Ethnographical groups in the Western Pacific

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.

Locally and ethnographically the Micronesians stand next to the Malay Archipelago and East Asia; from a physical point of view they display many of the Mongoloid marks with especial clearness. In their ethnographic relations they seem to be a race which has come down from a higher stage. In social and political institutions - in their money, their looms, their navigation - they show traces of a richer development of the external life. But a further motive must be sought in the less secluded character of the entire Micronesian development, upon which the neighbourhood of Asia has worked both advantageously and disturbingly.

Sumatran prahu. (From model in the Munich Ethnographical Museum.)

Many objects are indistinguishably like those of particular Malayan localities; thus the spears of the Carolines resemble those of central Celebes. Polynesian influences predominate especially in the Gilbert Islands; tattooing instruments agree exactly. The agreements between Melanesia and Micronesia lie in a mass of small details; the young people of Astrolabe Bay wear, besides the comb in their hair, little sticks bound with grass and adorned with cock's feathers, repeating the curious head ornament of the Ruk Islanders. The loom of Santa Cruz, unique in the Melanesian region, is closely akin to that of the Carolines.

Within the region of the darker races the contrasts are naturally sharper. In every archipelago, and in New Guinea, lighter and darker groups may be distinguished. The Papuas of New Guinea west of Humboldt Bay, are on the average darker than those to the eastward; in the western portion we no longer meet with light-skinned, straight-haired people, who might be taken for Polynesians. Ethnographical characteristics point partly to the more easterly islands of the Sunda group; the short bows of bamboo strung with fibres, or the stone clubs and the armour. Of smaller, quite special characteristics, we may note the arrows, exactly like those of Ceram. The more warlike and enterprising tribes dwell in East New Guinea; they are far superior to the natives of the interior, the stupid Dorese, and the good-tempered, cunning Papuas of the southwest coast. This character extends to the inhabitants of the neighbouring islands to east and north.

Between the Bismarck and Solomon Islanders, too, there is a great agreement in character; they are strong, coarse, warlike, but at the same time capable of work and receptive of education. In some distinctive details, such as the use of coloured bast and grass for ornament, the Solomon Islanders agree with New Guinea.

The Trobriand, D'Entrecasteaux, and other islands southward to Teste form, with eastermost New Guinea, one ethnographical province. Here we begin to find a higher proportion than in New Guinea of population partly straight-haired and fair-skinned, with such specific features as the loin-cloth made from the pandanus-leaf, the working of small disks of red spondylus-shell for ornament, the peculiar mode of inserting the axe-head, navigation highly advanced, and cannibalism. Some of these characteristics mark the transition from East New Guinea to the more westerly regions.

Alike in New Guinea and the next islands to the eastward there has been developed a style in which the human countenance is rendered by means of two straight lines, one at right angles to the other, to indicate the nose and lower rim of the forehead, a corresponding line giving the mouth. The effect of boredom produced by this physiognomy has been noted as being the effort to portray the bored Englishman; but it also reminds us of the "tortoise-shell style" of the Torres Islands, where it is made necessary by the material.

In the case of the Admiralty Islanders, holding as they do an intermediate position among the rest of the Melanesians, it is interesting to note that their peculiarities are negative. Except the spear they have no weapons; lacking bow and arrow, throwing-stick, sling, and axe. Bow and arrow are wanting also among other Melanesians, and the Australians; but the latter have other weapons, in some cases in remarkable abundance and variety. In the poverty of the islanders of whom we are speaking one might be inclined to see an effect of their isolation, an evidence of limited intercourse. But many other characteristics point to closer affinities, in one or another direction, with the inhabitants of Humboldt Bay, the Solomon Islands, or New Hanover.