The Caroline Archipelago embraces an immense space, and the Marianne Islands, as well as the Radak group, might fitly be included in it, as containing a population perfectly identical in race. For a long time the old geographers had had for their guidance only the charts of missionaries who, lacking alike the education and the appliances necessary to estimate accurately the size, position, and relative distance of all these archipelagoes, had attached notable importance to them, and often fixed at a considerable number of degrees the extent of a group which covered only a few miles.
Thus navigators accepted their guidance with wise caution. Freycinet was the first to infuse a little order into this chaos, and, thanks to his meeting with Kadu and Don Louis Torrès, he was able to identify later with earlier discoveries. Lütke did his part—and that not a small part—in the settling of an accurate and scientific chart of an archipelago which had long been the terror of navigators.
The learned Russian explorer is not of the same opinion as Lesson, one of his predecessors, who connected all the inhabitants of the Caroline group with the Mongolian race, under the name of the "Mongolo-Pelagian" branch. He rather sees in them, as did Chamisso and Balbi, a branch of the Malay family, which has peopled Eastern Polynesia. Whilst Lesson compares the people of the Carolines with the Chinese and Japanese, Lütke, on the other hand, finds in their great, projecting eyes, thick lips, and retroussé nose, a family likeness to the people of the Sandwich and Tonga Islands. The language does not suggest the slightest comparison with Japanese, whilst it shows a great resemblance to that of the Tonga Islands.
Lütke spent the time of his sojourn at Manilla in laying in stores, and repairing the sloop, and, on the 30th of January, he left that Spanish possession for Russia, which he reached on the 6th of September, 1829, casting anchor in the roads of Cronstadt.
It remains now to tell how it had fared with the sloop, the Möller, after the separation at Valparaiso. Arriving at Kamtchatka from Otaheite, she had left part of her cargo at Petropaulovski, and thereafter—in August, 1827—had set sail for Ounalashka, where she had remained for a month. After an examination of the west coast of America, which was cut short by unfavourable weather, and a stay at Honolulu, which extended to February, 1828, she had discovered the island Möller, noted the Necker, Gardner, and Lisiansky Islands, and marked, at a distance of six miles southwards, a very dangerous reef.
The sloop had then coasted the island of Curè, the French Frigate Shoal the reef Maro, Pearl Island, and the Isle of Hermes; and, after having made search for several islands marked upon Arrowsmith's charts, had at length reached Kamtchatka. At the end of April, she had set sail for Ounalashka and taken observations of the north coast of the Alaska peninsula. In September the Möller rejoined the Seniavine, and, from that period until their return to Russia, they were no more separated, save for brief intervals.
As one may judge from the sufficiently detailed account which has just been given, this expedition did not fail to bring about results of importance to geographical science. We must add that the different branches of natural history, physics, and astronomy, owe to it equally numerous and important additions.
CHAPTER II.
FRENCH CIRCUMNAVIGATORS.