NĒĔT OR PLATFORM FROM WHICH DUGONG ARE HARPOONED

Owing to the industrious habits of the men and their professed desire to get money for the forthcoming “May,” they went out diving for pearl-shell, and we were during our first week occasionally left without “subjects.” To obviate this I engaged two men, Peter and Tom, at ten shillings a week each to come and talk to us whenever we wanted them. I also engaged a man named Waria to help Ontong. After engaging Waria as literally our drawer of water and hewer of wood, I discovered that he was the hereditary chief of the island! So he was promoted to be my special instructor in the old native customs, and help Ray with his study of the language. Waria’s father died when he was a lad, so the present Mamoose was elected by the Hon. John Douglas. Since we left Waria has “come into his own.” We soon found out that Waria was making a translation of the Gospel of St. Matthew, and he turned out to be a very accomplished person. He was genuinely interested in our work, and quite grasped what our objects were. One day, on his own initiative, he wrote the following:—

ANTHROPOLADIKO EKSIPIDISIN

    1. tana mun
    2. their
    3. nel
    4. name
    5. itabo
    6. in the
    7. Mabaigan
    8. of Mabuiag
    9. nel
    10. name

Very early one morning, hearing the sound of wailing in the village, we went to inquire who had died. To our sorrow we heard it was the infant son of Waria. The child was quite well the day before, except for a stomach-ache; probably he had been overlaid in the night. There was a great exhibition of grief, and many people came in all through the day to sit in Waria’s house and weep by the poor little corpse. These people are really most affectionate and sympathetic; everything was disorganised that day on account of the infant’s death. Even old men sat about doing nothing. Waria was very desirous to have a photograph of his dead baby in order that he might not forget what he was like. Of course we did this for him.

When he was in Murray Island, Rivers wanted to find out whether any of the psychological traits or aptitudes that he had investigated ran in certain families, and consequently he commenced to record the relationships of the various subjects. Before he commenced on the inquiry he had absolutely no interest in the subject of genealogy, but he soon became literally fascinated with it. In the end he had tabulated the genealogies of every native of Murray Island as far back as could be remembered.

It was very amusing to see Rivers closeted with some old man ferreting out the family history of various people, and he often surprised the natives by the width and accuracy of his knowledge. A tremendous amount of secrecy had to be exercised in these inquiries in Murray Island, and one never knew in what odd corner or retired spot one might not come upon the mysterious whispering of Rivers and his confidant. The questions one overheard ran mostly in this wise, “He married?” “What name wife belong him?” “Where he stop?” “What piccaninny he got?” “He boy, he girl?” “He come first?” and so forth.

All this is not so simple as it appears, as everyone has one or two names, and sometimes a man will casually assume a new name. Some men have married several times, often to widows with children; but the most confusing point of all is the very general custom in Murray Island of adopting children. In many cases children do not find out till they are grown up who their parents were; often they never know.

Their system of naming relationships is very different from ours; for example, a mother’s sisters, that is the maternal aunts, are called “mothers.” In the usual method of collecting names of relationships confusion would often arise, owing to the very varied ways of regarding kinship; but according to Rivers’ system mistakes could practically never arise. All the terms he used were: “father,” “mother,” “husband,” “wife,” “boy,” “girl,” or “man” and “woman,” and for the first of these he always asked, “He proper father?” “He proper mother?” Once a genealogy was fairly complete it was only necessary to ask, “What A call B?” “What A call F?” “What B call A?” and so on, to find out what were the relationships acknowledged by them, and the names by which they were called.

Finding that this line of inquiry led to such good results in Murray Island, Rivers immediately started similar investigations when he arrived at Mabuiag. The collection of genealogies here was in one respect more difficult than in Murray Island, as the families were larger and the prevalence of polygamy, until quite recently, further complicated matters. Intermarriages between natives of different islands were naturally much more common than in Murray Island; indeed the intermarriage between the inhabitants of Mabuiag and Badu have been so frequent that they must be regarded as one people.