Pioneers in Australasia

by Harry Johnston

On parts of the north-west and north-east coasts of New Guinea, as on some of the outlying islands of the Jilolo group and of the Bismarck Archipelago, there were settlements of Caucasian-like people, called by anthropologists Indonesian—a term scarcely distinguishable from Polynesian. They were of the same stock as the similar folk (with faces like dark-complexioned Europeans) to be met with on the islands off western Sumatra. These Indonesians had broadened out into Polynesians eastwards of New Guinea. They had mingled in most of the Melanesian islands with the primitive Negroes, and had introduced many new ideas in religion, warfare, and art. They were a little less cruel, perhaps, than the Papuans. In the extreme limits of their range to the north-east—Hawaii archipelago—and to the south-east—Easter Island—they had developed a considerable civilization, though it is by no means certain whether they were the first inhabitants of those islands (the existing Hawaiians, according to their traditions, came from Samoa and had only been in the Hawaiian archipelago for about nine hundred years when they were discovered or re-discovered by Captain Cook). They may have been preceded in both groups by the ancient race that built in huge blocks of stone, but which either passed on to America or died out, leaving, however, its mixed and slightly degenerate descendants in the Polynesians, who from some such centre as the Marquezas Islands and Tahiti spread westwards to Samoa, and thence to nearly all the Pacific islands.

Both in Easter Island and in Hawaii the development of religion was a development of terror. The common people were especially harassed by their belief in evil spirits waiting to torture them cruelly after death (a belief engendered in the Hawaii archipelago by the terrible earthquakes and the active volcanoes with their seething craters). And at any moment they were liable to be seized by the priests, the nobles, or the king to be offered up as human sacrifices to the gods of sky, earth, mountains, and sea. The priests and kings or chiefs (and in some islands a king or chief was not merely a high priest as well, but was often worshipped as a god during his lifetime) had immense power over the community by being able to establish "tabu". To declare a thing or a person "tabu" was equivalent to saying that it was sacred, under the protection of the gods—might not be touched, drunk, eaten, smelt, or even looked at, without risk of death, through the action of some supernatural force or as a punishment administered for impiety by the human authority. This practice penetrated to New Zealand and spread its influence over much of Melanesia. It could be wielded with great benefit in keeping the people in order, but it also checked their enterprise in many directions, and was shockingly misused by both priests and chiefs for their own advantage.

All the Oceanic peoples were immoral, and their numbers were slowly decreasing in the Pacific islands as the result of superstition, vice, and selfishness. In order that there should be no scarcity of food in the smaller islands families were often limited to one or two children, many infants being killed at birth. They were particularly averse from daughters, so that in not a few tribes and communities the women were much fewer than the men, perhaps only one woman to four men; thus not a few of the men (priests, generally) were unmarried. Women were very unfairly treated, as is frequently the case among barbarous peoples. They were often forbidden to eat the more nourishing forms of food, in case there should not be enough for the men. In Hawaii, for example, they were put to death if caught eating bananas, coconuts, or the flesh of pigs or turtles. Their husbands (in Tahiti and Samoa) sometimes made them wean their children and bring up instead young pigs or puppies. (A similar practice is referred to in my book on the Pioneers of Canada in regard to the rearing of young bears by Amerindian women.)

Wars were constantly being waged between island and island, tribe and tribe—especially in the Melanesian division of Oceania. In the western Pacific, indeed, the lives of the natives, before the establishment of the White Man's rule, was one perpetual acquaintance with terror. At any moment in the offing might appear the war canoes of an enemy, and ensue the sudden invasion of a village, the defeat of its fighting men, the cannibal feast on the bodies of the slain, the carrying off of the young women and children into captivity, there perhaps to be fattened up and killed for more cannibal feasts. Or when bathing and swimming (which nearly all these people delighted in) they might be seized and devoured by sharks; or their islet or island coast was suddenly swamped by an enormous tidal wave, or a mighty earthquake swallowed up the village in an earthcrack or landslide; or red-hot ashes and burning lava from a suddenly active volcano destroyed several communities; or hurricanes devastated their settlements and swamped their fleets of canoes. It is true that they never suffered from cold (except in New Zealand), and seldom from famine; for the sea provided bountifully fish and edible seaweed, there were the sea birds' eggs on the rocks, innumerable oysters, clams, sea slugs[21], crabs, langoustes, and prawns; there were pigeons, parrots, rails, plovers, ducks, on most of the smaller islands, and a bewildering abundance of bird life in New Guinea and the big islands. There was the Bread-fruit tree, there were bananas, yams, the invaluable coconut—giving food and a wholesome drink; and in New Zealand, where tropical products were mostly lacking (though the Maoris introduced sweet potatoes and taro yams), there was the bracken fern, which from root stems yielded a palatable substance like that sago which in west Melanesia and Fiji, as in Malaysia, was an important article of diet.

Yet in spite of an abundant food supply and a genial climate, these Oceanic peoples suffered a good deal from disease before the Europeans came. There was leprosy, which was a terrible plague in some islands; there were various forms of germ fevers introduced into the blood by mosquitoes; smallpox had come from the west, spread by the Malays. Mostly these primitive Oceanians led short lives; and if they were mainly merry and irresponsible, these spells of light-heartedness, of dancing, immoderate feasting and drinking, song-singing, lovemaking, gambling, and living the life of mermen and mermaids in the foaming breakers of a warm sea, alternated with heart-breaking struggles against the forces of nature, panics in regard to new diseases, terrors of unseen devils, torturing sacrifices to malevolent gods, murders, cannibal feasts, poisonings, and enslavement.

In this description of the condition of man in Oceania I have made no allusion to Australia and Tasmania, for the reason that the natives of the southern continent (of which Tasmania recently formed an outlying peninsula) differed so remarkably from the peoples of the Malay islands, New Guinea, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (including New Zealand) as to require separate treatment.

The aboriginal Australoids are the most primitive, the least improved of existing human races: although peculiarly developed in some points, they are the lowliest form of real mankind known to us. They were considered at one time to be the descendants of a brutish but big-brained type, a veritable "ogre" which dwelt in Europe some hundred thousand years ago: the Man of Neanderthal. But this impression was wrong; the Australoids more nearly resemble the less specialised, ancestral human race of Europe. Australia was originally peopled by two distinct types of men: the Australoids and the negroid Tasmanians. These last had the curly black hair and depressed noses of Negroes, though they were also akin to the Australoids; which last people, except that they are dark-skinned and brutish-looking, are remarkably like savage white men! They have head-hair which is neither lank like that of the Mongolian nor frizzly or tightly curled like the "wool" of Negroes and Papuans. Unlike the Papuans, moreover, and still more unlike the smooth-skinned Mongolian and Amerindian, the Australoid has much hair growing on the face and body, as is often the case among European and Indian peoples. But they also exhibit a feature present both in primitive man and in the modern European—an exaggerated projection of the brows, of the bones of the forehead which shade the eyes. The stature is not much below the European mean, but the lower limbs are usually short and rather slender. The forehead is retreating, the large jaws prominent, and the teeth bigger in proportion than in other races of modern men.

Considering the great area of the island-continent on which the Australoids must have lived for many thousand years, there is considerable uniformity of physical appearance amongst them, and a general resemblance in the structure and sounds of their languages, though these last are divisible into two main groups: those of the north and north-west, and the speech of the remainder of Australia. In considering their language, to some extent, and still more in examining their rudimentary arts and religious ideas, it is obvious that the people of the north-east of Australia have been visited for centuries by Malays, Papuans, and even Polynesians, yet that none of these superior races succeeded in getting a permanent foothold.

So far as any sense of shame was concerned, the Australoids of both sexes went quite naked, or merely wore a girdle round the hips, to which strings or strips of fur were attached; but in cold weather or at night they put round their shoulders cloaks made from the skins of marsupials, skins sewn together after being scraped, softened, and dressed. Their own bodies they decorated or mutilated in various ways, such as knocking out two of the upper front teeth, passing a bone nose pin 5 or 6 inches long through the septum of the nose, cutting off the end joints of their fingers, and marking the skin of the upper arm, chest, and belly by terrific scars of raised skin. This was "cicatrization", so often referred to in describing the skin decoration of savages, especially the negroes of the Congo basin. The Australoids did not tatu their bodies (with pin-pricks and paint) like the Polynesians and Malays. They painted their skins for warfare or for ceremonial dances with red and yellow ochre, white and grey clay, and black mineral substances or charcoal. Also the men would gum to their bodies the white down or fluff of certain birds and beasts.