making but one voyage in the course of the year, the natives of the various islands kept up among themselves quite a frequent and regular communication. This favourable trait was undoubtedly owing in great measure to the defectiveness of their otherwise very elegant, but small, slight-built canoes, which are but ill adapted for voyaging to any remote distance.
Respecting that other swarthy, crisp-haired, savage race, widely different from that inhabiting the coasts of Nicobar, which, according to a legend, dwells in the forests of Great Nicobar, and lives upon snakes, vermin, roots, and leaves of plants, and in the Nicobar idiom called Baju-oal-Tschùa, we could only add to our stock of information by recitals that obviously pertained to the domain of Fable-land. When, however, we remember that not a single traveller or author who has indulged such gossiping, nay, that not even the natives who tell such stories of them, have ever seen one of this race, we shall be excused for suggesting in reply to the numberless conjectures afloat respecting these mysterious inhabitants, that the alleged denizens of the interior of Great Nicobar are neither a widely different race of men from the coast-natives, nor yet an offshoot of the crisp-haired swarthy race of Papuas from New Guinea, but that, dispossessed and degraded by a conjuncture of various hostile influences, they hold, with respect to the inhabitants of the sea-board, a similar position to that occupied by the Bushmen of Namaqualand to the Hottentots of Cape Colony.
In the circumstances in which the inhabitants of this group
of islands at present find themselves, without traditions, without proverbs, without songs, without monuments, and especially without any characteristic peculiarity in their habits and customs which could possibly throw a ray of light upon the obscurity of their origin, it is a bold undertaking to express any decided opinion as to the derivation and genealogy of this people. By far the most probable theory, as is also admitted by Dr. Rink, who visited these islands with the Danish Expedition, would represent them as an offshoot from the north-westerly boundary of the Malay race, as a people which, while possessing much in common with the Indo-Chinese stock, nevertheless in its physical characteristics seems to hold a middle rank between the Malay and the Burmese.
Considering the study of language as a most important and reliable source of information, the members of the Expedition made it their main object to draw up, in conformity with what is known as Gallatin's method, so extensively used by all American and English travellers, a vocabulary of about 200 words in both languages, viz. that used by the inhabitants of Nicobar, and that (widely different in all respects except the numerals) in use among the natives of the more southern islands. As a Malay barque from Pulo Penang was lying at anchor during our stay on the northern shores of Great Nicobar, so favourable an opportunity was of course made use of to prepare a similar vocabulary of the Malay idiom spoken at that port, which will give the philologist the advantage of being able to judge for himself as to the similarity existing between
these two idioms, and thence, by analogy, between the two races, and discriminate whether those scholars, such as Vatu, come nearer the truth who maintain that the Nicobar language is of Malay derivation with an admixture of foreign words, principally European, or those other students of philology who, as for instance Adelung, hold that the idiom used by these islanders is identical with some of the languages of the Indo-Chinese peninsula.
At the same time the ethnographer of the Expedition had endeavoured to ascertain by means of a new system of measurements of the human frame, drawn up by himself in concert with Dr. Edward Schwarz, one of the physicians of the Expedition, and with the co-operation and assistance of the latter, various data, such as, when applied to the various races inhabiting the earth, might justify many new and striking conclusions, and ultimately result in definitely fixing the relation, resemblance, or physical dissimilarity of the various races of man. Such a plan makes it much more easy by means of figures, those most undeniable evidences of the results of investigations, to get speedily and accurately at the required results, than by all the most specious theories laid down in the less certain domain of philosophic speculation.
These measurements, applied at three chief regions of the body, namely, the head, the trunk, and the upper and lower extremities, are intended to be scientifically discussed in a special memoir,[25] and we accordingly confine ourselves here to remarking
that the various points of measurements were not only determined in an anthropological point of view, but that among the 68 different categories, into which these measurements are naturally distributed, there occur some which supply many curious points of inquiry, as also considerable assistance not merely to national economics, the result of the light thrown upon the subject of the average of muscular strength of the various races as found by the dynamometer, but also to the graphic art, with respect to a more accurate acquaintance with the human skeleton as well as the entire figure.
In like manner we never omitted to collect some of the hair of the head from as many as possible of the various individuals measured, since the laborious researches of Peter Brown of Philadelphia on the human hair, have elevated it into a very remarkable means of tracing the origin of the various disparities of race.