Similarities and coincidences in labour and implements of labour

Agriculture is almost everywhere indigenous; even on the most barren coral island at least a few coco-palms are cultivated. It is most highly developed on islands like Tonga, where soil and climate are not too favourable, but at the same time not niggardly, so that labour is repaid but not allowed to flag. The Society Islands and Samoa, more prodigally endowed by Nature, stand somewhat lower, and the inhabitants are more indolent. Lowest of all are poor islands like Easter Island or the smaller Paumotus, with little area and a scanty rocky soil. Yet even there plantains, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, yams, taro, and solanum, were found in cultivation; unproductiveness is the exception, the more favoured regions the rule. Here we find fenced fields, terraces with earth artificially banked up on steep slopes, and arrangements for irrigation, especially in the cultivation of taro, trees for giving shade, and garden flowers, even beds laid out; all which is a sign that the cultivation of the soil has advanced far. Even on Easter Island, G. Forster found an irrigation trench a foot deep around every plantain, while in Tonga he walked in an avenue of four rows of coco-palms 2000 paces in length, diligently weeded and manured. Cultivation is correspondingly dense; one of the special advantages of Samoa to which Pritchard draws attention is that you come every mile or two upon a grove of coco-palms or bread-fruit; and the first visitors to Tongatabu depicted it as one great garden. In this way their descriptions excited among their contemporaries the liveliest longing for these fortunate islands.

In Micronesia, where fishing prevails, agriculture for the production of the chief article of food, taro, is carried on only in the larger islands, such as the Pelews. The men cultivate betel, tobacco, and turmeric, while the women of all classes, from the lowest to the highest, even kings' wives, make it a point of honour to keep their taro-patches in the finest condition. The task of the men is only to attend to the artificial irrigation of the plantations, which are in low marshy places, and to set out the young plants; the women have to keep the ground weeded, and take the plants up as required. Besides taro, the New Zealanders cultivate, among crops originally introduced from the north, the sweet potato - this with religious ceremonies - and the bottle-gourd; and of native plants a fern with edible rhizomes, and the New Zealand flax (phormium tenax).

Covered vessel in shape of a bird, inlaid with shell, from the Pelew Islands. (British Museum.)
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In western Melanesia agriculture is on the whole less advanced. Great part of New Guinea is uncultivated. Yet even here in individual cases it stands high. In the south-east among the Kerepunus, and on Astrolabe Bay in the north, the fields are kept like gardens; the soil being turned by men in a long row armed with pointed sticks, and then levelled by the women and planted with bananas, sugar-cane, yams; etc., in long strips. Clearing and fencing is done by all in common, in .exemplary style. If the arable lands are far off, little huts are put up for temporary occupation. Among the western islands, New Britain and the New Hebrides deserve the highest praise. There, as well as in the Solomons, the extensive plantations lie always in the neighbourhood of the habitations, and frequently are arranged, for the sake of irrigation, on terraces one above another.

Another vessel of the same material. (British Museum.)

On the steep slopes of Meralava, in Aurora, and in other islands, field rises above field, and every patch gets the full benefit of the irrigation. As in New Guinea, so in New Caledonia, the nutritious bread-fruit of the east is unknown, which implies a serious deficiency in the food-supply of the people. In little Mota (Banks Islands), on the other hand, Codrington found sixty names for varieties of bread-fruit, and eighty for yams. But the agriculture of the Fiji Islands takes a higher rank than even that of Polynesia. Here more than anywhere the taro or dalo, unquestionably the most nutritious of all Melanesian food-plants, is the staff of life. One kind is grown on dry ground, but the normal sort is the Polynesian; for which the soil is worked into a mortar-like consistency, and deeply trenched, before receiving the young plants.

After the yam, which stands second, the next root-crop to be mentioned is the anai or masave, the sweet root of the ti-tree (Dracaena terminalis or cordyline ti). In a few districts only, as Leper Island, is the banana the chief fruit; though the Fijians have thirty varieties of it. Sugar-cane, and the yakona plant, from the chewed roots of which the intoxicating drink kava is prepared, are planted in great quantity. We find, too, whole nurseries of the paper-mulberry, masi or malo, from the bark of which the material called tapa is made. In the New Hebrides and Banks Islands no single village is without its flowers and aromatic herbs. In all the archipelagos of the equatorial Pacific, the coco-palm is one of the most important plants. Even on uninhabited islands it is sedulously tended; and it forms, with the fruit of the pandanus, the chief food of the low islands, as the Paumotus, which are poor in vegetables.