These atolls had fought the ceaseless war which slowly, but eternally, shifted our terrestrial foothold. Makatea, nearer Tahiti, lifted its strange cliffs two hundred feet in the air. It had been raised by subterranean force thirty-five fathoms from the sea-level, and its coasts were vertical walls of that height.
The young Darwin’s theory appealed even with these examples of resurgence. It was improbable that an elevatory force would uplift through an immense area great, rocky banks within twenty or thirty fathoms of the surface of the sea, and not a single point above that level. Where on the surface of the globe was a chain of mountains, even a few hundred miles in length, with their many summits rising within a few feet of a given level, and not one pinnacle above it? Yet that was the condition in these atolls, for the coral animal could not live more than thirty fathoms or so below the atmosphere, so that the basic foundations of the atolls, on which the mites laid their offerings and their bones, were fewer than two hundred feet under the surface. The polyp gnome died from the pressure of water at greater depths. Just outside the reefs or between the atolls, the depths were often greater than a mile or two.
The vague science I possessed stimulated the memories of my reading of that oldest civilization in tradition, the immense continent of Pan, which a score of millenniums ago, according to the poet archæologists, flourished in this Pacific Ocean. Its cryptogram attended in many spots the discovery of a new Rosetta stone. I myself had seen huge monoliths, half-buried pyramids and High Places, hieroglyphs and carvings, certainly the fashioning of no living races. Were these Paumotus, and many other islands from Japan to Easter, the tops of the submerged continent, Pan, which stretched its crippled body along the floor of the Pacific for thousands of leagues? There were legends, myths, customs, inexplicable absences of usages and knowledge on the part of present peoples, all perhaps capable of interpretation by this fascinating theory of a race lost to history before Sumer attained coherence or Babylon made bricks.
A Paumotu atoll after a blow
Over this land bridge, mayhap, ventured a Caucasian people, the dominant blood in Polynesia to-day, and when the connecting links in the chain to their cradle fell from the sights of sun and stars, the survivors were isolated for ages on the islands like Tahiti and the Marquesas. On the mountain-tops, plateaus beneath the water, the coral insect built up these atolls until they stood in their wondrous shapes splendid examples of nature’s self-arrested labor, sculptures of unbelievable brilliancy.
Photo by Dr. Theodore P. Cleveland
A squall approaching Anaa
To them came first Caucasians who had been spared in the cataclysm, and later the new sailors of giant canoes who followed from Asia the line of islets and atolls, fighting with and conquering the Caucasians, and merging into them in the course of generations. These first and succeeding migrations must have been forced by devastating natural phenomena, by terrible economic pressure, by wars and tribal feuds. It was not probable that any people deliberately chose these atolls in preference to the higher lands, but that they occupied them in lieu of better on account of evil fortune.
These eighty Paumotu islands averaged about forty miles apart, with only two thousand people in all of them, which would allow, if equally distributed, only twenty-five inhabitants to each. On more than half of them no person lived, and all the others were scantily peopled. Three or four hundred might occupy one atoll where shell and cocoanuts were bountiful and fish plentiful and good, while two score and more atolls were left for the frigate-bird to build its nest and for the robber-crab to eat its full of nuts.