Man and the Seed
Man in his distribution in the islands of the Pacific reproduces in a minor degree nearly all the difficulties presented there by plants, birds, and other forms of animal life. Like the plant he entered the ocean from the west; and as with the plants, so with the aborigines, there was an era of general dispersion over this ocean, followed by an age in which Polynesian man, ceasing to migrate, tended to settle down in the several groups, there undergoing differentiation in various respects, as in physical characters, in language, and in manners. Just as we can now recognise the type of a plant, of a bird, or of an insect, that belongs to a particular group of islands, so we can distinguish between the Hawaiian, the Tahitian, and the Maori, whether in physical characters, in his speech, or in his customs. Fiji possesses in the Papuan element of its Melanesian population the earliest type of man in the Pacific, just as it also possesses in the Coniferæ the most ancient types of trees in this region. Divesting his mind of all previous conceptions, the ethnologist, as I have remarked in my discussion of the distribution of Freycinetia in [Chapter XXV], might profitably study de novo the dispersion of man in the Pacific from the standpoint of plant-dispersal.
Man and the seed have battled their way over the Pacific apparently in defiance of the prevailing winds and currents, and both have failed to reach the New World. Man in the Pacific is almost as enigmatical as the plant. As a denizen of this region he is by no means a recent introduction; and though his food-plants are mainly Asiatic, they belong to distinct ages in the history of man’s occupation of these islands.
I venture to think that a great deal lies behind the Indo-Malayan mask of the Polynesian, and that there is a story concerned with his origin that has yet to be told. We have by no means solved the riddle when by following the evidence we assign to him a home in Asia. It is only then that the real difficulties begin. It required many centuries of European civilisation for the discovery of America; but the voyages of Columbus sink into insignificance when we reflect on what had been dared and accomplished by uncivilised man when he first landed on the shores of Hawaii and Tahiti.
The problem of man in the Pacific bristles with difficulties differing in degree but not in kind from those relating to the flora. Whenever a particular theory seems on the point of being well established, some disturbing question arises, and as with the plant, we are never able to push our facts quite home. Since I first visited the Solomon Islands, now twenty-four years ago, the Pacific islander and his flora have deeply interested me. The history of man and of the plant cannot be separated in the Pacific; and the same determining principles of distribution have affected both.