Ethnographic Relationships

The impoverishment which we find becoming more and more conspicuous in the animal and vegetable world of Oceania, as we proceed eastwards, in no way holds good of mankind. In the Pacific the most recent development holds the eastern parts; the west and south are backward. The Melanesians occupy as it were a depression in the level of culture between Malays on the one hand and Polynesians on the other. But on the South American shores we find in Peru a region of yet higher culture.

If to the works of art we add what is from an ethnograpic point of view a more important intellectual possession, namely religious conceptions, together with social and political institutions, we find the east standing higher than the west; and that is true not only for Melanesia, but for Micronesia as well. No mistake on this point need arise from the fact that more objects in our museums come from islands which have been ransacked later, or which have fallen less into decay by reason of white influence.

Men of Ponapé in the Carolines (From a photograph in the Godeffroy Album)
[Click on picture for higher resolution]

In the general position held by the two great Pacific groups of races towards each other we can recognise a great difference of level. The Melanesians are on the whole inferior to the Polynesians; they represent an earlier development, retaining much which among the latter has already become obsolete. We cannot, however, at the present day decide whether the proximity of America or independent evolution has been the cause of this superiority in the eastern parts of Oceania. Still not only the points of agreement, but also the far shorter distance, are in favour of America.

The great groups; Oceanians, Malays with Malagasies, Australians and Americans

Polynesian insignia
of rank -
State paddle from
the Hervey Islands

If we group the races of this wide region into the Americans dwelling on the eastern shores of the Pacific, and the inhabitants of the islands on its western border, on the south, and far out in the ocean, we may denote the second group by the name of Oceanians, seeing that the Pacific is the only ocean that possesses so widespread a population having a character peculiar to itself. The possession (or lack) of a host of important articles links the oceanic races together in contra­distinction to the Malays on the west and the Australians on the south.

From the Australians they are sharply divided; but on the other hand they are connected with the Malays by transitions which point partly to a closer connection of origin, partly to influences of long standing. But as they have many points, notably the use of stone, in common with the Americans, while the Malays are within the domain of iron, they hold a very different position towards these latter from that held for example by the most westerly outliers of that race, the Malagasies.

While the Oceanic and Australian races have, together with the Americans, remained in the stone period of civilization the Australians indeed degenerating in their isolation, Malays and Malagasies have gained by means of influences from Asia and Africa.

Polynesian insignia
of rank detail -
State paddle from
the Hervey Islands

The importance of the Malays lies to a great extent in the fact that they have been instrumental in the diffusion of these influences eastward. But the connection of the Oceanians with them reaches back to an early period. When the regions of Oceania were first unveiled to Europeans in the sixteenth century, iron was found to have advanced as far as New Guinea, and the influence of India, as shown by details of language and artistic style, had extended to the same point. This influence was spread by those active traders and expert seamen, the Malays, and with the support of Eastern Asia, which had not then elevated exclusiveness to a principle of state, but had kept up an active traffic with the south, it would have spread further.

According to the statement of George Spilberg, the crews of the fleet, which was equipped in 1616 against the Dutch in Manilla, were composed of Indians, Chinese, and Japanese. An Indian bronze bell, with an inscription in Tamil, has been found in the interior of New Zealand; it was the ship's bell of some Mussulman Tamil, and dates from the fourteenth century at latest. The place of these weak and irregularly-acting influences has now been taken by the weighty advance of the Europeans, under whose hands in the course of 300 years almost all that was peculiar has died out, together with a great part of the population.