Harry Johnston

At some date of unknown remoteness—it may be a hundred or two hundred thousand years ago—a primitive type of man entered the island continent of Australia, coming from New Guinea and the islands of the Malay Archipelago. The period in human history was perhaps so distant from our days that the geographical conditions of the Malay Archipelago were not precisely what they are at the present day; islands now separated by shallow seas may have been joined one to the other, the southern projections of New Guinea and the northern peninsulas of Australia may have been much closer together, so that men, though living a life of absolute savagery representing the lowest grade of human intelligence, were nevertheless able, by making use of floating logs or roughly fashioned rafts,[10] to enter the Australian continent and to pass from New Guinea eastwards and southwards into the nearer archipelagos of the Pacific. Although, doubtless, changes have taken place during the last hundred thousand years in regard to the distribution of land and water between south-eastern Asia and Australia, and even over the surface of the Pacific Ocean; and although islands or islets may have since subsided that once served as stepping-stones for adventurous savages: nevertheless there cannot have been within this period of time—which is scarcely a second in the age of the planet on which we dwell—the rise of any continuous land surface between the continent of Asia and the great Malay islands, on the one hand; and New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Fiji, on the other. Because if there had been any such continuous land connection within the last two hundred thousand years, sufficient to effect the peopling of Australasia by the human species without the need of crossing straits and narrow seas, there would have come into these regions as well as Man many examples of the modern animals of Asia. But, as we know, the south-eastern part of the Malay Archipelago and all Australasia and the Pacific islands are singularly deficient in the types of mammal now existing in Asia. In New Guinea, Australia, and the Malay islands to the east of Celebes and Bali, there are no monkeys, cats, wild oxen, or deer (excepting in the Moluccas and Timor), no apes, bears, insectivores, squirrels, elephants, rhinoceroses, or tapirs. Elephants, tapirs, apes, tigers, and rhinoceroses got as far east as Java (though the two first are now extinct there), and if there had been continuous land connection from that region eastwards to New Guinea and Australia, which made human emigration thither possible without crossing the sea, then these other large mammals would have equally invaded Papuasia and Australia. That they did not penetrate farther east than Java shows that a broad sea strait must have intervened, and the fact that this strait—or rather a succession of straits—-did not prevent the Tasmanians, the Negroes of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, and the aboriginal Australians from reaching the lands in which the Europeans found them living three hundred years ago, shows that when they set out on these migrations from Malaysia eastward they could not have been without some knowledge of human arts and inventions, since they must have been able to fashion and use forms of transport across broad stretches of sea, such as logs or reeds fastened together into rafts, or water-tight vessels made out of the bark casing of fallen tree trunks.

AUSTRALIAN

AN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINE NAVIGATING A RAFT

Nevertheless, though of the same human species as ourselves, the Australoids[11] and Tasmanians[12] belonged to the lowliest living types of mankind, both physically and mentally. We know from various researches and evidence of cave deposits, bone and shell heaps, that these races had inhabited Australia and Tasmania for a very long period, that they did not originate in the southern continent, but evidently came from Asia; and that their nearest relations at the present day are the savage forest tribes of India and Ceylon, and in the past—most wonderful to relate—the ancient races of Britain and the continent of Europe. In his skull features and his very simple handicraft the Tasmanian resembled closely the people who lived in Kent and north-eastern France one to two hundred thousand years ago, in the warm intervals of the Great Ice Age. When races of superior intellect and bodily strength were developed in Europe and northern Asia, the ancestors of the Tasmanians and the Australoids were driven forth into the forests of Africa and southern Asia. From out of the Tasmanian type was specialized the Negro of Africa and southern Asia. But the unspecialized Tasmanian meantime was either extinguished by stronger races or was pushed on, ever farther and farther eastwards and southwards, until first Australia, and lastly what was once the southernmost peninsula of Australia—Tasmania—was his last refuge. The Australoids followed in the Tasmanian's footsteps, and became the native race of the Australian continent, prevented or discouraged from crossing over into Tasmania by the sea passage—Bass's Straits—which had been formed between Tasmania and the mainland. Other Australoids and Tasmanians no doubt populated New Guinea and the great Melanesian islands (as they had done all Malaysia). Here, however, they were followed up by the Negro, and in course of time Papuasia (as New Guinea and its surrounding islands is called) became almost as much a domain of the Negro as Africa. Primitive Negroes (mixed in blood with Australoids, and forming thus the Melanesian type) travelled as far eastwards and south as Fiji, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia. They may even have reached New Zealand before the Polynesian Maoris came, and in a half-breed with the Polynesian they extended their ocean range as far as the Hawaii archipelago. They populated the Philippine Islands,[13] and all the other islands of the Malay Archipelago, even as far out at sea as Micronesia, except—curiously enough—Borneo, and perhaps Java.

The Negroes or Melanesians improved on the rafts and bark canoes of the Tasmanians and Australoids by inventing and perfecting the "dug-out" canoe. This is made of a single tree trunk, hollowed out by the use of fire and the chipping of stone axes.

In Micronesia and Malaysia these Negroids soon became mixed with or exterminated by the early Mongolian type of man which, originating somewhere in High Asia, invaded Europe, America, south-east Asia, and Malaysia, assisting in time to form that race of mysterious origin and affinities, the Indonesian or Polynesian, whose invasion of the Malay Archipelago and Pacific islands occurred long after the coming of Tasmanian, Australoid, Negro, and Mongol, yet may have been as far back as five or six thousand years ago. The Polynesian's ancestors produced very considerable effects on these regions by bringing to them the first fruits of the white man's civilization which we associate in Europe and western Asia with the New Stone Age, or the period beginning perhaps twenty thousand years ago, in which men began to make beautifully finished stone and bone implements and set themselves to domesticate animals and to cultivate plants.

Among the Maoris of New Zealand, the people of Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, one or two islands off the west and the north-east of New Guinea, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), there are, or rather were, types amongst the Polynesians, strikingly European in form, feature, and mental characteristics. I write "were" with the intention of alluding to the days when there were no European settlers in these regions who could have modified the population by intermarriage. The languages spoken at the present day by all more or less pure-blood Polynesians betray a resemblance and affinity with the Malay dialects and languages of Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. It would seem, therefore, as though Malaysia was the original home of development of the Polynesian race, and that this remarkable people, celebrated for their fearless navigation of the ocean in well-constructed canoes, with masts, sails, and outriggers,[14] arose from some southward migration of the White Man (Caucasian) when he was emerging from the condition of the savage into the beginnings of civilization; a stage which is understood by the use of the term Neolithic, or the stage of perfected stone implements. Here in Malaysia the Caucasian type (which in ancient times populated much of northern and eastern Asia) mixed with the Mongol or Yellow Man, with the Negro or Black Man, and perhaps even with what remained of the generalized Australoid stock; and the result was the Polynesian as he is seen to-day: a tall, well-developed specimen of humanity with a reddish or yellow skin, large eyes set horizontally in the head, a well-formed nose and chin, straight hair (finer than that of the Mongol and with some tendency to curl or undulate), slight beards in the men, and a good brain development. In some respects these Polynesians recall in appearance, in mind, and in culture the aboriginal inhabitants of the three Americas, North, Central, and South. Indeed, if natives from the Upper Amazon, Southern Chili, or California were put alongside Polynesians from New Zealand, Tahiti, or Samoa it would not always be easy to pick them out at a glance. Where the Amerindian differs from the Polynesian is in being absolutely straight-haired and having features slightly more Mongolian, so that there is a still greater resemblance in body and mind between the Amerindian of South America and the Micronesians of the Ladrone Islands, the Dayaks of Borneo, or the Malays of the Malay Peninsula. The indigenes of North America obviously contain a great deal of Caucasian blood, from ancient migrations coming from north-east Asia, and therefore sometimes resemble Polynesians more than they do the Mongols of northern Asia.

Many students of the unwritten history of the human past are now inclined to believe that by the aid of islands since submerged individuals of the Malay and the Polynesian races must have penetrated in ancient times into Central and South America, carrying with them the beginnings of Neolithic culture and many new ideas in religion. Such theories derive some support from a comparison between the arts of Borneo and other islands of the Malay Archipelago, and of the Pacific islands and those of Central and South America.

Amongst the many problems of the past which we are unable at present to solve is why, if the Polynesians could colonize every island or islet in the vast Pacific, including New Zealand and Easter Island, they should have had so little effect on the development of Australia. In travelling east and south from their original homes in Sumatra, Jilolo, and the islands north of New Guinea, the Polynesians might just as easily have landed on the coasts of Australia as on those of New Zealand. But though such landings almost certainly took place, nearly all record of them is lost, and they had very little effect on the physical and mental character of the dark-skinned Australian aborigines. As a matter of fact, for some reasons connected with ocean currents and prevailing winds, the line of Polynesian migration seems to have been from west to east across the more equatorial regions of the Pacific, north of New Guinea, and afterwards from east to west, north-west, south-west, and due north. New Zealand was colonized by the Polynesians, not from the direction of New Caledonia, but from Samoa and Tonga. These Maoris (as they are now called) came at no very ancient date—perhaps not more than six hundred years ago;[15] but there may have been earlier Melanesian invasions from the direction of Fiji.

The aborigines of Australia at the present day are usually divided into two main sections, based on language, affinities, and other evidence. It is thought possible that the southern half of this division is the more primitive, and that the northern half has received here and there some modification by occasional attempts on the part of Hindu adventurers from Java, or Malay, Polynesian or Papuan seafarers, to settle on the inhospitable coasts of north-western, northern, and eastern Australia.

It is in any case practically certain that the Malay people were the first discoverers of Australia from the point of view of civilized man and of definite human history. The Malays are mainly of Mongol affinities. They belong to that great division of humanity which includes the peoples of Indo-China, Tibet, China, Japan, Mongolia, and Arctic Asia and America, and which is characterized by narrow, somewhat slanting eyes; a small, straight, narrow nose; high cheekbones; lank, coarse head hair, and a relative absence or scarcity of hair on the face and body. But the word Malay must be understood in two senses in this and other books treating of Australasia. It means in a general sense the Mongolian race which populates so much of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago (extending on the north-east to the Philippines and Formosa); and in a more restricted sense a tribe and language which originated in the MenaÑkabao district of central Sumatra. The Malay language is a member of the great Malayo-Polynesian group which may have been created by an ancient fusion, many thousand years ago, between the early Caucasian (White men) invaders of Sumatra and the Mongolians who followed them. At the present day the languages of this group range from Madagaskar in the south-west to Hawaii in the north-east, to Formosa in the north, and New Zealand in the south. An early mingling of the Mongolian Malay and the Caucasian or Indonesian[16] inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago produced probably not only this widespread family of languages, but the remarkable Polynesian peoples of the Pacific.

Yet although the Malays proper spoke this Polynesian type of language (so very different from the Mongolian languages of Indo-China) they remained chiefly Mongol in their physical features. But their close association with the Indonesian or Caucasian type of people in Sumatra seems to have inspired them with some of the energy and culture—especially in the matter of navigation—which was already carrying the hybrid Polynesians far ahead in the colonization of the Pacific islands. At several epochs these Malays left their native Sumatra on oversea adventure. They seem firstly to have visited Ceylon, southern India, and the Maldiv Islands. Then much bolder sea journeys, perhaps in outrigger canoes with mat sails, took them, via the Seychelles, to Madagaskar—it may be more than two thousand years ago. Later migrations eastward brought them to the coasts of the Malay Peninsula and islands, where they became the celebrated "Sea Gipsies"—the Orang laut, or Men of the Sea, who lived almost entirely on board their canoes, and only came on shore to trade or to plunder. Finally arose a warlike Malay tribe of eastern Sumatra (MenaÑkabau), who, becoming converted to the Muhammadan faith about six hundred and fifty years ago, left Sumatra to become a conquering, colonizing, trading people, who in the course of some four hundred years had settled on the coasts of the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Java, and the other Sunda islands, Celebes, the Moluccas, Philippines, and the north-western parts of Papuasia, and had founded kingdoms, spread everywhere their Muhammadan faith, and everywhere between Sumatra and New Guinea imposed their own Malay dialect as a medium of intercourse and commerce. In these wonderful adventures—which may have carried them and their civilization as far east as the New Hebrides, besides spreading still farther products of the Indian world, such as the domestic fowl,[17] the orange, lime, and betel pepper-vine—they undoubtedly discovered the north coast of Australia about five hundred years ago, and communicated their discovery to the Chinese, the Arabs, and finally the Portuguese and Dutch.

Assisted by Persians of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs of southern and western Arabia revealed East Africa and Madagaskar about the beginning of the Christian Era, and before this period had found their way to western India, Ceylon, and even the Malay Peninsula. After the convulsion and awakening caused by the promulgation of the Muhammadan religion, Arab voyages to the Far East (largely instigated by the merchants of Persia) increased to a remarkable extent; and wherever the Arabs went they endeavoured to spread the faith of Islam. Thus, as early as the thirteenth century, the Arab religion, dress, and customs had been introduced into the Island of Borneo, into the north of Sumatra, and the south of the Malay Peninsula. By 1470 the whole of Java had been converted to the Muhammadan religion, and the great mass of the Malay people became ardent advocates of that faith.

The Arabs, of course, belong to the Caucasian sub-species: they are emphatically White Men in body and mind, though their skin colour may have been darkened by ages of exposure to a hot sun and by occasional intermixture with the Negro. But they have gradually grown to be distinct in cast of mind and sympathies from the peoples of Europe; and the institution of the Muhammadan religion separated them still more widely from the world of Greece, Rome, Paris, Lisbon, and London. Until the fourteenth century of the Christian Era they and their Persian allies monopolized the whole of the trade which had grown up between Asia, Malaysia, and Africa on the one hand, and Europe on the other. Then the movements of the Mongols and Tatars in central and western Asia, and their temporary respect for and curiosity concerning Christian Europe, enabled Italian commercial travellers to penetrate to the farthest parts of Asia. Thus there reached Europe not only more or less accurate descriptions of Java and Sumatra, but vague hints as to a "great Java" which lay to the south and was a whole continent in itself. These hints became more precise at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when not only had the Malay Archipelago been traversed almost to the limits of New Guinea by adventurous Italians, but French and Portuguese navigators may even have been driven out of their course by storms, and obtained some glimpse of the Australian coastline.[18]

The definite revelation of Australasia will be dealt with in succeeding chapters. Meantime, before we begin to review the historical discovery of the Australian continent and the islands and islets of Malaysia, Papuasia, and of the Pacific, let us first of all realize what were the conditions of life amongst the savage or semi-savage inhabitants of these regions before they came into contact with the men of strong minds and strong bodies who left western Europe from the sixteenth century onwards to found colonies in the new worlds of America and Australasia.

In the sixteenth century the distribution and condition of the native races in Australasia and the Pacific islands stood thus: Java was thickly populated, far more so than any other island in Malaysia. This population consisted almost entirely of a short, yellow-skinned people of Malay speech and more or less of Mongolian type, but with some ancient Hindu intermixture. In the mountainous regions of the interior was a forest-dwelling race—the Kalangs—(now extinct), a wild people, supposed to be negroid but in reality more like the Australoids. Java, colonized some two to three thousand years ago by the Hindus, and at a later date much visited by Arabs and Chinese, had attained a high degree of civilization (of a very Indian character) when first visited by Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under the Dutch from the seventeenth century onwards it became the great centre of Malaysian commerce.

Borneo, on the other hand—a very much larger island—was in a less advanced stage of culture, except on the north coast, along which both Indian and Chinese—and, later, Arab—civilization had come into play. North Borneo was a very old colony of the Chinese, and under Arab influence after the thirteenth century had become a region of considerable wealth and power. The Muhammadan religion had spread over the North Bornean kingdom of Brunei and thence to Palawan and the Sulu archipelago, between Borneo and the Philippines. The Malays from Celebes wielded a considerable influence over the south coast; but all this Eastern civilization did not penetrate far into the interior, which was inhabited mostly by a Mongolian people (like the Malays and Indo-Chinese in appearance) generally known as Dayaks. Other tribes were distinguished as Dusuns, Muruts, Bukits, Kanowit, Kayan, Sagai, Madangs, Punans, Kennias, &c. All these interior peoples led a life of relative savagery, though they were very artistic, and never allowed complete nudity in either sex. They were not cannibals, but they had a passion for head-hunting and for the collection of skulls, which they preserved and decorated, and to which they attached some religious significance. In their appearance, their weapons (such as the blowpipe), arts, and industries, and this practice of head-hunting they offered most striking resemblance to the Amerindians of equatorial South America. Curiously enough, so far, there has been no trace whatever found of pre-existing Negroids or Negritos in Borneo, though this race once predominated in the neighbouring Philippine Islands, and is found in the Malay Peninsula and even eastern Sumatra. There are slight traces of Negroids in the population of the great island of Celebes, to the east of Borneo, and, with the exception of Java, in all the other parts of Malaysia. The island of Celebes, like Java, was a region of considerable Malay civilization when first reached by Europeans. The people here (except the wild forest tribes) had elaborate dresses, steel weapons and implements, were skilled in weaving, embroidery, gold and silver jewellery work, and shipbuilding. On the whole, Java and Celebes were the two most advanced of the Malay islands in the arts and industries and the amenities of civilized existence when Europeans first sailed amongst these wonderful islands of spices, of Malay pirates, of cockatoos, hornbills, and buffaloes.

In Palawan (in which live the most exquisitely beautiful peacock pheasants), and the Sulu archipelago—between Borneo and the Philippines—the natives were all Muhammadans and much under Arab influence; but in the rest of the Philippine Islands the Malays and the older Mongolian peoples dwelling on the coasts were civilized pagans, a good deal under Chinese and North Borneo influence, while the interior was tenanted mainly by the wildest pigmy Negritos, who were strong enough in numbers to keep the yellow-skinned, straight-haired people from colonizing the forested mountains. After the Spaniards came and put firearms into the hands of the Malays, the Philippine Negritos soon got the worst of it, and at the present day only number about twenty-four thousand in Luzon and Mindanao out of a total population of nearly eight millions. Unfortunately the arms and ammunition thus obtained by the Malays in the Philippines and Borneo turned them into a bold race of pirates, who began after the commencement of the seventeenth century to prey on the commerce of Malaysia and the China Sea.

The eastern islands of the Malay Archipelago—Timor, Flores, Buru, Jilolo, Ceram, and their adjacent groups of islets—were peopled by mixed races, partly of Malay and partly of Negrito or Papuan stock. In the mountainous interior of the larger islands the natives were still wild and naked pagans, but little distinguishable from the Papuans of New Guinea. But the coast population was mostly Muhammadan, or about to become so, and more or less derived from Malay settlers. In some cases, perhaps, they represented a Mongoloid stock older than the Malay and related to the Micronesians farther to the north-east.

These Micronesians were the peoples of the Mariana or Ladrone, Palao (Pelew), Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert Islands. They were of mixed elements, partly Polynesian (which is to say semi-Caucasian), partly Mongolian, and in some degree Papuan, but many of them bear a remarkable facial resemblance to the Amerindians of North and South America. This may arise partly from the partial colonization of these archipelagoes of small islands in the western Pacific by immigrants from Japan and China, mostly shipwrecked mariners. This intermixture has imparted a "Tatar" look to some of the Micronesians, just as the same facial features in the Amerindian are undoubtedly derived from ancient migrations taking place in prehistoric times from Siberia and Japan into north-west America. On the whole the Micronesians are most nearly allied to the Polynesian group of peoples to the south of them, though their languages form quite a separate group. Before Europeans discovered them they ignored the use of metal; their implements were made of stone, of sharks' and whales' teeth, of sharp-edged bivalve shells, of cane, and wood. They had a great reverence for stones, both as objects of worship and as money. This feeling would almost seem to be due to the remembrance of more remote times, when there dwelt in these and perhaps other Pacific archipelagoes a wonderful race of stonebuilders, who may have been the Caucasian ancestors of the modern Polynesians and akin to that European Neolithic race which ranged across the Old World from Ireland to Korea, and over the Australasian islands from Sumatra to Easter Island.

A section of these Neolithic stonebuilders seems to have sojourned for a time in the Caroline Islands, one of the Micronesian archipelagoes. Here they constructed forts, palaces, quays, out of immense blocks of stone, shaped ready hewn, so to speak, by the hand of Nature: for they were cubes and four-sided prisms of basalt (like the formations at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland), the remains of ancient volcanic eruptions on the larger islands of the Caroline group. Besides the stone buildings (which were erected, like all ancient stonework, by placing block on block, without any binding mortar between) this vanished race constructed artificial canals and harbours. Their prosperity and civilization seem to have come to an end—perhaps they emigrated to America and founded some of the prehistoric civilizations there—through the partial subsidence of the Micronesian islands. Many of these ancient stone buildings are now partly under water, and there is other evidence which shows that these and other Pacific groups of islands were larger in extent several thousand years ago than they are now. The modern Micronesians may be in part descended from the great race of stonebuilders, but they have much degenerated in civilization, as has been the case with the people of Egypt and the Amerindians of Peru and Mexico.

New Guinea, four hundred years ago, and its adjacent islands, large and small, of Waigiu, Aru, Timor-laut, the Admiralty Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago (once known as New Britain and New Ireland), and the Solomon Islands were peopled almost entirely by Negroids, that is to say by Oceanic Negroes, Papuans, and Negritos, similar to the inland populations of the eastern Malay islands. The Papuans were a tall race, with abundant bushy hair of woolly texture and with arched, almost Jewish noses. Their skins were very dark, and their appearance (except for the high nose), their noisy dispositions, love of excitement and laughter, reminded travellers very much of African Negroes. The Oceanic Negroes of the Bismarck Archipelago only differed from the Papuans in being more "negro", with more tightly curled hair and flatter noses. The Negritos were like the pigmy Negroes of Africa. But here and there on the coast of New Guinea, or on the islands off it, were obvious Polynesian settlements of old times, and even on some isolated island a people quite pale skinned and Caucasian in appearance.

The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, of New Caledonia, and the Fiji archipelago are allied to the Papuans more than to any other stock, but are usually known as Melanesians.[19] Their characteristics when first discovered by Europeans (which for purposes of accurate description was not much more than one hundred years ago) were not quite so "negro" as those of the Papuans and the Negritos. They had dark, almost black skins and broad noses, but the head-hair was less tightly curled and grew to greater length. They had often the very prominent brow ridges of the Australoid, and some indications also of mixture with a higher race—the semi-Caucasian Polynesian—and were no doubt the result of an early mixture of all these types. The civilization of the Melanesians was somewhat higher than that of the Papuans, but inferior to the arts and industries and social life of the Polynesians. They had developed agriculture to some extent, and amongst cultivated plants had the taro yam (a kind of Arum with tuberous roots), the Sweet potato (a Convolvulus), the sugar cane, the Bread-fruit tree,[20] the banana, the coconut palm, the sweet roots of a tree-lily (DracÆna), and the fruit of a Pandanus; perhaps also the Kava pepper vine. They possessed as domestic animals a pig of an east Asiatic species and a dog of a type like the pariah dog of India or the Dingo of Australia. They also had fowls of a game bantam type, which no doubt had been brought eastward by Malay traders till they passed from island to island into Melanesia, and even to most of the Polynesian islands except New Zealand. In New Caledonia there were fowls of a big breed but there were no pigs or dogs. [The domestic fowl was even found in the remote Easter Island when it was first visited by Europeans, but had not got beyond that to South America; neither had the American maize, tobacco, or other cultivated plants reached the Pacific islands till they were brought there, from Asia or Europe in recent times.]

PAPUAN OF SOUTH-EAST NEW GUINEA, NEAR PORT MORESBY
(From a drawing by the late Professor T.H. Huxley)

Melanesians, like Polynesians and Papuans, lived much on a fish diet if dwelling anywhere near the sea. The Papuans of New Guinea do not seem to have known the Bread-fruit until modern times, though that tree was the most important staple of life in so many Pacific islands, and under another name appears anciently to have been a favourite article of food in the Malay Archipelago. There was, however, no Bread-fruit among the New Zealanders, though they had sweet potatoes, taro yams, and gourds. Likewise the New Zealanders omitted to take the pig with them from their original home in Samoa: perhaps, however, the pig had not then reached those islands from the west. The New Zealanders ate their dogs, and the domestic dog throughout Oceania was bred for eating, and not merely as a hunting companion. Like the Dingo of Australia, and the domestic dogs of Negro Africa, the breeds of Malaysia and Polynesia could not bark. In Melanesia and most parts of the Pacific, including New Zealand, one or more species of rat were much in request as food, and were introduced by these different races of men into almost all the islands, including New Zealand.

All the Melanesians, like the Papuans of New Guinea, and the Negroes of the Bismarck Archipelago, were thorough-going cannibals, and this vice—the eating of human flesh—infected some of the Polynesian peoples, especially the New Zealanders. Cannibalism probably existed at one time in all the Polynesian islands, but had died out in most by the time they were discovered by Europeans, only remaining as a well-established custom in New Zealand and throughout Melanesia. The New Zealand Maoris used after one of their inter-tribal battles to collect the bodies of their slain enemies, cut off their scalps and right ears, and offer these first as a sacrifice to the gods. Then a row of cooking pits were dug on the right hand "for the gods" and on the left for humans. The eyes and the brain were removed from a dead warrior, and were eaten raw by the chief man of the victorious party. When the cut-up bodies of the vanquished were cooked, the chief's sons and relations first, and the whole of the army afterwards, fell on the meat cooked on the left-hand row of pits and devoured all they could at a sitting. The right-hand section of the feast was presided over by the priests and the contents of the pits partly consumed by them, and partly carried off to be stored against future requirements. What was left over on the left-hand side was packed up in baskets and sent to friendly tribes, who by accepting and eating the remains of these slain men took the side in the quarrel of the victorious force.

In Fiji human flesh was, above all, the food of chiefs, but everyone partook who could. Slaves were captured in war or purchased from other islands and were carefully fattened up for the table.

Cannibalism was partly an act of revenge, a desire more completely to extinguish a fallen enemy, and in part a sacrifice to the gods of the victorious tribe, or it began as an act of atonement or propitiation to win the favour of a deity. In New Caledonia and New Zealand—perhaps also in Fiji—it was often provoked by mere hunger for meat, a hunger less easy to satisfy than in the large islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and the mainland of New Guinea, where there were the great Cassowary birds, large fruit bats, tree kangarus, phalangers, and an immense variety of pigeons.

In religion there was mostly this difference between Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians: the two latter had castes of priests who devoted themselves to the conduct of religious ceremonies, and were often unmarried; whereas amongst the Melanesians and Papuans there were no priests, anyone—usually the chief of the village or tribe—being competent to sacrifice to the gods, or to conduct the semi-religious ceremonies (so like those of Negro Africa) connected with birth and death: most of all, the solemn rites observed in the initiation of boys and girls into the duties of adult life on their entering manhood or womanhood. The dwarf Negroes or Negritos of New Guinea and the islands to the west had very little religious belief; the Papuans more, but not so much as the Melanesians of the Pacific archipelagoes. These last, no doubt, had been taught and influenced for many hundred years by the Polynesians. All these peoples believed in a variety of gods, devils, spirits, and fairies. (The Fijians even believed in water-babies!) Sometimes the supernatural being was the soul of a deceased hero or chief, canonized after his death, and still working for or against the survivors in the form of a shark, a turtle, a fish, snake, or lizard.

Stones and trees were worshipped as the form or the home of a god; so were lizards, snakes, birds, the sea, a volcano, the sun, the moon, stars, and vault of heaven. Nearly everything of fixed form had a soul, was alive, was connected in some way with the spirit world. A belief among Papuans, Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians in the immortality of human beings was almost universal. Only perhaps among the Negritos was it absent or "not thought about".

As to the arts and industries, all this region lay outside the range of metal-using countries, except where iron had been introduced by the Malays, as on the north-west coasts of New Guinea and the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Otherwise the races of Australasia and the Pacific were still in the Stone Age. The Papuans and Melanesians, however, had a great feeling for art and colour. They carved wood most skilfully with chisels made of bivalve shells, or stone adzes. There was a great tendency, derived from Malaysia, especially in New Guinea and Melanesia, to build houses on piles, with platforms rising high above the ground: a most convenient architecture both for defending the dwelling against attack (by drawing up the ladder of approach) and for raising sleeping places above the range of mosquitoes, centipedes, snakes, and damp. In some parts of New Guinea the people constructed their houses high up in the forks of great trees, and used rope ladders to ascend and descend.

But in Polynesia and those island groups to the east and north-east of New Guinea much influenced by the Polynesians, the houses were mostly built on the ground, sometimes with a stone floor, or were raised on a mound of earth. They were usually oblong in shape, and of considerable length, with a roof of thatch or palm leaves in shape like a long boat turned upside down. In the Solomon Islands the houses (occupied by several families) were occasionally as much as 70 feet long and 40 wide. The thatched roof was in some instances carried right down to the ground, in other cases it formed a veranda supported on posts. But in parts of New Guinea and the islands adjacent to its eastern half, in Fiji and New Caledonia there were round or oval-shaped huts, looking like hayricks. The houses of the New Zealanders had firm walls made of slabs of wood, and one small window facing eastward. There was a porch over the door. In the southern part of the great South Island, near the snowy mountains, there were winter houses made by excavating a square or oblong pit in the ground and roofing this over. In wintertime a fire was lighted inside this underground dwelling, and the temperature under the heavily thatched roof became very high, whilst it was freezing outside; but as the dwelling was unventilated it was often unwholesome for its occupants. Except among the wildest Negritos and Papuans, there were in every village a club house and a guest house, or the two uses combined in one large dwelling. And on this club house the men of the village lavished their best ideas of art and decoration. The beams and posts would be handsomely carved and painted, or even inlaid with beautifully coloured sea shells; mats woven of palm fibre or grass covered the walls, and the timbered floor might be lacquered with some vegetable varnish. Similar decorations were bestowed on their temples and their chiefs' houses.

The furniture consisted of little else than a rude bed made of slabs of wood covered with matting; chairs or stools were carved out of solid blocks of wood, or made from bamboo sections. The fireplace was a thick cane basket covered with clay. Canes or reeds and the invaluable bamboo equally made light but firm frames which did duty as tables in Polynesian households, but the Melanesians were usually content with mats and stools for all furniture. Pottery—baked clay—was made by the Melanesians and by most Papuan (but not Negrito) and Micronesian tribes; it was also known to the Polynesians, but for some reason had in late centuries almost gone out of use, its place being taken by wood vessels, gourds, the halves of coconuts, and the shells of clams. Still, the manufacture and use of clay pots were retained by the Polynesians of Easter Island. Food was cooked by placing it between hot stones, which were then sprinkled with water, and the whole thing covered over till the food was steamed and cooked. Water was boiled in wooden vessels by dropping in red-hot stones.

Sharp knives in New Guinea and Melanesia were made from splinters of bamboo. The ground was tilled and prepared for cultivation all over these Oceanic regions by wooden implements—pointed stakes, forked branches made into hoes, flat slabs rubbed down into smooth spades. Papuans (but not Negritos)—still more Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians—were industrious agriculturists, and besides food plants they cultivated bright-coloured flowers (such as the crimson Hibiscus) and the paper Mulberry tree, from the bast of which they obtained the famous tapa "bark cloth", as also from the bast of fig trees and a relation of the Bread-fruit. There was no loom or idea of weaving anywhere, except here and there on the coast of New Guinea and in the Santa Cruz Islands (near the New Hebrides), whither it may have been introduced by Malay seafarers. But the plaiting of leaves, rushes, and fibre was carried to a fine art by all these Oceanic peoples. In New Zealand the Maoris made much use of the now-celebrated New Zealand flax, the fibre of Phormium tenax, a liliaceous plant related to aloes.

Not having any metal (as already related), axes were made of chipped flakes of obsidian (a glassy, flint-like volcanic stone) or of other stones ground to a sharp edge, or of hard, sharp-edged bivalve shells, or sharp-edged bones from the flattened spine of the tortoise or turtle. Terrible instruments for slaying and beheading were devised from the lower jawbones of large fishes, with saw-like rows of recurved teeth; or by implanting razor-edged sharks' teeth into the sides of wooden swords. Daggers with saw-like edges were made from the spines of the ray or skate, as well as from very hard wood rubbed down into a sharp cutting edge by sharks' skin. Spears and pikes were also made from hard wood and sharpened by burning the point in the fire. Or the point of the spear was made from the bony spines in the tail of the great Ray fish, or the wooden haft of the spear was fastened to a sharpened stone or obsidian blade by means of resin. Bows and arrows were in use nearly throughout New Guinea and most of the adjacent island groups; also in the New Hebrides. But they had not been introduced into New Zealand, and had fallen into disuse in most parts of Micronesia and Polynesia, though they were originally used by all these Oceanic peoples. In the eastern Melanesian islands slings were employed to hurl stones. Clubs and throwing sticks were common Papuan and Melanesian weapons, some of the former as executioners' weapons being fitted with stone heads. Shields scarcely penetrated to Polynesia, but were much developed and most fantastically carved and painted in New Guinea and some of the western Melanesian islands. In the northern parts of Oceania armour made of fibre, cord, or matting, and helmets of fibre, wood, or basketwork were worn, but more for ornament than to shield the head.

The Negritos, Papuans, and most of the Melanesians went about in complete, or almost complete, nudity before they were influenced by the Malays or by Europeans. On the other hand, the Polynesians were scarcely ever seen without some covering; they had, in fact, a sense of decency which was almost entirely absent from the negroid races of Oceania in their primitive condition. But whether or not clothing was worn for a covering or for propriety, the men, and in a lesser degree the women, of all the Oceanic races were passionately fond of ornaments. The more highly developed Polynesians decorated the face and body of men and also women by tatuing; that is to say, by pricking the skin with a sharp implement and rubbing in some colouring matter. The Melanesians and Papuans, however, were more addicted to what is called "cicatrization", that is to say, slashing the skin and raising permanent blobs or blisters by introducing some irritant. The more or less bushy hair was dressed sometimes with great elaborateness. Necklaces of teeth (human, dogs', pigs', kangarus', phalangers', fishes', and whales'), of seeds, shells, pebbles, bones, and pieces of wood were worn, together with armlets, bracelets, and anklets; so also were girdles of plaited fibre. The brightly coloured feathers of birds entered largely into personal adornments—in breastplates, masks, headdresses, and robes.

All these Oceanic races possessed musical instruments, chiefly drums, flutes, Pan pipes, and slabs of resonant wood. They loved singing—especially the Melanesians—and dancing.

In both Melanesia and Polynesia—even also in Australia—there were the rudiments of picture writing, which in Easter Island became developed into regular hieroglyphics.

All the Oceanic peoples, except the dwarfish Negritos, were fond of birds, partly owing to their love of colour and partly due to a sense of the poetry of nature which thrilled them all, the handsome Polynesians most of all. In Easter Island the pretty little terns, or "sea-swallows", were tamed and trained to perch on the men's shoulders. Some of the island pigeons were partially domesticated. In New Guinea and the big islands near by a great admiration was felt for the fantastic Hornbills, and to wear a hornbill's head and casque was a privilege of brave men only. The New Zealanders regarded their parrots as semi-sacred. They would seem, however, in the earliest days of their settlements on these two great islands, to have exterminated the gigantic Moas. Perhaps, however, Nature had already begun the killing off of most of these flightless birds before man came on the scene. Certainly some Moas survived to the coming of the Polynesian New Zealanders from Samoa and Tonga; for the legend goes that, when the earliest pioneers of these adventurous people returned to Samoa with proofs of the discovery of a vast New Land in the southern ocean, they brought with them the bones and feathers of a gigantic bird.

Most of these Oceanic peoples had some idea of a currency, except in the savage interior of New Guinea; that is to say, there were objects used in trade which had a more or less fixed value, such as, in some island groups, the red hair-tufts from the necks of fruit bats, parrots' feathers, the feathers of the starling-like DrepanidÆ (in Hawaii), brightly coloured shells—or, in others, pieces of bark cloth, rolls of matting, beautiful seeds, disks, pieces or points of shells strung on fibre (like the wampum of America), or the teeth of dolphins, whales, dogs, phalangers, and boars; also the vertebrÆ of the Dugong. (See p. 40.) In Micronesia the currency was more in objects like stones, either large "millstones" made of a yellowish limestone in Palao Island; or small red stones, polished pebbles, enamelled beads of unknown age and origin, prisms of polished, baked, red clay (known as brak), bits of glass or porcelain (obviously from China).

How were the Oceanic peoples living, from a social point of view, before the advent of the European? The Negritos of New Guinea and those which lingered in the interior of Malayan islands like Buru led an absolutely savage existence scarcely superior in intellectual level to that of the ape. They were hunters dwelling in the dense forest on grubs, termites, wild fruits, roots, and edible leaves; on the flesh of such birds and beasts or monitor lizards as they could snare or slay. They built rough shelters as temporary dwellings, and wandered from one part of the forest to another in search of food. They were expert at catching fish or climbing trees after birds' nests or honey, but they had no canoes, no implements, no religion (only a vague belief in a life beyond the grave), and no ceremonies connected with birth, puberty (or the "coming of age"), marriage, death, or burial. They belonged to the human species, but were primitive human types who had degenerated rather than advanced, and were almost drifting back into the life of the beast.

Then there were the jolly, ferocious, excitable, laughter-loving vigorous Papuans, with their nearly black skins, their mops of frizzled hair, their big arched noses and tall, well-made bodies. The Papuans lived in small tribes and passed their lives raiding other tribes, eating their captives, hunting ground kangarus, tree kangarus, phalangers, cassowaries, Birds of Paradise, parrots, and Crowned pigeons. They came to trade with the Malays on the coasts, where sometimes they settled down under Malay sultans. As often as not, however, they would turn treacherous, fall on some band of traders (if they could take them at a disadvantage), slay, and eat them.

On parts of the north-west and north-east coasts of New Guinea, as on some of the outlying islands of the Jilolo group and of the Bismarck Archipelago, there were settlements of Caucasian-like people, called by anthropologists Indonesian—a term scarcely distinguishable from Polynesian. They were of the same stock as the similar folk (with faces like dark-complexioned Europeans) to be met with on the islands off western Sumatra. These Indonesians had broadened out into Polynesians eastwards of New Guinea. They had mingled in most of the Melanesian islands with the primitive Negroes, and had introduced many new ideas in religion, warfare, and art. They were a little less cruel, perhaps, than the Papuans. In the extreme limits of their range to the north-east—Hawaii archipelago—and to the south-east—Easter Island—they had developed a considerable civilization, though it is by no means certain whether they were the first inhabitants of those islands (the existing Hawaiians, according to their traditions, came from Samoa and had only been in the Hawaiian archipelago for about nine hundred years when they were discovered or re-discovered by Captain Cook). They may have been preceded in both groups by the ancient race that built in huge blocks of stone, but which either passed on to America or died out, leaving, however, its mixed and slightly degenerate descendants in the Polynesians, who from some such centre as the Marquezas Islands and Tahiti spread westwards to Samoa, and thence to nearly all the Pacific islands.

Both in Easter Island and in Hawaii the development of religion was a development of terror. The common people were especially harassed by their belief in evil spirits waiting to torture them cruelly after death (a belief engendered in the Hawaii archipelago by the terrible earthquakes and the active volcanoes with their seething craters). And at any moment they were liable to be seized by the priests, the nobles, or the king to be offered up as human sacrifices to the gods of sky, earth, mountains, and sea. The priests and kings or chiefs (and in some islands a king or chief was not merely a high priest as well, but was often worshipped as a god during his lifetime) had immense power over the community by being able to establish "tabu". To declare a thing or a person "tabu" was equivalent to saying that it was sacred, under the protection of the gods—might not be touched, drunk, eaten, smelt, or even looked at, without risk of death, through the action of some supernatural force or as a punishment administered for impiety by the human authority. This practice penetrated to New Zealand and spread its influence over much of Melanesia. It could be wielded with great benefit in keeping the people in order, but it also checked their enterprise in many directions, and was shockingly misused by both priests and chiefs for their own advantage.

All the Oceanic peoples were immoral, and their numbers were slowly decreasing in the Pacific islands as the result of superstition, vice, and selfishness. In order that there should be no scarcity of food in the smaller islands families were often limited to one or two children, many infants being killed at birth. They were particularly averse from daughters, so that in not a few tribes and communities the women were much fewer than the men, perhaps only one woman to four men; thus not a few of the men (priests, generally) were unmarried. Women were very unfairly treated, as is frequently the case among barbarous peoples. They were often forbidden to eat the more nourishing forms of food, in case there should not be enough for the men. In Hawaii, for example, they were put to death if caught eating bananas, coconuts, or the flesh of pigs or turtles. Their husbands (in Tahiti and Samoa) sometimes made them wean their children and bring up instead young pigs or puppies. (A similar practice is referred to in my book on the Pioneers of Canada in regard to the rearing of young bears by Amerindian women.)

Wars were constantly being waged between island and island, tribe and tribe—especially in the Melanesian division of Oceania. In the western Pacific, indeed, the lives of the natives, before the establishment of the White Man's rule, was one perpetual acquaintance with terror. At any moment in the offing might appear the war canoes of an enemy, and ensue the sudden invasion of a village, the defeat of its fighting men, the cannibal feast on the bodies of the slain, the carrying off of the young women and children into captivity, there perhaps to be fattened up and killed for more cannibal feasts. Or when bathing and swimming (which nearly all these people delighted in) they might be seized and devoured by sharks; or their islet or island coast was suddenly swamped by an enormous tidal wave, or a mighty earthquake swallowed up the village in an earthcrack or landslide; or red-hot ashes and burning lava from a suddenly active volcano destroyed several communities; or hurricanes devastated their settlements and swamped their fleets of canoes. It is true that they never suffered from cold (except in New Zealand), and seldom from famine; for the sea provided bountifully fish and edible seaweed, there were the sea birds' eggs on the rocks, innumerable oysters, clams, sea slugs[21], crabs, langoustes, and prawns; there were pigeons, parrots, rails, plovers, ducks, on most of the smaller islands, and a bewildering abundance of bird life in New Guinea and the big islands. There was the Bread-fruit tree, there were bananas, yams, the invaluable coconut—giving food and a wholesome drink; and in New Zealand, where tropical products were mostly lacking (though the Maoris introduced sweet potatoes and taro yams), there was the bracken fern, which from root stems yielded a palatable substance like that sago which in west Melanesia and Fiji, as in Malaysia, was an important article of diet.

Yet in spite of an abundant food supply and a genial climate, these Oceanic peoples suffered a good deal from disease before the Europeans came. There was leprosy, which was a terrible plague in some islands; there were various forms of germ fevers introduced into the blood by mosquitoes; smallpox had come from the west, spread by the Malays. Mostly these primitive Oceanians led short lives; and if they were mainly merry and irresponsible, these spells of light-heartedness, of dancing, immoderate feasting and drinking, song-singing, lovemaking, gambling, and living the life of mermen and mermaids in the foaming breakers of a warm sea, alternated with heart-breaking struggles against the forces of nature, panics in regard to new diseases, terrors of unseen devils, torturing sacrifices to malevolent gods, murders, cannibal feasts, poisonings, and enslavement.

In this description of the condition of man in Oceania I have made no allusion to Australia and Tasmania, for the reason that the natives of the southern continent (of which Tasmania recently formed an outlying peninsula) differed so remarkably from the peoples of the Malay islands, New Guinea, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (including New Zealand) as to require separate treatment.

The aboriginal Australoids are the most primitive, the least improved of existing human races: although peculiarly developed in some points, they are the lowliest form of real mankind known to us. They were considered at one time to be the descendants of a brutish but big-brained type, a veritable "ogre" which dwelt in Europe some hundred thousand years ago: the Man of Neanderthal. But this impression was wrong; the Australoids more nearly resemble the less specialised, ancestral human race of Europe. Australia was originally peopled by two distinct types of men: the Australoids and the negroid Tasmanians. These last had the curly black hair and depressed noses of Negroes, though they were also akin to the Australoids; which last people, except that they are dark-skinned and brutish-looking, are remarkably like savage white men! They have head-hair which is neither lank like that of the Mongolian nor frizzly or tightly curled like the "wool" of Negroes and Papuans. Unlike the Papuans, moreover, and still more unlike the smooth-skinned Mongolian and Amerindian, the Australoid has much hair growing on the face and body, as is often the case among European and Indian peoples. But they also exhibit a feature present both in primitive man and in the modern European—an exaggerated projection of the brows, of the bones of the forehead which shade the eyes. The stature is not much below the European mean, but the lower limbs are usually short and rather slender. The forehead is retreating, the large jaws prominent, and the teeth bigger in proportion than in other races of modern men.

Considering the great area of the island-continent on which the Australoids must have lived for many thousand years, there is considerable uniformity of physical appearance amongst them, and a general resemblance in the structure and sounds of their languages, though these last are divisible into two main groups: those of the north and north-west, and the speech of the remainder of Australia. In considering their language, to some extent, and still more in examining their rudimentary arts and religious ideas, it is obvious that the people of the north-east of Australia have been visited for centuries by Malays, Papuans, and even Polynesians, yet that none of these superior races succeeded in getting a permanent foothold.

So far as any sense of shame was concerned, the Australoids of both sexes went quite naked, or merely wore a girdle round the hips, to which strings or strips of fur were attached; but in cold weather or at night they put round their shoulders cloaks made from the skins of marsupials, skins sewn together after being scraped, softened, and dressed. Their own bodies they decorated or mutilated in various ways, such as knocking out two of the upper front teeth, passing a bone nose pin 5 or 6 inches long through the septum of the nose, cutting off the end joints of their fingers, and marking the skin of the upper arm, chest, and belly by terrific scars of raised skin. This was "cicatrization", so often referred to in describing the skin decoration of savages, especially the negroes of the Congo basin. The Australoids did not tatu their bodies (with pin-pricks and paint) like the Polynesians and Malays. They painted their skins for warfare or for ceremonial dances with red and yellow ochre, white and grey clay, and black mineral substances or charcoal. Also the men would gum to their bodies the white down or fluff of certain birds and beasts.

They had no agriculture, and no domestic animals but the Dingo. This dog they kept as much for eating as for hunting. Although each tribe occupied a definite area, they had scarcely any settled homes or permanent villages. They roamed about looking for food, and living for days, weeks, or months alongside their food supply, which consisted of the produce of the chase—kangarus, phalangers, wombats, koalas (tailless phalangers), emus, bustards, swans, parrots, and pigeons; fish, snakes, lizards, turtles (on the coast), and shellfish. They ate a good many insects—fat-bodied moths, beetle grubs, termites (white ants), the pupÆ of real ants, and the larvÆ of bees. Honey was, of course, much liked and much sought after, and from it they made with water a sweet drink which sometimes became slightly fermented like mead. Their women obtained from the ground wild yams, truffles, and the roots and tubers of various plants or the seeds of others. They cooked their food by broiling, by baking in the ashes, and by the use of hot stones. Although they did not know tobacco till the Europeans introduced it, they already possessed the idea of inhaling the smoke of other dried leaves through a bamboo pipe, and chewed some leaves for their soothing qualities.

When hard up for food, they occasionally became cannibals, and after an inter-tribal fight the slain were generally eaten. They had a vague sense of religion, believed that there was a life after the grave, that men's spirits mostly went to a land beyond the visible sky, and sometimes returned again in the bodies of newborn children. But some of these men—famous chiefs in their day—stopped in the sky and became gods. There was one principal God, who was sometimes identified with the creator of all things, and who might be seen at night time in the form of a very bright star. Much of their religion was associated with the discipline of the community, and was manifested in elaborate dances. Nearly every clan or tribe had "medicine" men—individuals who were learned in the customs and laws of the tribe, and who had some rough knowledge of medicine and surgery. Their tribal organization was based on the association for common purposes of defence of a number of groups, which last were either united by family ties or formed a brotherhood because they all inherited or adopted the same "totem"[22] or crest. It was usually forbidden for a man to marry a woman who belonged to the same clan or totem group as himself; he must secure a wife from another coterie. Marriage was actually or generally pretended to be an affair of capture, though frequently based on a bargain; and the unwilling young woman was sometimes dragged to her new home by the hair of her head, or knocked senseless by a club and then hoisted on to her husband's shoulders. The women, in fact, were very badly treated, and did all the hard work of the community.

The Australoids when first discovered were a degree or two farther advanced than the "Eolithic"[23] Tasmanians. They were, in effect, in a "PalÆolithic" stage of culture, similar to that of Europe some fifty thousand years ago. Their weapons and utensils were made of wood, stone, and bone. They did not know the bow and arrow, but used a rather elaborate wooden rest for throwing their spears with greater force than by the unaided arm. The spearhead was either of finely pointed hard wood, carved with notched barbs, or it was a separate piece from the haft and made of stone, bone, or shell, tied strongly on to the haft, and further fastened by resinous gum. This gum from the Eucalyptus trees was very useful for attaching the blades of stone axes and knives to their handles.

But the Australoids were specially celebrated for two things: their "bull-roarers" and their "boomerangs". The bull-roarer was a carved and flattened piece of wood or stone something in the shape of an axe blade. At the narrow end of this implement (which had a sacred character, as it was usually inscribed or painted with the "crest" or device of the clan's totem) were indentations, to which a piece of fibre string or strip of hide could be tied. The "churinga" (as it was called in south-east Australia) was then whirled round and round in the air till it made a loud booming noise. This the women were persuaded was the voice of a spirit, and only youths after their initiation, or full-grown men, were in the secret. [All over the world of savagery in ancient times, and in the few places where savages now remain, women have been very easily "gammoned", and have been made to believe much nonsense which the men invented to scare them and keep them in submission.]

The boomerang was a wooden throwing stick, very thin and flat, and curved or crooked in the middle. Although more or less fiat in surface, it nevertheless had a slight twist, a little like the plane of a bird's wing. Hurled flat-wise through the air it was a very effective weapon; and some kinds, if they did not hit the object aimed at, would return and fall near the place from which they had been thrown. But both boomerang and bull-roarer, though they seemed very novel and unusual to the early pioneers in Australian discovery, were really not peculiar to this savage people. They have existed in many parts of Negro Africa, and even anciently in Europe, India, and in Egypt.

The houses of the Australoids were rough shelters of sticks, fronds, and grass. In warm weather the natives did not bother to put up huts, but slept with their feet towards the fire and their heads against a low wind screen of boughs and grass. The aborigines of Australia had some gift for painting and drawing objects, and had even invented a rough alphabet of symbolic signs or primitive writing, with which they marked their "message sticks" or churingas. These message sticks, in fact, were the germ of letters.

Finally, it might be mentioned that, even when first discovered, Australia—an island continent of 2,946,691 square miles—was very sparsely inhabited, and the bulk of the population was confined to the districts near the seacoast. If there are, as is sometimes computed, one hundred thousand aborigines still living in Australia at the present day, there were probably not more than double that number a hundred years ago. They did much to limit their own increase by killing or abandoning their children; they were often engaged in civil wars; in times of scarcity they turned cannibal. What, however, is so remarkable about this isolated people is their having gone on living with very little change or improvement in the life which was that of our ancestors fifty thousand years ago. While the races of Europe and northern Asia have tried so many experiments, have achieved so many conquests over nature, have had such a marvellous insight into the workings of the universe—have, in fact, for ten thousand years or so, been leading the lives of demigods, the Tasmanians and the Australoids have been content just with the day's provision of food, a fairly dry sleeping place at night, a little fighting and dancing, lovemaking of a more or less brutal kind, and a span of life which, owing to its excessive hardships and the callous if not cruel treatment of the men and women past their prime, was seldom more than fifty years. They have, it is true, seen God in the stars, and they have felt like us the tragedy of death and the hope of a resurrection; but, unlike us (their far-off cousins, whose "Tasmanian" and "Australoid" ancestors stayed in Europe), they achieved no conquest over nature, their lives were scarcely better than the lives of beasts.

The Tasmanians shared some of the physical features of the Australoids. Like them they were dark-skinned—a very dark brown—and of brutish appearance, especially in the women. The men were usually better looking than the females, but both alike represented perhaps the lowest type of humanity which has been known to scientific men in a living state—for they just lived long enough to be photographed. The Tasmanians were distinctly more negroid than the Australoids. They were of medium height. The nose was broader, shorter, and more depressed than that of the Australoid, and the hair inclined to be tightly curled. They looked, in fact, with their long and large upper lips, their receding chins, projecting brows and jaws, big teeth, woolly hair, small, deepset eyes, and hairy faces and bodies (even the women had slight whiskers) like the most primitive form of Homo sapiens, and the joint ancestor of the Negro and the European.

Probably they entered north-eastern Australia at a very remote period, and were pushed down by the succeeding Australoids into the south-easternmost extremity of the continent—first the peninsula, then later the island of Tasmania. They were then (and they remained) in the lowest stage of human culture, like the Negritos or pigmy Negroes of Malaysia and Africa. They had no dwelling good enough to be called a hut: merely a circle of sticks stuck in the ground with their points converging. On to the top of these bent wands was thrown a mass of fern or grass, which made a rough thatch. Or the savages contented themselves in fine weather with a mere wind shelter of branches and bark strips. Whenever there was a cave or a cranny in the rocks handy to their hunting ground, they lived in that. They had no agriculture and no domestic animals, not even the Dingo or semi-wild dog of Australia. They lived much on shellfish, on the cray-fish of the streams, and the flesh of kangarus and other marsupial beasts, and such birds as they could bring down with their throwing sticks; though they also ate roots, fungi, fruits, gum, and the sweet sap of certain trees. This even they sometimes allowed to collect in hollows at the base of the trunk till it became slightly fermented. Their method of cooking was by broiling over a fire or placing the dead beast to cook in its skin in the hot ashes. Their only weapons and implements were heavy stones used as hammers; flaked stones—big chunks of sand-stone with sharp edges, held in the hand as scrapers or choppers; long stakes, their points sharpened and hardened by being charred in the fire, and their stems straightened by heat and pressure; stems of small trees fashioned into rough clubs; and short, straight, thin but heavy sticks used as missile weapons for hurling at birds or small mammals.

Their language was never properly written down by the Europeans. It is described as being full of rough sounds and not possessing a great number of words, but we really know very little on the subject. They were without any sense of shame, and if they wore any clothing it was for warmth or ornament. As a matter of fact, it was limited in the men to strips of kangaru hide tied round the neck or ankle, and other pieces of hide which were fastened round the legs like gaiters when travelling through thorny bush country. The women tied an undressed kangaru skin round the neck and waist, in which they carried their babies. Both sexes wore necklaces of shells, flowers, or seeds; and the men decorated their hair with kangaru teeth. The bodies—especially of the men—were anointed with kangaru fat and coloured with red ochre, and this red dust and fat were also rubbed into the hair and beard.

They had no religion, other than a vague belief in a life after the death of the body. Yet they were not cannibals, as was the case with the Australoids and the Oceanians; and they treated their women better than did the brutal Australoids. But their tribes or clans were constantly at war with one another, and this fact rather than any scarcity of food was the cause of their being in small numbers after many thousands of years of settlement in this large and fertile island. At the end of the eighteenth century—when Tasmania was first explored by Europeans—it was estimated that the aborigines numbered a total of between six and seven thousand. Between 1800 and 1830 they were reduced to only two hundred by warfare with the invading English settlers, by murder, by the effects of alcohol, and the spread of European diseases. After 1830 the two hundred gradually died out, till in 1876 the last of the old Tasmanian race expired.