The Island Groups

The island groups, their climate and their cultivated plants - Number of the population, its decrease and shifting - Traces of denser population and of civilization - Ruins - Migrations - Involuntary migrations in the Pacific - Navigation and shipbuilding - Orientation - Trading journeys - Famine, war, and other grounds of emigration and immigration - Legends of migrations - Migrations in mythology - Community of speech and agreement of customs in Polynesia - Legend of Hawaiki - Polynesians in Melanesia and Micronesia - Uninhabited islands - Date of the migrations - Ethnographical groups in the Pacific - Genealogy of the Australians.

The Island Groups

THROUGHOUT the western and central part of the Pacific are many thousands of islands scattered about in numerous groups. On the west they are connected by larger islands with Australia and the Malayan Archipelago. There is first of all New Guinea with the inner chain of the Melanesian islands ending on the east with the Fiji group; the New Zealand group lies isolated to the south-east. Eastward beyond Fiji and northward beyond New Ireland lie countless smaller islands forming Polynesia. They stretch away from the Carolines to Easter Island, which is separated by a space of nearly 2500 miles from the South American coast, and they stretch from the South Island of New Zealand to Hawaii. Within the angle formed by a line running through the Mariannes towards Japan and another running through the Pelew Islands towards the Philippines, there lies a second group of still smaller islands called Micronesia.

Polynesian Weapons and Costume
Printed by the Bibliographisches Institut. Leipzig

The separation between the three groups does not penetrate far; smaller groups within them may much more naturally be excluded. Individual countries, larger and smaller, have plenty of common peculiarities both in natural character and in the mode of their origin. Long ago a natural division into high and low islands was recognised, the latter including the coralline, the former the volcanic islands. This simple classification does not indeed wholly correspond with the domain of phenomena, surface phenomena, volcanic phenomena, and violent earthquakes occurring over the whole length and breadth of the region; while the coral formation has been developed to an extent such as is nowhere else found in that tropical belt of the Pacific which is richest in islands.

Only certain islands, the chief of them being New Guinea and the two larger islands of New Zealand, afford space for development on a large scale, and sufficient to permit, more especially in Melanesia with its larger islands, the growth of differences between up-country and coast tribes. New Guinea does not indeed hold a position in Melanesia proportionate to its size, being more sparsely inhabited than most of the islands lying in front of it, an evidence for the indolence and unproductiveness of true Papuan labour and its development. On the other side the distance of New Zealand from Polynesia prevented it from exercising those more penetrating effects which might have been expected to emanate from the largest among the islands.

Thus we have before us, almost universally, only the population of small and numerous areas, very unevenly endowed, and widely separated from each other. Of all people the ethnographer must bear that well in mind. Further, the denser population is confined to the coast spaces, while the interior is thinly inhabited. Rapid changes from habitation to non-habitation are frequent under these conditions; nor is the list of islands now uninhabited, but showing traces of former habitation, a short one.