The English Find Australia
The spirit of adventure, now inspiring all ranks of society as well as most of the civilised races of the world, was by no means satisfied by territorial conquest. The wide dominions of the sea, as yet untraced and all unknown, embraced an empire which appealed as strikingly to the sympathies of geographers as did the prospects of Far Eastern trade to the feelings of the East India merchants. Much the same ceaseless quest carried the Cossack Dejneff, in 1648, round the north-eastern extremity of Asia; Torres, a Spaniard commissioned by the Spanish Government of Peru, in 1606 negotiated the strait between New Guinea and the mainland; and various Dutch expeditions in 1606, 1616, 1618, 1627 and 1642 endured the dangers of the reef-bound coasts. But it was not until 1688 that the English first made their appearance on the Australian coast. In some measure the situation was awaiting the man. The voyages of Captain Cook (1769–1777) took up the work of geographical exploration in the Southern Hemisphere in a style quite befitting the records already elsewhere accomplished.
Pacific and the Destinies of Peoples
If between the continent of Australia and the coasts of China to-day there is only a commercial connection, it must not be forgotten that Australia is closely identified with the Polynesian races, who in turn are related to the early Japanese. New Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia, and New Guinea, as parts of one and the same continent, which now in many places has disappeared beneath the sea, present an ethnographic study of unusual importance and interest. In few other parts of the world is so great an ethnographic variation imposed upon a single connecting racial family as in the island divisions of the South Seas—Australasia, Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. It is by the existence of this underlying relationship that the Indo-Pacific races, whatever their specific origin, undoubtedly link up two hemispheres which organically are widely separated. By the abruptly disintegrated character of existing racial location, however, it is possible to read the impression made by the Pacific Ocean on the history of the world. If oceanic influences are represented in other ways to-day, and tribal migrations in a body are occurrences of the past, the necessities of the age still make such heavy demands on what is, after all, the immemorial highway of mankind that the Pacific can still be said to mould the destinies of races to-day as easily as it has obliterated them in the past.
What will Happen To-morrow?
Turning to Asia, although the Empires of Russia in Siberia and of China have worked out their destinies independently of the Pacific, remaining unaffected by it more than all other Eastern states, the part that the Pacific has played in the development of Asia since the eighteenth century cannot go unnoticed. Japan, in particular, has profited by the readiness of communication that the ocean provides to rise above prejudices which are usually inseparable from an island people and are pre-eminently to be expected among Asiatics. In China the absence of any prominent dependence on the sea, either for food or means of transport, has produced in very sinister form an aversion against the West. None the less, under pressure from the Occident, and without regarding the example set by Japan, the Celestial Empire has permitted much commercial encroachment. Succeeding the galleons of the buccaneers have come the stately traders of the merchant princes of Europe and America, and these in turn have given place to the steamers of industrial trusts, exacting as large a tribute as the earliest marauders. While the consequences of industrial expansion among Oriental people have made the Pacific the focus of much restless energy, Japan, now as great a Power on land as formerly she was, and is, at sea, has developed an intelligence that has made her pre-eminent among the trading nations of the East. Undeterred by exertion, unmoved by expenditure, Japan has displaced the carrying trade of the Pacific by her fearless invasion of Western markets. Throughout the isles of the Southern Seas, and up and down the face of the Pacific slope, the islanders have swarmed, filling the lands of their passage with unaccustomed energy.
Looking back, then, at the conditions of Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and comparing them with those existing to-day, it will be noticed that a wide gulf still separates Japan from China in the twentieth century as it formerly separated China from the rest of the Far East. On the one side there is China, now emerging from revolution; on the other there is Japan, voicing the regeneration of Asia with raucous tones.
China Thirty years Hence
Meanwhile the vast interests of the Occident in the Orient are united with either power by frequent political intercourse and a traffic which has given to the Pacific priority of place in the battle for commercial supremacy. Yet while China is commercially independent of the West, and Japan dependent upon it, all branches of foreign industry cannot but view with alarm the increasing aggressiveness of the spirit of independence now inspiring Asia at the prompting of Japan. Obviously these signs are the indication of an approaching cleavage between East and West, which, when fully attained, will bear witness to the complete severance of the shackles hitherto enthralling Asia to the interests and purposes of the West. It must not be forgotten that Japan already has achieved her complete regeneration. Thirty years hence China, no doubt, will have followed suit, when a federacy of the Far Eastern Powers may become an accomplished fact. Even at this moment such a union is possible, and its realisation would impose upon all European Governments the immediate revision of their Asiatic policies.
At this time such a combination is hampered only by the unwillingness of China to accept the suggestions of Japan in anything affecting the policy of Asia, although, in spite of this objection, active reforming influences are gradually effecting important changes throughout the Chinese Empire. For the moment, therefore, Japan is content to tread alone the path she has marked out, encouraging her subjects by example to exploit Asia for the Asiatics, and to secure recognition of the doctrine of equality between the white and Asiatic races.