THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY JANUARY, 1916 THE MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC BY ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER MORE than 2,000 years ago, there lived upon the Islands from Sumatra to the Philippines an ancient sea-faring race, the brown-skinned Sawaiori. Of their origin we know nothing, but that they had long been separated from the Indian Peninsula is evident, for there are no Sanscrit words in the language of their descendants. Much as the Polynesians are to-day, their ancestors, the half-mythical Sawaiori, probably were in those ages long past, for even to-day no Polynesian population has developed a national solidarity. Their political and social unit is and always has been the village, fortified, self-centered, with no communal interest and no civic virtue extending beyond the limits of its ramparts of rattan. Weak as a house divided against itself were the Sawaiori when before the dawn of our Christian era, hordes of Malay pirates began to swarm out from southeastern Asia and to overrun the off-lying islands.1 We may picture village after village obliterated in an orgie of massacre and outrage. From the roar of burning thatch the weak ones slunk away, while to the cat-like Malay the heroes fell a prey. One desperate resource remained to the persecuted race-flight over the wide and unknown waters of the Pacific. Eastward went the fugitives in two great streams, one along the northern and the other skirting the southern coast of New Guinea. But, although forced by hunger to conquer a landing place, there to grow the broad-leaved taro for the onward voyage, no home for the Sawaiori could be found upon New Guinea, for ever in his rear there lurked the Malayan prahu, while the forests around him secreted cannibals hungering for his flesh. Before the dawn of history they sailed, these mariners of a weak and exiled race, who heavy with many a fear the world has long outlived, yet braved the unknown perils of this loneliest of seas-the ocean of the long low heave, the never stilled breathing of the monster in his sleep; for calm over the Pacific has but the semblance 1 For a résumé of his own and previous researches upon this subject one should consult William Churchill's "Polynesian Wanderings," published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1911. of peace and over its hours of stillness there broods the threat of stormto them but the inaction of a demon nursing his rage. Thus onward sped the disheartened bands until New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago faded beneath the western sea, and the high mountains of the Salomons rose majestically above the eastern horizon. Then along the coast of these Islands, so fair to look upon, our wanderers still sailed searching always for the land of peace and finding only the abode of the Melanesian savage, but still beyond, luring them onward toward the rising sun, lay the untried ocean. Forced at last to leave all land behind, they did as wise sailors would have done, steered close into the southeast trades that blow so constantly over this vast expanse of ocean. Thus when starvation hovered near, when the last of the meagre store of fermented bread fruit had been consumed, and slaves began to fall to sustain the master voyagers, there still remained as a last resource the fair wind to bear them back to the known but dreaded shores of the Salomons. Such a course from the southeasternmost Salomons close hauled on the tropical wind, would carry our navigators to the Santa Cruz group where once again they had to encounter their old foe the negroid Melanesian. Thus after conquering only enough of the coveted shore to suffice for a temporary resting place, they sped onward and away to discover Retumah where at last peace from all but their own ambitions awaited them. Then as years passed and little Rotumah became overpopulated, and jealousies engendered savage wars, some long-forgotten Columbus of the Pacific made a last and final voyage of 600 miles over the open ocean to beautiful Samoa, the El Dorado of the Polynesian race. With faces toward the rising sun they had gone their fearsome way, and as beaten fugitives taking awful chances a remnant of their race had found the seclusion of a land untrodden by any but their own feet. Yet, as men treasuring the memory of their past, they turned their homesick faces toward the setting sun, whence the spirits of their dead returned over the ocean to the mythical fatherland the old songs still de 8 THREE MAIDENS OF FUNAFUTI ATOLL, ELLICE ISLANDS. Types of the Polynesian race. scribe. For somewhere, far to the westward lay the half-forgotten home, and the something that stands for Europe to us in America, is the fabled Hawaiki to the Polynesians of to-day. Generations came and passed, but Samoa remained to them by right of eminent domain. Yet history constantly repeats itself, and wars and persecutions again operated as of old, so that within historic times, from five hundred to three hundred years ago, so the old songs tell, great voyages were made from Samoa to Hawaii, to the Cook Islands and thence to New Zealand; to Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, the Ellice and Gilbert Islands, and to the remotely isolated Easter Island. In Samoa the story is of the departing fugitives and in Hawaii or New Zealand the song tells of their arrival, and the dates of these achievements are fixed by the generations of the chiefs that have been and passed away, and are now but names known but to the chanting priests. For two thousand miles around Samoa the men of Polynesian race were masters of the island-world, and thus from Rotumah to Easter Island four thousand miles from west to east, and from New Zealand to Hawaii |