Pioneers in Australasia

by Harry Johnston

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.