anchor coming up; and, in a few minutes more, we were off and on our way to Honolulu up the Pacific. ”

“ The Australians constitute the only exception. The racial affinities of this primitive people are somewhat doubtful, though they are in all probability derived from Negro stock. The Australians have lived so long isolated in their island continent, however, that in the course of time they have developed certain ethnic peculiarities.
Oceania is still connected through Malaysia with Indo-China. The Golden peninsula, in turn, is joined on the west with the Indo-Mediterranean-European region, and open on the north to the Asiatic area. ”

“ Who were the race or races who populated the Pacific? Here our firm ground ends, for this is a very complicated subject, with regard to which much work still remains to be done. It is impossible as yet to make any broad statement, which is not subject to qualification, or which can be implicitly relied on.
The Solomon group and other islands off the coast of Australia are inhabited by a people known as Melanesians, who have dark 292skins, fuzzy hair, and thick lips, resembling to some extent the natives of Africa; this area is called 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. ”

“ The figures above exclude the population of all islands where the people are more or less strongly mixed with neighbouring races, such as the Micronesian, Melanesian and Papuan, and the half-caste Fijians. ”

“ Roman Catholics also have missionaries on some of the islands. The Samoans are naturally religious and the level of their morality is far higher than that of the foreigners who bring in whisky and introduce the vices of civilization to these southern seas. There are, it is true, high-class business men scattered through the various archipelagoes, but the average beach-combing trader is as a rule a curse instead of a blessing and most of the evils that have come to the people are due to him. ”

“ "I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it'll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I think—" (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn't sound at all the right word) "—but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?" ”

“ Samoa still rises silently in moonlight out of the sea of my dreams. I can hear the barbarian orchestra clanging away down in the native village, as Samoan girls and youths, and two or three white men, waltz under the palms just below the plateau, where groves of orange-trees hang their golden fruit amongst dark leaves. As I play the violin the semi-savage people whirl to the wild rhythm of the forest ballroom music of a tribal waltz. ”

“ with considerable suspicion of its president’s brilliant theory of vending his wares direct to the people—was perhaps the only one who had suspicions. He had once written a brilliant criticism to some inquirer, in which he had said that no enterprise of such magnitude as the Northern Pacific had ever before been entirely dependent upon one house, or rather upon one man, and that he did not like it. “I am not sure that the lands through which the road runs are so unparalleled in climate, soil, timber, minerals, etc., as Mr. Cooke and his friends would have us believe. ”

“ No bolder navigators, no more merciless pirates than the Malays ever sailed the sea, and, as they skimmed over the blue in their queer proas, their fierce eyes searching the horizon for the sail of some helpless trader, they not infrequently made some hitherto unknown island. Adventurers all, they occupied the place if it were their whim, and mixed with or exterminated the original inhabitants. Thus their stock spread in the course of centuries over all Polynesia, giving populations to Tonga, to the Samoan, Sandwich, Society and other islands, and, more important to our theme, to New Zealand. ”

“ They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white shirt-fronts—and rather portly withal. ”

“ From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched People upon Earth; but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans, being wholy unacquainted not only with the Superfluous, but with the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition. The earth and Sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for Life. They covet not Magnificient Houses, Household-stuff, etc.; ”

“ In the stone age our manners were probably not superior to those of the natives of Oceania.
We must not, therefore, blame these representatives of humanity for not having risen higher. They have never been a nation. Scattered as their homes are on the wide ocean, and divided as they are into small tribes, without agricultural or mineral resources, without connexions, and with a climate which makes them strangers to want, they could but remain stationary or cultivate none but the most rudimentary arts and industries. ”

“ During the latter half of the nineteenth century practically all of Oceania has been divided among European powers. Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand are peopled by colonists from England; but they possess the character of a great nation rather than that of colonies. A few of the larger islands have become producers of sugar, cotton, and fruit. The long distance from the markets for their products is offset by the low cost of native labor. The coral islands are almost valueless for commercial products ”

“ In physical appearance they are tall, well-formed, dark of complexion, and black-haired. In the northern island groups—Tonga, Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and others—which are colonized by European and American peoples, the natives have gradually acquired western civilization. The number of natives has decreased,232 however, and only about one-third of the population of fifty years ago remains to-day.
The animal and vegetable life is peculiar. That of Australia resembles the life forms of a geological age long since past; that of the islands near tropical Asia is Asian in character. ”

“ A line drawn athwart the Pacific from New Zealand through Fiji to Hawaii will roughly cut off this domain from the rest of the Oceanic world, where all to the west is Melanesian, Papuan or mixed, while all to the right—Maori, some of the eastern Fijians, Tongans, Samoans, Tahitians, Marquesans, Hawaiians and Easter Islanders—is grouped under the name Polynesian, a type produced by a mixture of Proto-Malayan and Indonesian. ”

“ Many customs of Oceanica can be understood only in the light of the small value attached to human life in this island world. The overpopulation which lies back of their colonization explains the human sacrifices in their religious orgies and funeral rites, as also the widespread practice of cannibalism. This can be traced in vestigial forms, or as an occasional or habitual custom from one end of the Pacific to the other, from the Marquesas to New Guinea and from New Zealand to Hawaii. All Melanesia is tainted with it, and Micronesia is not above suspicion. ”

“ The first is easiest made when the world is young and when the previous occupants create no obstacles. The second implies maritime skill and enterprise, and maritime skill improves with the experience of mankind. One of the greatest facts of ethnological distribution and dispersion belongs to this class. All the islands of the Pacific are peopled by the members of one stock, or family—the Polynesian. These we find as far north as the Sandwich Islands, as far south as New Zealand, and in Easter Island half-way between Asia and America. ”

“ The oceanic islands, on the other hand, are grouped between the tropics in isolated archipelagoes, extending more than halfway across the Pacific. The lines of entry into this insular region lead back to Indo-Malaysia, the cradle-land of mankind and the point of intersection of the three racial regions of the old world. Oceania was, accordingly, peopled from three sources, successive waves of Negro, Caucasic and Mongolic migration coming together in Indo-Malaysia and spreading out again over the islands of the Pacific. ”

“ The larger islands nearer to Asia were for the most part fragments of a former extension of the Asiatic or Australian continents; even New Zealand (104,000 square miles) must once have formed part of a huge strip of continental land stretching southwards from New Guinea and north-east Australia. But most of the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia (as distinct from Melanesia [2] ) , though they may have been larger than they are now and have risen out of comparatively shallow seas, were nevertheless always oceanic, that is to say, never connected with any great continent in recent ages. ”

“ The Pacific widens toward the south; and Australia and Oceania lie in the opening, thus furnishing the Pacific with its most striking peculiarity—a third continent situated in the Southern Hemisphere, together with the richest series of island formations on earth. Whatever the Pacific may contribute to history, it will be a contribution to the annals of the Southern Hemisphere; and if a great independent history develop in the antipodes, it will have the Southern Pacific, bounded by Australia, South America, New Zealand, and Oceania, for its sphere of action. ”

“ if you incorporate those tropical countries with the Republic of the United States, you will have to incorporate their people too. ”

“ Many culture traits of Middle America and Peru are not found in Oceania: the use of cement in masonry and the vigesimal system of numeration in Middle America; the amazingly intricate Maya calendar and hieroglyphics with the first invention of zero; baked brick in two Mexican sites; bronze in Peru; the hammock; the whistling jar; the manioc press. Some of these New World traits must have been invented here, but we are asked to believe that the others were forgotten in Oceania and remembered in the Americas. One argument for trans-Pacific diffusion is clear and cogent, however. ”