The eastern islands of the Malay Archipelago—Timor, Flores, Buru, Jilolo, Ceram, and their adjacent groups of islets—were peopled by mixed races, partly of Malay and partly of Negrito or Papuan stock. In the mountainous interior of the larger islands the natives were still wild and naked pagans, but little distinguishable from the Papuans of New Guinea. But the coast population was mostly Muhammadan, or about to become so, and more or less derived from Malay settlers. In some cases, perhaps, they represented a Mongoloid stock older than the Malay and related to the Micronesians farther to the north-east.
These Micronesians were the peoples of the Mariana or Ladrone, Palao (Pelew), Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert Islands. They were of mixed elements, partly Polynesian (which is to say semi-Caucasian), partly Mongolian, and in some degree Papuan, but many of them bear a remarkable facial resemblance to the Amerindians of North and South America. This may arise partly from the partial colonization of these archipelagoes of small islands in the western Pacific by immigrants from Japan and China, mostly shipwrecked mariners. This intermixture has imparted a "Tatar" look to some of the Micronesians, just as the same facial features in the Amerindian are undoubtedly derived from ancient migrations taking place in prehistoric times from Siberia and Japan into north-west America. On the whole the Micronesians are most nearly allied to the Polynesian group of peoples to the south of them, though their languages form quite a separate group. Before Europeans discovered them they ignored the use of metal; their implements were made of stone, of sharks' and whales' teeth, of sharp-edged bivalve shells, of cane, and wood. They had a great reverence for stones, both as objects of worship and as money. This feeling would almost seem to be due to the remembrance of more remote times, when there dwelt in these and perhaps other Pacific archipelagoes a wonderful race of stonebuilders, who may have been the Caucasian ancestors of the modern Polynesians and akin to that European Neolithic race which ranged across the Old World from Ireland to Korea, and over the Australasian islands from Sumatra to Easter Island.
A section of these Neolithic stonebuilders seems to have sojourned for a time in the Caroline Islands, one of the Micronesian archipelagoes. Here they constructed forts, palaces, quays, out of immense blocks of stone, shaped ready hewn, so to speak, by the hand of Nature: for they were cubes and four-sided prisms of basalt (like the formations at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland), the remains of ancient volcanic eruptions on the larger islands of the Caroline group. Besides the stone buildings (which were erected, like all ancient stonework, by placing block on block, without any binding mortar between) this vanished race constructed artificial canals and harbours. Their prosperity and civilization seem to have come to an end—perhaps they emigrated to America and founded some of the prehistoric civilizations there—through the partial subsidence of the Micronesian islands. Many of these ancient stone buildings are now partly under water, and there is other evidence which shows that these and other Pacific groups of islands were larger in extent several thousand years ago than they are now. The modern Micronesians may be in part descended from the great race of stonebuilders, but they have much degenerated in civilization, as has been the case with the people of Egypt and the Amerindians of Peru and Mexico.
New Guinea, four hundred years ago, and its adjacent islands, large and small, of Waigiu, Aru, Timor-laut, the Admiralty Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago (once known as New Britain and New Ireland), and the Solomon Islands were peopled almost entirely by Negroids, that is to say by Oceanic Negroes, Papuans, and Negritos, similar to the inland populations of the eastern Malay islands. The Papuans were a tall race, with abundant bushy hair of woolly texture and with arched, almost Jewish noses. Their skins were very dark, and their appearance (except for the high nose), their noisy dispositions, love of excitement and laughter, reminded travellers very much of African Negroes. The Oceanic Negroes of the Bismarck Archipelago only differed from the Papuans in being more "negro", with more tightly curled hair and flatter noses. The Negritos were like the pigmy Negroes of Africa. But here and there on the coast of New Guinea, or on the islands off it, were obvious Polynesian settlements of old times, and even on some isolated island a people quite pale skinned and Caucasian in appearance.
The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, of New Caledonia, and the Fiji archipelago are allied to the Papuans more than to any other stock, but are usually known as Melanesians.[19] Their characteristics when first discovered by Europeans (which for purposes of accurate description was not much more than one hundred years ago) were not quite so "negro" as those of the Papuans and the Negritos. They had dark, almost black skins and broad noses, but the head-hair was less tightly curled and grew to greater length. They had often the very prominent brow ridges of the Australoid, and some indications also of mixture with a higher race—the semi-Caucasian Polynesian—and were no doubt the result of an early mixture of all these types. The civilization of the Melanesians was somewhat higher than that of the Papuans, but inferior to the arts and industries and social life of the Polynesians. They had developed agriculture to some extent, and amongst cultivated plants had the taro yam (a kind of Arum with tuberous roots), the Sweet potato (a Convolvulus), the sugar cane, the Bread-fruit tree,[20] the banana, the coconut palm, the sweet roots of a tree-lily (Dracæna), and the fruit of a Pandanus; perhaps also the Kava pepper vine. They possessed as domestic animals a pig of an east Asiatic species and a dog of a type like the pariah dog of India or the Dingo of Australia. They also had fowls of a game bantam type, which no doubt had been brought eastward by Malay traders till they passed from island to island into Melanesia, and even to most of the Polynesian islands except New Zealand. In New Caledonia there were fowls of a big breed but there were no pigs or dogs. [The domestic fowl was even found in the remote Easter Island when it was first visited by Europeans, but had not got beyond that to South America; neither had the American maize, tobacco, or other cultivated plants reached the Pacific islands till they were brought there, from Asia or Europe in recent times.]
PAPUAN OF SOUTH-EAST NEW GUINEA, NEAR PORT MORESBY
(From a drawing by the late Professor T.H. Huxley)
