Traces of the Indian mythology—measures of the Indian influence in other respects—just exist amongst the Dyaks—e.g., Battara is a name in their Pantheon, and this is an alteration of the Brahminic Avatar.
The pirates who harass the coasts of Borneo and the Chinese Seas—destined, at some future time to be, like the Kaffres, but too well-known to the English tax-payers—are Malays rather than Orang Binua, or their equivalents; the navigation of the Dyaks being chiefly confined to rivers.
The particular tribes of Sarawak are the following—the Lundu, the Sarambo, the Singé, the Suntah, the Sow, and the Sibnow. It is almost unnecessary to name the great fountain-head for all our recent knowledge of Borneo—Sir James Brooke.
The Dyak type predominates amongst the Orang Binua of Borneo. In the Philippines the Semang complexion re-appears. But the prolongation[214] of the eastward line of migration takes us through the Mariannes and Ladrones to Polynesia; and here the magnitude of the islands decreases; in other words, the influences of the sea-air become greater. The aliment becomes almost wholly vegetable. The separation from the civilizational influences of Asia amounts to absolute isolation. Of the general ethnology of the South Sea Islanders I say nothing. The reasons which took me over China, Arabia, and the Malayan peninsula, sicco pede, spare the necessity of details here.
In the Sandwich Islands there is a constitution. In Tahiti, a school of native Christian Missionaries.
New Zealand exhibits the contrast between the darker and lighter-coloured Oceanic populations in so remarkable a manner as to have engendered the notion that two stocks occupy the island. If it were so, the fact would be remarkable and mysterious. How one population found its way to a locality so distant is by no means an easy question; whilst the assumption of a second family of immigrants just doubles its difficulty.[68]
In Java the proper Malay influences have been[215] so great as to leave but few traces of the Orang Binua; and, earlier even than these, those of India were actively at work.
East of Bali, however, the Orang Binua re-appear, and here the type is that of the Semangs. From Ombay, parts of Ende, and parts of Sumbawa, we have short vocabularies—short, but not too scanty to set aside the hasty, but accredited, assertion of the Australian language, having nothing in common with those of the Indian Archipelago.[69]
I feel as satisfied that Australia was peopled from either Timor or Rotti, as I do about the Gallic origin of the ancient Britons.