The Papuans have not woolly hair, like the Australians. Their hair grows in separate plaits, which twine one in another, and form, when of some length, a voluminous and characteristic coiffure. The Papuans of New Guinea, according to Dumont d’Urville, are men of medium stature, with elegant forms, oval countenance, and tolerably regular features. Their skin is of a dark brown colour. They appear to be of a timid and unenterprising character. Their residence they have planted on the shores of the sea, where they dwell in long wooden huts, raised upon piles which are plunged deep in the very waters of ocean. It does not seem that they acknowledge the authority of any chiefs. They know only a few words of the Malayan language, and speak the papoua, which differs from it essentially.
The Andamanese, or Andamans, are of a jet-black colour. Their stature rarely exceeds four and a half to five feet. Their head is large, and sunken between the shoulders; their hair woolly; most of them are disfigured by protuberant stomach and meagre lower limbs. They go about in an absolute nudeness, for we cannot regard as any species of clothing the coat of clay or yellow ochre which they plaster over their bodies to protect them against the stings of insects; the red ochre which the earth supplies them they make use of to powder their hair and paint their face. According to the latest estimates, the total population of the Andaman Islands does not exceed 2000 individuals.
The Alfourous, or Harfourous, inhabit Borneo, the Celebes, the Moluccas, Mindanao, and some other isles. Their type has no very definite peculiarity, and ethnologists seem agreed to consider them a mixed race, resulting from a cross between the Papuans and the Malays, and forming the transition between the two races.
CHAPTER XI.
MAN IN THE SAVANNAHS AND THE FORESTS:—THE MALAYO-POLYNESIANS—THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.
THE Malayo-Polynesian race has also been designated, and much more felicitously, the Neptunian or Pelagian, because it peoples exclusively the peninsulas and islands of the great Southern Ocean. It is, to speak the truth, an ill-defined, heterogeneous, and composite race, presenting very diverse types. Ethnologists, however, divide it into two original branches—the Malayan and the Polynesian.
The Malays have the skull flattened in the inferior portion, the malar bones very wide apart, a flat nose, an exceedingly wide mouth, thick lips, and eyes raised in the direction of the temples; their yellow skin embrowns by exposure to the sun, but if sheltered from its rays, grows almost white, especially with the females. Generally speaking, they are corrupt, sanguinary, and perfidious, as our seamen wrecked upon their shores have too frequently experienced; but they are intelligent, and capable of a certain degree of civilization. The best marked types of this race are found in Sumatra, among the anthropophagous Battas already spoken of, the Orang-Lobous, and the Pagais. The latter tatoo the body, says Maury,[184] and like the Nagas of Assam, make new marks every time they have killed a foe; thus bearing about on their own persons the evidences and glorification of their prowess. Like the Michmis of Assam, they expose their dead on rudely-constructed scaffolds or platforms, where they leave them to decay; a custom which prevails amongst nearly all the Polynesian populations, as well as among the Redskins of North America. We must therefore conclude that the Malayan race was, at the outset, extremely barbarous. It owes its civilization to the influence of the Hindus, and especially to that of the inhabitants of the Malabar coast.
This civilization, in all its conditions, the Malays appear to have transported to Madagascar, where they have formed, by intermixture with the Negroes of Africa, two new races—the Hovas, who still preserve distinctly visible affinities with the Negroes properly so called, and the Sakalaves, who approximate towards the Kaffirs.