The Races of Oceania

The Malayo-Polynesians are at this day the most pronouncedly insular people on the earth; their only remaining hold on the mainland is by the peninsula of Malacca. But we may maintain a continental origin for individual tribes now living on islands, like the Malays and Acheenese of Sumatra, without any inducement from the desire of finding an origin, or so-called cradle of mankind, for all the races of the earth, on the continent of Asia. H. Kern assumes, on philological grounds that the home of the Malayo-Polynesians, including the Malagasies, was situated in a tropical country, where sugar-cane, coco-nut, rice, banana, rattan, and taro grew, and where they were acquainted with dogs, pigs, poultry, various kind of monkeys, turtles, probably also buffaloes and crocodiles, and possibly even elephants and horses, and that it was at no great distance from the sea. He is most inclined to look for the district of their origin in the countries which are now called Cambodia, Annam, and Siam.

Dyak woman of Borneo
From a photograph in the Damann Album

The Malayan starting-point for the Polynesian migration has been connected with the word bolotu, used by Polynesians for the next world, the abode of the gods; in which a reminiscence of Buru has been imagined. In spite of various indications in that direction, we can hardly reconcile ourselves to the notion that a single insignificant island of the great Archipelago can have given rise to the widely-scattered peoples of the Central Pacific - all the less when we find Malayo-Polynesian affinities extending to the Melanesian Islands and Madagascar.

Position of Japan and North-west America

The continental origin of the Malayo-Polynesians is of special import for the right understanding of them, since it reveals to us the possibility of their wider extension in former times in the western coast districts of the Pacific. Their presence in Formosa, the traces of them in Japan, lead in that direction to a point where the chain of relations with North-west America becomes more clearly visible. The question whether these races had once a wide extension on the continent may here be passed over.

Between Japan, where north-west American influences are recognisable, and Formosa, to which the Malayo-Polynesians extend at the present day, so narrow a gap is left that transference is almost certain. But a more important fact is that with so much larger an extension either on the coast or on islands towards the north, the possibility of direct connection by means of migration, voluntary and involuntary, is increased.

The coast northward from the mouth of the Columbia river with its numerous islands, more especially the part between Puget Sound and Cape Spencer, the Beehive as Dall calls it, where continuous swarms of men are reared and sent forth, is some four thousand miles in a straight line from the Japanese archipelago. On this side also, and from hence northward to the Behring Straits, there stretches a region where the art of navigation is highly developed.

The points of agreement with America of which we get glimpses even under the peculiar and high civilization of Japan grow thicker as we go north, until on the Behring Sea we arrive at identity between the races dwelling on the Asiatic and American shores. That very more recent extension of Asiatic characteristics over North America, from which it results that South American races show in details points of conformity with those of the south-west Pacific, while the North American are more clearly traceable to the north-west Pacific, testifies to the advantages of the northern road.