The Project Gutenberg eBook, Pioneers in Australasia, by Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston, Illustrated by Alec Ball

Transcriber's Note:

[~ao] as in Serr[~ao] depicts a single tilde extending over both letters ("a" and "o").

MAGELLAN VISITING THE KING OF SEBU

PIONEERS IN
AUSTRALASIA

By SIR HARRY JOHNSTON
G.C.M.G., K.C.B.

WITH EIGHT COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS
BY ALEC BALL

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW BOMBAY

Printed and bound in Great Britain

PREFACE

I have been asked to write a series of works which should deal with "real adventures", in parts of the world either wild and uncontrolled by any civilized government, or at any rate regions full of dangers, of wonderful discoveries; in which the daring and heroism of white men (and sometimes of white women) stood out clearly against backgrounds of unfamiliar landscapes, peopled with strange nations, savage tribes, dangerous beasts, or wonderful birds. These books would again and again illustrate the first coming of the white race into regions inhabited by people of a different type, with brown, black, or yellow skins; how the European was received, and how he treated these races of the soil which gradually came under his rule owing to his superior knowledge, weapons, wealth, or powers of persuasion. The books were to tell the plain truth, even if here and there they showed the white man to have behaved badly, or if they revealed the fact that the American Indian, the Negro, the Malay, the black Australian was sometimes cruel and treacherous.

A request thus framed was almost equivalent to asking me to write stories of those pioneers who founded the British Empire; in any case, the volumes of this series do relate the adventures of those who created the greater part of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, by their perilous explorations of unknown lands and waters. In many instances the travellers were all unconscious of their destinies, of the results which would arise from their actions. In some cases they would have bitterly railed at Fate had they known that the result of their splendid efforts was to be the enlargement of an empire under the British flag. Perhaps if they could know by now that we are striving under that flag to be just and generous to all types of men, and not to use our empire solely for the benefit of English-speaking men and women, the French who founded the Canadian nation, the Germans and Dutch who helped to create British Africa, Malaysia, and Australia, the Spaniards who preceded us in the West Indies and in New Guinea, and the Portuguese in West, Central, and East Africa, in Newfoundland, Ceylon, and Malaysia, might—if they have any consciousness or care for things in this world—be not so sorry after all that we are reaping where they sowed.

It is (as you will see) impossible to tell the tale of these early days in the British Dominions beyond the Seas, without describing here and there the adventures of men of enterprise and daring who were not of our own nationality. The majority, nevertheless, were of British stock; that is to say, they were English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, perhaps here and there a Channel Islander and a Manxman; or Nova Scotians, Canadians, and New Englanders. The bulk of them were good fellows, a few were saints, a few were ruffians with redeeming features. Sometimes they were common men who blundered into great discoveries which will for ever preserve their names from perishing; occasionally they were men of Fate, predestined, one might say, to change the history of the world by their revelations of new peoples, new lands, new rivers, new lakes, snow mountains, and gold mines. Here and there is a martyr like Marquette, or Livingstone, or Gordon, dying for the cause of a race not his own. And others again are mere boys, whose adventures come to them because they are adventurous, and whose feats of arms, escapes, perils, and successes are quite as wonderful as those attributed to the juvenile heroes of Marryat, Stevenson, and the author of The Swiss Family Robinson.

I have tried, in describing these adventures, to give my readers some idea of the scenery, animals, and vegetation of the new lands through which these pioneers passed on their great and small purposes; as well as of the people, native to the soil, with whom they came in contact. And in treating of these subjects I have thought it best to give the scientific names of the plant or animal which was of importance in my story, so that any of my readers who were really interested in natural history could at once ascertain for themselves the exact type alluded to, and, if they wished, look it up in a museum, a garden, or a natural history book.

I hope this attempt at scientific accuracy will not frighten away readers young and old; and, if you can have patience with the author, you will, by reading this series of books on the great pioneers of British West Africa, Canada, Malaysia, West Indies, South Africa, and Australasia, get a clear idea of how the British Colonial Empire came to be founded.

You will find that I have often tried to tell the story in the words of the pioneers, but in these quotations I have adopted the modern spelling, not only in my transcript of the English original or translation, but also in the place and tribal names, so as not to puzzle or delay the reader. Otherwise, if you were to look out some of the geographical names of the old writers, you might not be able to recognize them on the modern atlas. The pronunciation of this modern geographical spelling is very simple and clear: the vowels are pronounced a = ah, e = eh, i = ee, o = o, ô = oh, ō = aw, ö = u in 'hurt', and u = oo, as in German, Italian, or most other European languages; and the consonants as in English.

H.H. JOHNSTON.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Magellan's Voyage Around the World. By Antonio Pigafetta. Translated and annotated by James Alexander Robertson. 2 Vols. Cleveland, U.S.A. The Arthur H. Clark Company. 1906. (This is the best work dealing with Magellan's voyage to the Philippines and the after events of his expedition.)

The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan. Translated from the accounts of Pigafetta, &c., by Lord Stanley of Alderley. London. Hakluyt Society. 1874. (This work contains a great deal of supplementary information regarding the doings of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the Pacific and Malaysia.)

Early Voyages to Australia. By R.H. Major. London. Hakluyt Society. 1859.

Tasman's Journal ... Facsimiles of the Original MS. with Life of Tasman. By J.E. Heeres. Amsterdam. 1898.

Dampier's Voyages. Edited by John Masefield. 2 Vols. London. E. Grant Richards. 1906.

The History of Mankind. By Professor Friedrich Ratzel. Translated from the second German edition by A.J. Butler, M.A. 3 Vols. London. Macmillan & Co. 1896.

The History of the Australian Colonies. By Edward Jenks, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 1896.

Voyage Autour du Monde. By De Bougainville. Paris. 1771.

The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo. By H. Ling Roth. London. 1896.

Cook's Voyages. (Original edition in 6 Vols., including plates.) London. 1772, 1777, and 1784.

Captain Cook's Journal during his First Voyage Round the World. Edited by Captain W.J.L. Wharton, R.N., F.R.S. London. Elliot Stock. 1893.

Journal of the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Banks. Edited by Sir Joseph D. Hooker. Macmillan & Co. 1896.

Captain James Cook. By Arthur Kitson. London. John Murray. 1907. (This is the best life of Cook.)

The Eventful History of the Mutiny and Piratical Seizure of H.M.S. "Bounty". London. John Murray. 1831.

Gonzalez's Voyage to Easter Island, 1770-1. Translated by Bolton Glanville Corney. Hakluyt Society. 1908.

Terre Napoléon. (The French attempts to explore Australia at the beginning of the 19th Century.) By Ernest Scott. London. Methuen. 1910.

Murihiku. (A study of New Zealand history.) By the Hon. R. M'Nab. New Zealand. 1907. (A most interesting, accurate, and comprehensive work.)

Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, &c., in Company with the Rev. Samuel Marsden. By John Liddiard Nicholas. 2 Vols. London. 1817.

New Zealand: being a Narrative of Travels and Adventures, &c. By J.S. Pollack. 2 Vols. London. Richard Bentley. 1838. (Gives interesting information regarding the whale fishery round about New Zealand.)

Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. "Fly". By J.B. Jukes. 2 Vols. London. 1847. (Treats of the exploration of the coasts of Torres Straits, South New Guinea, and Malaysia.)

Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. "Rattlesnake". By John Macgillivray. 2 Vols. London. 1852. (This deals with the exploration of South-east New Guinea, &c. Professor Huxley accompanied this expedition as surgeon, and contributed illustrations to the book.)

The Malay Archipelago, &c. By Alfred Russel Wallace. 2 Vols. London. Macmillan. 1869.

A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago. By H.O. Forbes. London. 1885.

Life of Sir James Brooke. By Sir Spencer St. John. London. 1879.

PIONEERS
IN AUSTRALASIA

[CHAPTER I]

The General Features of Australasia

In previous books of this series dealing with the achievements and adventures of the pioneers whose journeys led to the foundation of the British Empire beyond the seas, I have described the revelation of West Africa, the exploration of British North America, and the experiences of those who laid the foundations of our knowledge concerning India and Further India. The scope of this last volume brought us to Sumatra, Singapore, and Java: that is to say the western part of Malaysia. I now propose to set before my readers the more remarkable among the voyages and strange happenings which led to the discovery of Australasia, and to the inclusion within the British Empire of northern Borneo, south-eastern New Guinea, the continent of Australia, the large islands of New Zealand, and a good many islands and archipelagoes in the Pacific Ocean. The most convenient general term for this region of innumerable islands, large and small, is "Australasia", since it lies mostly in the southern hemisphere and yet is more nearly connected by affinity or proximity with Asia rather than any other continent.

Yet this title is not strictly correct, for Borneo, like Sumatra and Java, is really part of Asia so far as its geological and human history, animals, and plants are concerned; whereas the Malay islands farthest to the east—such as Timor, the Moluccas, and Jilolo—more correctly belong to a distinct region of the world, of which New Guinea and Australia are the headquarters, and New Zealand, Easter Island, the Marquezas Islands, and Hawaii the farthest outlying portions. But in regard to the landing of Europeans and the order of its exploration, Borneo, like the Philippines, forms part of that "Australasia" which was first reached (1521) from the direction of the Pacific Ocean.

Australasia (it is necessary, if wearisome, to repeat) consists of islands, great, small, and very small; Australia being so large an island that it ranks as the fifth and smallest of the continents. The insular character of Australasia has caused most of the great adventures connected with its discovery and colonization to be extraordinary feats of ocean rather than of land travel. But when we consider the size of the sailing ships, or of the mere junks, boats, or canoes in which some of the journeys were made, and the fact that the home of the explorers was not two, three, or four thousand miles away across the sea (as in the discovery of America and the West African coast), but more than treble that distance; that these hardy adventurers had to reach the unknown islands of the Pacific either round the stormy Cape of Good Hope or the still more stormy Cape Horn in ships on which we might hesitate to embark in order to cross the Bay of Biscay or the Irish Channel: the achievements of the Australasian pioneers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries become almost unbelievable in their heroism and power of endurance. The Victoria of Magellan's fleet which sailed from Spain to the Pacific and back across the Atlantic and Indian oceans was of 85 tons capacity! Matthew Flinders in 1803 crossed the Indian Ocean from North Australia to Mauritius in a schooner of 29 tons! Sir James Brooke sailed in 1883 from the mouth of the Thames to conquer North Borneo from the pirates in a sailing yacht of 148 tons.

Think of the courage that must have been required by a Magellan, a de Quiros, or even a Captain Cook, when they steered into the Unknown from the coast of South America across the broad waters of the Pacific! They had only a limited stock of fresh water: how long would it be before an island or a continent was encountered whereon they could land to replenish their supplies from some spring near the seashore or some stream falling from the hills? They had very little in the way of fresh provisions: when these were exhausted might not their mariners develop that dread disease scurvy,[1] and rot into madness or death? or before arriving at such an extremity mutiny and murder their officers? Food of any kind might become exhausted before fresh supplies could be obtained; and we know from many instances how ready the ship's crew of famished, uneducated sailors was, first to talk of cannibalism, and at last to lay violent hands on an officer or a comrade, kill him, and eat him. Or the undiscovered lands which would be their only resource against a death from starvation, disease, or thirst might be populated by ferocious man-eating savages (as indeed many of them were) and the landing parties of seamen and officers be promptly massacred. Or it might be a desert island, and the pleasing-looking herbs or fruits be deadly poison, or the strange fish, mussels, oysters, clams, whelks, or turtles prove to be so unwholesome that all who ate of this new fare were prostrated with illness. The gallant little sailing ship—little in our eyes whether its capacity were of 30 or even 400 tons—might be charged by a bull cachalot whale as big as an islet, and then and there spring a leak and founder with all on board. There might well be—and there were—treacherous coral reefs just masked by two or three feet of water on which the vessel would be driven at night-time and break her back. The crew would take to their frail boats and then have a thousand or more sea miles to cross, with oar and ineffective sail, before they could find a landing place and sustenance. Perhaps on the way thither (the giant, greedy sharks following in their wake) they died of sunstroke or thirst, or went mad and jumped into the sea and the shark's maw. Or they did reach some South Sea island—not to be discovered again for a century or two—where they were received as demigods by the astonished savages, but where they had to pass the rest of their lives as savages too; consoling themselves as best they could with a Polynesian wife or husband (for there were women sometimes in these ventures, especially on the Spanish vessels) and the growing up of a half-caste family; but never heard of again in their far-away homes, and ever and anon weeping and crying in vain to Heaven to be restored once more to the fair cities and romantic life of Spain or Portugal, or to the comfort and the orderly beauty of a Norman or an English homestead.

After sailing, sailing, sailing across the equatorial belt of the Pacific Ocean they at length reached—if no disaster arrested their progress—the limits of the known: they came to some part of Malaysia where the natives were no longer naked, black, unreasoning cannibals, or crafty, yellow, naked thieves; some seaport in the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, or Java where they met men of the Muhammadan religion, or even other European Christians who had reached Australasia round the Cape of Good Hope. But the Muhammadans might out of jealousy or of revenge for wrongs they had suffered from other Christians cause them to be imprisoned or murdered, while more often than not the fellow Christians they were greeting after a twelve-thousand miles' voyage half round the world belonged to some nation in rivalry or at war with their own. Then they might be held long years in captivity, or be executed (with or without torture) outright. (Matthew Flinders was imprisoned in Mauritius for six and a half years by the French not much more than a hundred years ago.) At any rate they would probably be refused those sea stores and materials necessary for repairing a crazy ship, and have to face the return voyage across the Indian Ocean, round the stormy extremity of Africa, and through the violent gales of the northern Atlantic with but a slender hope of reaching home, or even of surviving the perils of the sea, in a leaky, worm-eaten ship with splintered masts and rotten sails.

This fifth division of the earth's surface which they had come to explore consisted of an almost uncountable number of islands ranging in size from Australia, with an area of 2,946,691 square miles, New Guinea, which has about 312,330, and Borneo, with another 290,000, to tiny islets like the Fanning atoll, 9 miles by 4, or little Pitcairn, 2 miles square, on which the mutineers of the Bounty long hid themselves. The larger islands nearer to Asia were for the most part fragments of a former extension of the Asiatic or Australian continents; even New Zealand (104,000 square miles) must once have formed part of a huge strip of continental land stretching southwards from New Guinea and north-east Australia. But most of the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia (as distinct from Melanesia[2]), though they may have been larger than they are now and have risen out of comparatively shallow seas, were nevertheless always oceanic, that is to say, never connected with any great continent in recent ages.

These small islands are divided into two classes: the mountainous or volcanic and the coral or flat islands, also called "atolls", from a word in a South Indian language. Atolls, or coral islands, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are made by the coral animals (a polyp or minute jellyfish-like creature living in communities like the cells of a human body), building upwards towards the surface of the sea the lime structures in which they exist. They start, of course, from some reef or submerged volcanic cone which is not far below the surface of the water. The limestone rock which they make out of secretions from the sea water gradually forms an irregular circle of narrow islets, with a lagoon in the centre and one or more deep openings to the sea. Vegetation—always coconuts—slowly covers these coral islands, and at last they become habitable by man. If the land beneath them is rising above the waves, the coral fossilizes into coralline rock and the living coral animals go on building and extending farther out to sea. If the land is sinking faster than the coral animal can build, then by degrees the once pleasant islets become a jumble of barren and crumbling rocks, only haunted by sea birds (but sometimes valuable for their guano), and finally a dangerous reef or shoal.

Of the smaller Pacific islands that are not mere coral reefs and atolls the Hawaii group, the Marquezas, Tahiti, Easter Island, Pitcairn, the Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji groups, the New Hebrides, most of the Ladrones, and one or two of the Caroline Islands are volcanic, high, and of recent formation, even though like the New Hebrides and the Marquezas they may rest on submerged extensions of sunken lands. The Solomon Islands are also mainly volcanic, but with the Bismarck archipelago practically form an extension of New Guinea; while New Caledonia is a very old fragment of unsubmerged land, and so is tiny Norfolk Island between New Caledonia and New Zealand. The southern island of New Zealand is, like New Caledonia, a portion of an ancient continent which has never been submerged; and the north island of that dominion is a very volcanic region.

The volcanic islands of the Pacific are always of more importance than the coral, partly because they are larger, but still more on account of their singularly fertile soil, high peaks, good rainfall, and picturesque scenery. They are, in fact, the "summer isles of Eden, set in dark purple spheres of sea", of Tennyson's poem. The climate is almost invariably healthy, the temperature a perpetual summer, with a never-absent invigorating sea breeze. The only grim reminder that there is another side to Nature lies in the occasional hurricane which drives great ships on to the coral or the basalt rocks, which lays low many a dwelling and plantation, or the earthquake followed by the still more alarming tidal wave. In Hawaii there is one of the largest active volcanoes in the world, into the seething crater of which victims used to be thrown as sacrifices to the god of fire. In the New Hebrides and Santa Cruz Islands there are other volcanoes, also active and occasionally emitting great streams of molten lava. This is, or was, also the case in the little islands—mere volcanic peaks rising above the waves—that form a broken chain round the north coast of New Guinea. Here were the "burning islets" so often noted in Tasman's and Dampier's voyages. Weird was the sight of them at night—a great cone standing out of the blue-black darkness, vomiting red fiery gas and red-hot ashes, columns of dense smoke turned gold and orange by the incandescent lava bubbling up and boiling over the crater's lips, and streaming in blazing cascades down the mountain's sides. The thundering discharges of gas, the crackling of electricity, added to the terror of the scene; and yet one can realize that after a time and the passing of many such small active volcanoes the Dutch, Spanish, and English sailors became used to them, and even found the presence of a burning mountain in the dark tropic night a cheering beacon in the pathless seas.

Borneo, Celebes, Buru, Jilolo, and the Spice Islands, Timor, Ceram, the eastern Sunda Islands were, of course, with Java and Sumatra on the west, New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago on the east, and the Philippines on the north, continental islands; that is to say, fragments of the former prolongation of Asia towards Australia: old lands, large or small portions of which have always risen above the very shallow sea which now separates them from one another. Yet Malaysia, like Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, is very volcanic. Of all its islands Borneo is the least so at the present day, in fact there is no active or recently active volcano in that huge island; whereas the Philippines are occasionally racked with earthquakes and have twelve active volcanoes. Java has a long range of lofty craters—some hundred and twenty-five in all, of which at least thirteen are active. The Lesser Sunda Islands, east of Java, likewise contain many volcanoes: Lombok and Sumbawa are little more than exceedingly large groups of craters, and when the Sumbawa volcano (of which something like 6 cubic miles was blown away) erupted in 1815, its red-hot lava and ashes killed forty thousand of the inhabitants on its slopes. There are volcanoes in Celebes, the Moluccas, Jilolo, and some of the islands off the west end of New Guinea. Timor only shows traces of past volcanic activity. In consequence of its being the most volcanic region in the world, Malaysia is very subject to earthquakes; and these disturbances of the earth's surface not only cause devastating tidal waves on the seacoasts, but in some way affect the atmosphere, provoking fearful cyclones of wind, followed by torrential rain. Similar disturbances of the atmosphere, however, occur frequently before or after the rainy season. Borneo is frightfully hot—perhaps hotter all the year round than any other country—but it is less afflicted with devastating winds. Nearly all Malaysia has a tremendous rainfall, though one or two islands, such as Flores and parts of Timor, have a rather drier climate, more suggestive of northern Australia. As a rule, however, Malaysia, in consequence of its perpetual summer under an equatorial sun, its rich alluvial soil—often of that peculiar richness associated with volcanic materials—and its plentiful rainfall, is clothed with a primeval forest which for luxuriance can scarcely be matched in West Africa or Brazil. These lands have been styled "the gardens of the sun"; "enormous forcing houses crammed with vegetation"; "great zoological gardens, full of rare and curious beasts". Here may be seen many species of palms: the gloriously beautiful Cyrtostachys palm of Java, with vividly red sheaths to the fronds and flower stalks, and bright yellow inflorescence changing to scarlet fruit; the creeping, climbing palms (the "rattan" or Calamus); stately Areca palms (which produce the betel nut, and the smaller species the "cabbage", so often described by travellers in Australia and the Pacific islands); useful Sago palms (Metroxylon); the sugar-yielding Arenga; the toddy or "rum" palm (Caryota); the Nipa, used for thatching; and, of course, the Coconut. As one travels eastward into the Pacific, this variety of palms thins out until at last only the Coconut remains on the coral islands.

Of the other far-famed trees of the Malaysian forest there is the tall Duriān, with its evil-smelling, delicious-tasting fruit; there are stately, evergreen oaks, chestnuts, and mulberries; many kinds of fig trees—some growing like the Indian Banyan, with dependent roots that reach down from the far-spreading branches and form a grove of trees in time; others that live like grey, snaky parasites writhing about the trunks of victim trees, which in time they strangle; there are giant laurels, cinnamon laurels, huge myrtles, clove myrtles with their intensely aromatic flowerbuds, caoutchouc trees producing indiarubber, nutmeg trees, with their fragrant spice which so early drew traders to the most eastern part of the Malay Archipelago; and there are trees of sweet-smelling wood like the sandalwood and the Aquilaria or eaglewood, others like the damar-attam (Hopea), which produce a valuable glass-like resin; there are two or more kinds of big-leaved Bread-fruit trees (Artocarpus), yielding their farinaceous, fig-like pods; and Artocarpi of a creeping habit whose branches are covered with small fig-like fruits remarkable for their gorgeous coloration—scarlet spotted with white, scarlet and purple, white and orange. Bamboos, often of huge girth, grow everywhere; orchids of incredible loveliness in colour and strangeness of form fringe the great boughs of the forest trees, which also afford harbourage to parasitic aroids of fantastic appearance; the glades are full of pitcher plants, ground orchids, brilliantly-coloured Cannas, "Grains-of-Paradise", calladiums with painted leaves, and wild bananas, with their beautiful, glossy, emerald-green fronds, or in some species with vividly coloured flower spikes. The marshy places are thickly grown with rushes resembling the papyrus of Africa; the shores of estuaries and low-lying coasts are the domain of tall mangroves and of the pandanus or screw pine—a semi-aquatic tree of the tropical parts of the Old World, which, with many aerial roots, and long, pointed, sword-like leaves, is distantly akin to the palms, and in Australasia produces fruit which is much eaten by the natives, especially in the Pacific Islands. These dense jungles of mangrove, pandanus, and other trees growing in the mud and brackish water—the habitat of mud-hopping fish, and numbers of large, brightly-coloured shore crabs, some so blue and so white and glossy that they are called "porcelain" crabs—were often a great barrier to the early explorers on the coasts of Borneo, Celebes, and Timor, besides being a prime hiding place for the praus of the Malay pirates. In the dense forests the lianas and climbing plants are a remarkable feature in the pictures of triumphant vegetation—pictures of which my untravelled readers can gain some faint idea by ascending the winding staircase in the great Palm House at Kew Gardens and looking down on the complex assemblage of tropical trees and plants. In these Malaysian woods there are many species of wild vines, with small brightly-coloured grapes; there are exquisite wreaths of the climbing asparagus—Smilax; festoons of climbing ferns, of the various kinds of pepper that hang their clusters of aromatic seeds from tree to tree, of the ipomœas (convolvuluses), passion flowers, bignonias, jasmines, purple and scarlet loranthus (a kind of mistletoe), and many climbing peas and beans, remarkable for their delicate or brightly-coloured flowers, which often exhale a delicious scent. In the higher parts of Java, Borneo, the Philippines, and even of New Guinea there are jungles of rhododendrons with vivid crimson blossoms. It is, however, a common mistake to suppose that the entire surface of the Malay islands is covered with primeval forest. Considerable spaces have been cleared for cultivation, or after such clearing have relapsed into jungle; and this jungle is either a second growth of poor and scattered trees or more often a coarse and luxuriant grass. In the hilly interior of Dutch Borneo there are dry moors, deep in sand and sparsely covered with scrub. On the high plateaus and the mountain ranges of Flores and Timor considerable areas are open, treeless spaces, but covered instead with low-growing herbs, offering to the eye spectacles of brilliant colour when they blossom during the rainy season.

The splendid vegetation of Malaysia extends throughout New Guinea and the adjacent archipelagos, but with a diminution of species eastwards and a gradual infiltration of Australian forms, such as the Eucalyptus (a relation of the Myrtle family), the Casuarinas,[3] and the Araucaria conifers. More and more attenuated, the Malaysian flora spreads out over the tropical Pacific islands, wearing itself out finally in Hawaii, to which the sandalwood and a few other Malayan trees extend; and Pitcairn Island, where, however, the few Malayan species may have been anciently introduced by man.

The larger and more western islands of the Malay Archipelago have a fauna of beasts, birds, and reptiles, fish and insects, spiders and land crabs as remarkable as the wealth of their flora, and next to Africa the richest in the world. Here may still be seen—in Borneo—the wild Indian elephant and a two-horned rhinoceros; in Java there is a tiger and a small form of one-horned Indian rhinoceros. In Borneo exists the large red-haired ape called Orang-utan; in Java there are smaller anthropoid apes known as Gibbons. Java and Borneo both have a handsome wild ox, the Banteng, besides more or less wild long-horned Indian buffaloes. The smallest and most remarkable of all the buffaloes is the Anoa, found only on the island of Celebes, and a larger but similar short-horned buffalo is found in the Philippines. Nearly all the islands have wild swine—generally of a type near to the wild boar, but with a very long head—the parent form of the domestic pig of Polynesia. But the queer island of Celebes, and Buru, which lies to the east, possess the strangest pig in the world: the Babirusa, a type with—for pigs—a small and slender head and (in the male) tusks which grow up and out through the cheeks. In Borneo there is a large monkey with an immense drooping nose; in Celebes a creature called the Black Ape—an intermediate form between baboons, macaques, and the higher apes. The macaque monkeys—creatures with short tails and bare faces, rather like small baboons (the Gibraltar monkey is a macaque)—are very common throughout Malaysia, extending as near to New Guinea and Australia as the islands of Buru and Timor. The other monkeys belong to the Semnopithecus genus, the long-tailed sacred monkeys of India. One of these found in Borneo is a combination in colouring of black, white, and chestnut red. The more northern and western of the Malay Islands possess a few strange lemurs, a large flying creature, the colugo, allied to lemurs and bats, and the Tupaias or squirrel-tailed Insectivores. Deer, without any white spots and related to the Sambar type of India, are found in the Philippines, Borneo, Java, the eastern Sunda Islands as far as Timor, Celebes, and the Moluccas; and in the Philippines there are spotted deer like the hog deer of India. Carnivorous mammals are represented more especially by a small tiger and a leopard in Java, the Clouded tiger of Borneo (a kind of leopard), several small cats, numerous civets, a small bear, and wild dogs. Cats and civets extend their range to Timor and the Philippines, and a civet—probably brought by the Malays—is found in Celebes. The fruit-eating bats or flying foxes are very large, often attaining to 5 feet across the wings. Their range extends eastwards beyond the Solomon Islands to north-east Australia and the New Hebrides. Nearly all the Pacific islands, including New Zealand and Hawaii, have bats of their own, but they are insect-eating, and very often day-flying. In the eastern islands of Malaysia begin to appear the marsupials of Australia, but until New Guinea is reached there is only one type to be seen, the Cuscus—a kind of phalanger akin to the "Opossum" of Australia.[4] There are porcupines, squirrels, and many strange rodents of the Rat family in western Malaysia. Peculiar genera and species of rats penetrate not only to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, but also to Australia. The native rats of New Zealand and the Polynesian islands, however, have been introduced by man, chiefly for food.

The wealth in birds in Malaysia makes the naturalist's and artist's mouth water! There are no vultures, but several types of eagle—amongst them, in the Philippine Islands, a very large monkey-eating eagle with a huge, narrow beak—and some very handsomely coloured kites and hawks. Amongst the parrots are the gorgeous crimson Eclectus, the lovely Lories, and those "white parrots"—Cockatoos—which furnished so much amazement and delight to the early Italian voyagers. But the strangest looking of all the parrots are the black cockatoos, peculiar to New Guinea. The peacock reaches to Java but not to Borneo, but in Borneo and Palawan there are superb pheasants and peacock-pheasants, and most of the Malaysian islands possess wild jungle fowl. Peculiar to Malaysia and Australia are the Megapodes, a family of gallinaceous birds allied to the Curassows of America, and which hatch their eggs by depositing them in mounds of decaying vegetation. There are very large cuckoos, the size of big pheasants; but perhaps the most remarkable bird groups in their Malaysian developments are the Hornbills and the Pigeons. The Fruit Pigeons of this region transcend description in their exquisite tints of peach colour, green of several shades, crimson, purple, and maize yellow. One kind is jet-black and pale-cream colour. These fruit-eating pigeons extend their range into New Guinea, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. In New Guinea there is the celebrated Victoria Crowned Pigeon, largest living of all the tribe; and in the Samoa Islands, without any near relation, the Didunculus, or Little Dodo—a ground-frequenting bird (which has since taken to the trees) that shows us how the large Dodo of Mauritius developed from the ordinary fruit-pigeon type. The Kingfishers of Malaysia are also very wonderful, and reach their climax of development in the New Guinea region. Some species are remarkable for their long storklike beaks, their long racquet tails, and superb plumage of ultramarine blue, purple, and white.

But the crown of glory which rests on eastern Malaysia and New Guinea in regard to bird life has been bestowed on this region because of the presence here—and here only together with the north extremity of Australia—of the Paradise Birds. These marvels of creation, which are fast becoming exterminated by the agents of the wicked plumage trade, and without any opposition from the Dutch, German, or British Australian Governments of these countries, first make their appearance to a traveller coming from the west when he reaches the island of Jilolo or the Aru Islands, neither of which groups is very far from New Guinea. The Paradise Birds do not extend their range to the Bismarck Archipelago. East of the Solomon Islands there are fewer and fewer species of birds. Two Lories and three or four Parrakeets are found in Fiji, a beautiful blue and white lory inhabits Tahiti, together with a species of parrakeet. An ultramarine-blue and purple lory is found in the remote Marquezas archipelago, the farthest prolongation eastwards of the Malayan fauna. The other land birds of the Polynesian islands are pigeons, thrushes, flower-peckers, starlings, shrikes, babblers, a screech-owl, one or two plovers and rails, a sea-eagle, and two or three species of ducks. This seems to represent the totality of the resident birds of the Pacific islands east of Fiji and the New Hebrides. The birds of the Hawaii archipelago are very peculiar and have come thither chiefly from America. They include a peculiar family of starling-like birds—the Drepanidæ—celebrated for the beauty of their plumage which, in fact, has led to the extinction of several species.

The reptile life of Malaysia comprises many strange and remarkable forms, but, like the beasts, birds, and freshwater fish, it thins out in variety of species as the traveller crosses the boundary line between the Malay islands of Asiatic affinities and those belonging more to the Australian region; while, of course, in Polynesia reptiles are very few, or absent altogether. One or two species of harmless snakes are found as far eastwards as Fiji and Samoa. No land reptile of any kind exists in Tahiti or in Hawaii. Perhaps the biggest Crocodile in the world[5] (Crocodilus porosus) is found in all the great Malay Islands, and its range extends through New Guinea to the Solomon archipelago and Fiji, and to the extreme north coast of Australia. A much smaller—barely 7 feet long—crocodile with a long, narrow muzzle is found in northern and north-eastern Australia, and is quite harmless. Borneo has a peculiar gavial (fish-eating crocodile) with a very narrow snout. Large Pythons—perhaps the biggest known to science—extend over the same Austro-Malayan region, but do not reach lands to the east of New Guinea and Australia. Their place in the Melanesian islands of the Pacific is taken by small Boa snakes of a harmless nature. A prominent reptile in the life of the aborigines in Austro-Malaysia is the Monitor lizard, nearly always miscalled by Europeans "Iguana". This Monitor is the largest of the lizards, with a long, flexible tail, and sometimes as much as 8 feet in length in its Melanesian types, and is not infrequently mistaken for a crocodile by Europeans. It has very sharp teeth and can give a severe but not a very dangerous bite, its most powerful weapon being its whip-like tail. It is often eaten by the natives, and in its turn devours their fowls. Curiously enough, there is a real iguana in the Fiji Islands—one of the puzzles of animal distribution, for the Iguana family of vegetable-eating lizards is otherwise confined to Tropical America and Madagaskar. The seas of Malaysia and of Polynesia (as far south as the New Zealand coasts) swarm at times with different types of real sea-serpents, that is to say, snakes that live entirely in the water and resort only to the shore to give birth to their young, which are born alive. These sea-snakes are of the Cobra family and are very poisonous. They are sometimes brightly coloured and marked in bold patterns.

The MALAY ARCHIPELAGO
Scale, 1:22,500,00

Very different in climate, flora, and fauna to Malaysia and Polynesia are the great southern lands of Australia and New Zealand, together with New Caledonia and Norfolk Island. The northern, eastern, and south-western coast regions of Australia have a fairly abundant rainfall—quite as much as that which prevails in the more southerly of the Malay islands. But the centre, south, west, and north-west of Australia is much of it an almost hopeless desert, though not such a complete sandy desert as may be seen in Mongolia and northern Africa. The vegetation of this dry region of Australia consists mainly of a close-growing, spiny-seeded grass—the celebrated Spinifex. There are also gouty-looking Baobab trees like those of Tropical Africa. In New Guinea, where the rich flora contains not a few Australian elements, there are mountains rising considerably above the line of perpetual snow[6] both in the south-east and west, and many of the volcanoes, active and extinct, of Malaysia attain altitudes of over ten and eleven thousand feet. There are mountains nearly as lofty in the Solomon Islands, while in New Zealand we have the superb Southern Alps (12,349 feet at their highest), which give a magnificent display of snow peaks and glaciers. But much of Australia is flat and undulating, and the highest mountain in that continent is only 7328 feet. Another thing which marks off Australia from the rest of Australasia is the complete absence of active volcanoes. But this is only quite a recent fact in its history, for at periods scarcely more distant than fifty thousand or sixty thousand years ago there were still volcanoes in the eastern part of the island continent vomiting out boiling lava and red-hot ashes, even after the land was inhabited by man. Still, as compared with Malaysia, Polynesia, and northern New Zealand, Australia is a very stable region, not persecuted by earthquakes or the present results of volcanic activity.

Its flora, like its fauna, is so peculiar that it constitutes one of the most distinct and separate regions of the world. There are a few patches of forest in the far north-east which are almost Malayan in their richness, and which contain quite a number of Malay types; and in the extreme south-west the Araucaria pine forests attain a certain luxuriance of growth. The predominant tree throughout Australia is the Eucalyptus, a peculiar development of the Myrtle order (anciently inhabiting Europe), which extends into New Guinea but not into New Caledonia or New Zealand. The Eucalyptus genus in Australia develops something like one hundred and fifty species, some of these trees 200 feet high, like the splendid Jarra timber, others—the Mallee scrub—making low thickets of 12 to 14 feet above the ground. The Australian "pines", important in the timber trade, belong to the genus Frenela, (which is akin to the African Callitris), to the cypresses, the yews, junipers, and to the genus Araucaria, the "Monkey Puzzle" type of conifer. These Araucarias are also met with in Norfolk Island, New Caledonia, and on the mountains of New Guinea. They furnish the Norfolk Island pine, 200 feet high and 30 feet in girth; but the equally celebrated Kauri "pine" of New Zealand belongs to the quite different genus Agathis. The "She-oaks", "swamp-oaks", "beef-wood", "iron-wood" trees one reads about in the literature of Australia, are all species of Casuarina trees. (The Casuarinas form a separate sub-class of flowering plants. See note on p. 27.) There are no real oaks in Australia, but there is a kind of beech tree in the south. A type of tree most characteristic of Australia is the Acacia in various forms, but not looking at all like the Acacia of Africa and India with its pinnate leaves. The three hundred kinds of Australian acacias mostly develop a foliage which consists of long, undivided leaves. They are famous for the beauty and odour of their yellow blossoms, and under the incorrect name of "Mimosa" are now widely grown all over the world where the climate is sufficiently mild, just as the Eucalyptus globulus or Blue Gum tree of Australia has been spread by cultivation far and wide through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. But Australia has comparatively few palms,[7] and those chiefly in the north-east, and no bread-fruit tree (except where introduced). Conspicuous objects in the landscape are the "Grass trees" (Xanthorrhœa and Kingia)—plants allied to lilies and rushes. The Grass tree has a great bunch of wiry-looking leaves at its base, out of which rises a straight smooth stem like a long walking-stick. This is surmounted by a spike of white flowers. The Doryanthis lily grows to a height of 15 feet from the ground. Another conspicuous object in the "bush" is the splendid Flame tree, with bunches of crimson flowers (Brachychiton, a genus of the Sterculiaceæ, distant relations of the Baobab and the Mallows). A common sight in the well-watered regions is the Australian "tulip" (nearly everything in Australia is mis-named)—the great red Waratah flower, really a kind of Protea. To this same order (Proteaceæ), which is so well represented in Australia and South Africa, belong the beautiful-foliaged Grevillea trees and the celebrated Banksia, a shrub named after Sir Joseph Banks, and found in Australia and New Guinea. In the marshes and creeks of Queensland there are superb water lilies with leaves 18 inches in diameter. The gouty Baobab trees of the desert have been already mentioned.

Beautiful scenery is only to be met with in Australia in the mountain ranges of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, and in the vicinity of Perth (south-west Australia). Here there are glades with superb tree-ferns, but the mountain peaks above the tree zone are bare and desolate. A large proportion of the interior is a dismal flat of scrub and stones, its monotony only broken by 6- to 20-feet-high mounds of the Termites or white ants. A good deal of the north coast is obstructed by forests of mangroves—a dismal-looking tree with its dull-green, leathery foliage, grey-white stems and pendent air-roots.

An interesting feature, however, in Australian scenery is the Great Barrier Reef. This is the remains of a former north-eastward extension of Australia—an immense coral reef stretching out for several hundred miles from the coast of Queensland in the direction of New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. This reef of visible and sunken rocks acted as a great barrier in the past, and prevented timid navigators from finding the north-east coast of Australia and establishing its separation from New Guinea. But the reef is of importance to commerce, for it maintains enormous quantities of the Trepang or Sea-slug, a creature which makes delicious soup and is passionately liked by the Chinese. [It is not really a slug but a relation of the star-fish, and is called scientifically a Holothurian.] The Great Barrier Reef is famous for the variety and almost incredible beauty of its corals and of the painted and decorated fish, anemones, and crabs of these shallow waters. It is, in fact, a region of such wonderful and strange beauty that one can only hope it will some day be made a kind of national aquarium by the Commonwealth of Australia, and constantly visited by those who like to gaze on the marvellous animals of a tropical coral sea.

The rocky coasts of Australia and Tasmania (besides those of the Philippines and the Pacific Islands) are remarkable for their abundant supplies of oysters, clams, whelks, and other shell-fish, which for ages have been a great food supply to savage man,[8] who had in fact merely to take at low tide what nature offered to him, at very little trouble to himself. Some of the clams (Tridacna) are enormous, measuring 3 feet and even 5 feet across the upper shell.

The crocodiles, pythons, and monitor lizards of Australia have been already alluded to in the description of Austro-Malaysia. There should, however, be mentioned in addition the long-necked tortoises of the continent and the turtles of the seacoasts. Australia once produced immense horned and armoured tortoises, but they became extinct soon after man entered this remote land. There are no vipers or rattlesnakes in Australia; all the poisonous snakes (and there are many) belong to the Cobra family. The most singular in appearance of the living land reptiles is a very large Agama lizard (the Chlamydosaurus), which is as much as 3 feet long, runs or hops on its hind limbs, and when angry erects a huge frill of leathery skin round the chest and shoulders. Another equally strange form of the Agama family is the Moloch lizard, about 1 foot long, with a very small mouth, but protected by the covering of its skin—a mass of sharp spines, thorns, and knobs. Its skin is not only very rough, but very absorbent, so that it will suck up water like blotting paper.

The beasts and birds of Australia are, in most cases, peculiar to that continent. The former belong almost entirely to the marsupial sub-class, that is to say, they consist of creatures like the Kangaru, Phalanger, and Thylacine (besides the Opossums of America), which, after the young is born, place it in a pouch on the outside of the mother's stomach, where it is kept until it is able to forage for itself. In many respects these marsupials evince a low organization, and really resemble, in their jaws and teeth, primitive mammals of ancient times discovered in fossil in Great Britain and North America. New Guinea also possesses some of these marsupial types, derived probably from Australia. The most widespread of these is the Spotted Cuscus, a phalanger with a woolly coat, the male of which has large black or brown spots on a cream-coloured ground, while the female is uniform brown. This animal ranges through the easternmost Malay islands from Celebes to New Guinea and north Australia, while another species, the Grey Cuscus, is found as far east as the Bismarck Archipelago and the northern Solomon islands. These outlying groups of islands to the east of New Guinea also possess a flying Phalanger, but otherwise no marsupials penetrate into the Pacific islands beyond New Guinea and Australia. For the rest, New Guinea has Short-legged Kangarus (Dorcopsis), Tree Kangaroos (Dendrolagus), Striped Phalangers, Dormice Phalangers, Flying Phalangers, Feather-tailed Phalangers, Ring-tailed Phalangers, a species of white-spotted Dasyure ("Marsupial Cat"), and several forms of insectivorous marsupials ("Bandicoots" of the genera Phascologale and Perameles). But the true Kangarus—especially the big species—the Banded Ant-eater, the Wombats (which look like huge rabbits), the Koala or Tailless Phalanger (the "native bear"), the striped marsupial wolf or Thylacine, the Tasmanian Devil, the Marsupial Mole, most of the Dasyures and Bandicoots, are confined in their distribution to Australia and Tasmania, Tasmania being the richest part of Australia in marsupial types.

But this region, in common with New Guinea, possesses mammals still more primitive and interesting than the marsupials—the egg-laying sub-class, which contains the two existing forms of Echidna (Porcupine Ant-eater) and Duckbill. The Duckbill, a furry creature the size of a large cat, with the jaws converted into a leathery beak, is only found in the south-east of Australia and in Tasmania. The Echidna and Duckbill do not produce their young alive, but lay eggs from which the young are hatched. Apart from these marsupials and egg-laying mammals, Australia possesses only a few species of the higher mammals: a wild dog, a number of rats—aquatic and terrestrial—and bats; besides, of course, seals on the coasts and rivers, and the strange Dugong.[9] The bats are both of the insect-eating and fruit-eating kinds, and have probably flown over in recent times from New Guinea. From the same direction likewise have travelled the Australian rats, some of which have taken to a water life. As to the Dingo or Wild Dog, that may have been introduced by the early human inhabitants who came to Australia from Malaysia, but it has inhabited Australia for a very long period, though it did not reach Tasmania. It is related to a wild dog of Java. There is said to be a wild dingo in New Guinea.

Australian birds are very noteworthy. In the extreme north there is the Cassowary, which elsewhere is only found in New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Island of Ceram. Nearly the whole of Australia, however, was at one time frequented by the Emu, a large, flightless bird only second in size to the Ostrich. The Emu once extended its range to Tasmania as well as to Kangaroo Island, off the south coast of the continent. The Parrot order is more abundantly represented in Australia than anywhere else. In New Zealand and the tiny Norfolk Island there are species of a remarkable type of Parrot—the Nestor—which has a very long beak, not deep, like that of other parrots. The family of brush-tongued Lories is represented in the island continent by many beautiful forms. Here also developed originally the Cockatoos, which have since spread to New Guinea and the eastern Malay islands. The True Parrots and Parrakeets are well represented in New Guinea and Australia, and assume in some cases the most lovely and delicate coloration.

THE BIGGEST OF THE KANGAROOS
(From a specimen sent from Australia to the New York Zoological Park)

Amongst other noteworthy Australian birds is the Lyre Bird, in two or three species. This is a distant connection of thrushes and warblers, the size of a pheasant, and with very pheasantlike habits. Although the colour of its body is simply brown of various tints, the male bird has a most remarkable tail, the larger feathers of which exactly reproduce the form of a lyre. This creature is one of the minor wonders of the world, and it is therefore surprising that the great Commonwealth of Australia should take no measures to prevent its extermination at the hands of thoughtless and ignorant settlers, for, unlike the cockatoos, it does no damage to crops.

Australia also possesses the Black Swan, and it has a strange-looking, long-legged Goose, which has scarcely any web between its toes. There are numerous Eagles and Hawks, but there is no Vulture. There is also no True Crow, but there are Choughs and many crow-like developments of the Shrike, Oriole, and Starling groups, and in the extreme north of Australia, besides one or two Birds of Paradise, there are the singular Bower Birds (really belonging to the same family), who build little palaces and ornamental gardens of sticks, shells, feathers, pebbles, and other bright and attractive objects, as places in which they can go through their courtship ceremonies. The mound-building Megapodes or Brush Turkeys (which do not hatch their eggs by sitting on them, but bury the egg in a mound of decaying vegetation) also inhabit eastern and northern Australia, and are the only representatives there of the gallinaceous order. Amongst Kingfishers is the celebrated Laughing Jackass, which lives not on fish but on insects and carrion. Australia has no Woodpeckers, no Hornbills, no Cuckoos, and no True Pheasants, and a good many other bird families are remarkable for their absence from this region.

The scenery of New Zealand, in contrast to that of Australia, is nearly everywhere beautiful—as nature made it—though the modern settlers have robbed the island of much of its loveliness by cutting down the forests recklessly, destroying the ferns, and shooting the song birds. In the North Island of New Zealand are the most remarkable examples of volcanic activity, and this region has, or had—for they sometimes disappear in earthquake convulsions—beautiful crater lakes of deep blue or emerald green and terraces of congealed lava or pumicestone that assume lovely tints of pink, pale yellow, green or bluish grey.

The trees and plants of New Zealand have a character quite as peculiar and distinct as those of Australia. Amongst them grow beech trees similar to those of South Australia, and allied to the beeches of South America. There are only two species of a single genus of palm (Rhopalostylis), but there are many conifers allied to those of New Guinea and South America rather than to the conifers of Australia. The Kauri "pine" (Agathis) has been already mentioned. None of the conifers of Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and New Caledonia are "pines", "cedars", or "firs". The members of the pine family are entirely restricted to the Northern Hemisphere. The magnificent "pines" of New Caledonia and its adjacent islands are Araucarias ("monkey puzzles"). Besides an abundance of ferns (including the bracken), the undergrowth of New Zealand is chiefly composed of Veronica bushes, of fuchsias, and calceolarias. New Zealand has no deserts, and is blessed with a constant and a fairly abundant rainfall. It is as unlike Australia in appearance as it could well be, and much more resembles in general appearance our own country of England or the southernmost parts of South America.

New Zealand and New Caledonia were evidently cut off from their ancient connection with the New Hebrides and New Guinea before mammals had spread in that direction. New Zealand was entirely without any form of beast, except bats and seals, when first colonized by the Maoris; but this Polynesian people brought with them in their canoes a rat which they bred for eating, and a small, foxy-looking, domestic dog. Of the bats there are two kinds: one a small nocturnal bat, allied to the European Pipistrelle; and the other a very remarkable and isolated form, a "day" bat (Mystacops), which climbs about the trees, has very narrow wings, and does not fly much. The seals on the coast, which made New Zealand so attractive to the American and English whaling ships, consisted of a "Sea Bear" (Otaria), the Sea Elephant (now extinct), and four other large Antarctic species of true Seal. New Zealand had no great variety in species of birds, which belonged mainly to the Goose, Rail, Eagle, Parrot, Honeyeater, and Corvine groups. Amongst the most noteworthy of modern New Zealand birds are the Kaka Parrot of North Island and the handsome Kea Parrot of the South Island (both of the genus Nestor). The last-named has lately taken to attacking sheep. Another very interesting form is the Stringops or Tarapo Ground Parrot (sometimes called the Owl Parrot). The Huia is a chough-like bird with orange wattles and a beak which, though straight in the male is sickle-shaped in the female. The Tui Honeyeater or parson bird has two delicate white plumes below each cheek. But it is the extinct birds which will always make New Zealand interesting. Amongst these was the largest type of bird which has probably ever existed—the Moa. We now know that besides Moas with long necks and small heads, which stood about 12 feet high, and were bigger than ostriches, there were other and much smaller types of the same order. One of these still survives: it is the so-called wingless Apteryx, which comes out at night, and with its long beak searches for worms. These Moas, of many sorts and sizes, probably still lived in the three islands of the New Zealand dominion when they were first discovered by the Polynesians; but being without any adequate means of defence, and quite unable to fly, they were soon exterminated, only the nocturnal Apteryx remaining. It is possible that these great ostrich-like birds reached New Zealand from the direction of Queensland and New Caledonia. [New Caledonia possesses one bird, which is found nowhere else in the world, though it has relations in South America. This is the Kagu, a pretty, grey, heron-like creature, which is really a sort of dwarf crane.] Two other remarkable bird developments once existed in New Zealand: a large, flightless goose (Cnemiornis), and a huge, thick-set Harpy Eagle (Harpagornis). This last no doubt fed mainly on the Moas, and died out when they became extinct.

New Zealand has only one kind of frog, no snakes, no tortoises, and only one true lizard (a Gecko), but it possesses all to itself an indigenous reptile of the greatest possible interest. This is the Tuatera (or Sphenodon), now restricted in its range to three or four islets off the northernmost coasts of New Zealand. Once this creature, which is about 3 to 4 feet long, ranged over the whole of New Zealand. It has been killed out mainly by the white settlers, and unless some effort is made will soon have disappeared altogether. This would be a great pity, for it is one of the most interesting of living things. It is the scarcely changed descendant of a very early order of reptiles which came into being millions of years ago and inhabited Europe and Asia.

[CHAPTER II]

The First Human Inhabitants of Australasia

At some date of unknown remoteness—it may be a hundred or two hundred thousand years ago—a primitive type of man entered the island continent of Australia, coming from New Guinea and the islands of the Malay Archipelago. The period in human history was perhaps so distant from our days that the geographical conditions of the Malay Archipelago were not precisely what they are at the present day; islands now separated by shallow seas may have been joined one to the other, the southern projections of New Guinea and the northern peninsulas of Australia may have been much closer together, so that men, though living a life of absolute savagery representing the lowest grade of human intelligence, were nevertheless able, by making use of floating logs or roughly fashioned rafts,[10] to enter the Australian continent and to pass from New Guinea eastwards and southwards into the nearer archipelagos of the Pacific. Although, doubtless, changes have taken place during the last hundred thousand years in regard to the distribution of land and water between south-eastern Asia and Australia, and even over the surface of the Pacific Ocean; and although islands or islets may have since subsided that once served as stepping-stones for adventurous savages: nevertheless there cannot have been within this period of time—which is scarcely a second in the age of the planet on which we dwell—the rise of any continuous land surface between the continent of Asia and the great Malay islands, on the one hand; and New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Fiji, on the other. Because if there had been any such continuous land connection within the last two hundred thousand years, sufficient to effect the peopling of Australasia by the human species without the need of crossing straits and narrow seas, there would have come into these regions as well as Man many examples of the modern animals of Asia. But, as we know, the south-eastern part of the Malay Archipelago and all Australasia and the Pacific islands are singularly deficient in the types of mammal now existing in Asia. In New Guinea, Australia, and the Malay islands to the east of Celebes and Bali, there are no monkeys, cats, wild oxen, or deer (excepting in the Moluccas and Timor), no apes, bears, insectivores, squirrels, elephants, rhinoceroses, or tapirs. Elephants, tapirs, apes, tigers, and rhinoceroses got as far east as Java (though the two first are now extinct there), and if there had been continuous land connection from that region eastwards to New Guinea and Australia, which made human emigration thither possible without crossing the sea, then these other large mammals would have equally invaded Papuasia and Australia. That they did not penetrate farther east than Java shows that a broad sea strait must have intervened, and the fact that this strait—or rather a succession of straits—-did not prevent the Tasmanians, the Negroes of New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, and the aboriginal Australians from reaching the lands in which the Europeans found them living three hundred years ago, shows that when they set out on these migrations from Malaysia eastward they could not have been without some knowledge of human arts and inventions, since they must have been able to fashion and use forms of transport across broad stretches of sea, such as logs or reeds fastened together into rafts, or water-tight vessels made out of the bark casing of fallen tree trunks.

AN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINE NAVIGATING A RAFT

Nevertheless, though of the same human species as ourselves, the Australoids[11] and Tasmanians[12] belonged to the lowliest living types of mankind, both physically and mentally. We know from various researches and evidence of cave deposits, bone and shell heaps, that these races had inhabited Australia and Tasmania for a very long period, that they did not originate in the southern continent, but evidently came from Asia; and that their nearest relations at the present day are the savage forest tribes of India and Ceylon, and in the past—most wonderful to relate—the ancient races of Britain and the continent of Europe. In his skull features and his very simple handicraft the Tasmanian resembled closely the people who lived in Kent and north-eastern France one to two hundred thousand years ago, in the warm intervals of the Great Ice Age. When races of superior intellect and bodily strength were developed in Europe and northern Asia, the ancestors of the Tasmanians and the Australoids were driven forth into the forests of Africa and southern Asia. From out of the Tasmanian type was specialized the Negro of Africa and southern Asia. But the unspecialized Tasmanian meantime was either extinguished by stronger races or was pushed on, ever farther and farther eastwards and southwards, until first Australia, and lastly what was once the southernmost peninsula of Australia—Tasmania—was his last refuge. The Australoids followed in the Tasmanian's footsteps, and became the native race of the Australian continent, prevented or discouraged from crossing over into Tasmania by the sea passage—Bass's Straits—which had been formed between Tasmania and the mainland. Other Australoids and Tasmanians no doubt populated New Guinea and the great Melanesian islands (as they had done all Malaysia). Here, however, they were followed up by the Negro, and in course of time Papuasia (as New Guinea and its surrounding islands is called) became almost as much a domain of the Negro as Africa. Primitive Negroes (mixed in blood with Australoids, and forming thus the Melanesian type) travelled as far eastwards and south as Fiji, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia. They may even have reached New Zealand before the Polynesian Maoris came, and in a half-breed with the Polynesian they extended their ocean range as far as the Hawaii archipelago. They populated the Philippine Islands,[13] and all the other islands of the Malay Archipelago, even as far out at sea as Micronesia, except—curiously enough—Borneo, and perhaps Java.

The Negroes or Melanesians improved on the rafts and bark canoes of the Tasmanians and Australoids by inventing and perfecting the "dug-out" canoe. This is made of a single tree trunk, hollowed out by the use of fire and the chipping of stone axes.

In Micronesia and Malaysia these Negroids soon became mixed with or exterminated by the early Mongolian type of man which, originating somewhere in High Asia, invaded Europe, America, south-east Asia, and Malaysia, assisting in time to form that race of mysterious origin and affinities, the Indonesian or Polynesian, whose invasion of the Malay Archipelago and Pacific islands occurred long after the coming of Tasmanian, Australoid, Negro, and Mongol, yet may have been as far back as five or six thousand years ago. The Polynesian's ancestors produced very considerable effects on these regions by bringing to them the first fruits of the white man's civilization which we associate in Europe and western Asia with the New Stone Age, or the period beginning perhaps twenty thousand years ago, in which men began to make beautifully finished stone and bone implements and set themselves to domesticate animals and to cultivate plants.

Among the Maoris of New Zealand, the people of Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, one or two islands off the west and the north-east of New Guinea, and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), there are, or rather were, types amongst the Polynesians, strikingly European in form, feature, and mental characteristics. I write "were" with the intention of alluding to the days when there were no European settlers in these regions who could have modified the population by intermarriage. The languages spoken at the present day by all more or less pure-blood Polynesians betray a resemblance and affinity with the Malay dialects and languages of Java, Sumatra, and the Malay Peninsula. It would seem, therefore, as though Malaysia was the original home of development of the Polynesian race, and that this remarkable people, celebrated for their fearless navigation of the ocean in well-constructed canoes, with masts, sails, and outriggers,[14] arose from some southward migration of the White Man (Caucasian) when he was emerging from the condition of the savage into the beginnings of civilization; a stage which is understood by the use of the term Neolithic, or the stage of perfected stone implements. Here in Malaysia the Caucasian type (which in ancient times populated much of northern and eastern Asia) mixed with the Mongol or Yellow Man, with the Negro or Black Man, and perhaps even with what remained of the generalized Australoid stock; and the result was the Polynesian as he is seen to-day: a tall, well-developed specimen of humanity with a reddish or yellow skin, large eyes set horizontally in the head, a well-formed nose and chin, straight hair (finer than that of the Mongol and with some tendency to curl or undulate), slight beards in the men, and a good brain development. In some respects these Polynesians recall in appearance, in mind, and in culture the aboriginal inhabitants of the three Americas, North, Central, and South. Indeed, if natives from the Upper Amazon, Southern Chili, or California were put alongside Polynesians from New Zealand, Tahiti, or Samoa it would not always be easy to pick them out at a glance. Where the Amerindian differs from the Polynesian is in being absolutely straight-haired and having features slightly more Mongolian, so that there is a still greater resemblance in body and mind between the Amerindian of South America and the Micronesians of the Ladrone Islands, the Dayaks of Borneo, or the Malays of the Malay Peninsula. The indigenes of North America obviously contain a great deal of Caucasian blood, from ancient migrations coming from north-east Asia, and therefore sometimes resemble Polynesians more than they do the Mongols of northern Asia.

Many students of the unwritten history of the human past are now inclined to believe that by the aid of islands since submerged individuals of the Malay and the Polynesian races must have penetrated in ancient times into Central and South America, carrying with them the beginnings of Neolithic culture and many new ideas in religion. Such theories derive some support from a comparison between the arts of Borneo and other islands of the Malay Archipelago, and of the Pacific islands and those of Central and South America.

Amongst the many problems of the past which we are unable at present to solve is why, if the Polynesians could colonize every island or islet in the vast Pacific, including New Zealand and Easter Island, they should have had so little effect on the development of Australia. In travelling east and south from their original homes in Sumatra, Jilolo, and the islands north of New Guinea, the Polynesians might just as easily have landed on the coasts of Australia as on those of New Zealand. But though such landings almost certainly took place, nearly all record of them is lost, and they had very little effect on the physical and mental character of the dark-skinned Australian aborigines. As a matter of fact, for some reasons connected with ocean currents and prevailing winds, the line of Polynesian migration seems to have been from west to east across the more equatorial regions of the Pacific, north of New Guinea, and afterwards from east to west, north-west, south-west, and due north. New Zealand was colonized by the Polynesians, not from the direction of New Caledonia, but from Samoa and Tonga. These Maoris (as they are now called) came at no very ancient date—perhaps not more than six hundred years ago;[15] but there may have been earlier Melanesian invasions from the direction of Fiji.

The aborigines of Australia at the present day are usually divided into two main sections, based on language, affinities, and other evidence. It is thought possible that the southern half of this division is the more primitive, and that the northern half has received here and there some modification by occasional attempts on the part of Hindu adventurers from Java, or Malay, Polynesian or Papuan seafarers, to settle on the inhospitable coasts of north-western, northern, and eastern Australia.

It is in any case practically certain that the Malay people were the first discoverers of Australia from the point of view of civilized man and of definite human history. The Malays are mainly of Mongol affinities. They belong to that great division of humanity which includes the peoples of Indo-China, Tibet, China, Japan, Mongolia, and Arctic Asia and America, and which is characterized by narrow, somewhat slanting eyes; a small, straight, narrow nose; high cheekbones; lank, coarse head hair, and a relative absence or scarcity of hair on the face and body. But the word Malay must be understood in two senses in this and other books treating of Australasia. It means in a general sense the Mongolian race which populates so much of the Malay Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago (extending on the north-east to the Philippines and Formosa); and in a more restricted sense a tribe and language which originated in the Menañkabao district of central Sumatra. The Malay language is a member of the great Malayo-Polynesian group which may have been created by an ancient fusion, many thousand years ago, between the early Caucasian (White men) invaders of Sumatra and the Mongolians who followed them. At the present day the languages of this group range from Madagaskar in the south-west to Hawaii in the north-east, to Formosa in the north, and New Zealand in the south. An early mingling of the Mongolian Malay and the Caucasian or Indonesian[16] inhabitants of the Malay Archipelago produced probably not only this widespread family of languages, but the remarkable Polynesian peoples of the Pacific.

Yet although the Malays proper spoke this Polynesian type of language (so very different from the Mongolian languages of Indo-China) they remained chiefly Mongol in their physical features. But their close association with the Indonesian or Caucasian type of people in Sumatra seems to have inspired them with some of the energy and culture—especially in the matter of navigation—which was already carrying the hybrid Polynesians far ahead in the colonization of the Pacific islands. At several epochs these Malays left their native Sumatra on oversea adventure. They seem firstly to have visited Ceylon, southern India, and the Maldiv Islands. Then much bolder sea journeys, perhaps in outrigger canoes with mat sails, took them, via the Seychelles, to Madagaskar—it may be more than two thousand years ago. Later migrations eastward brought them to the coasts of the Malay Peninsula and islands, where they became the celebrated "Sea Gipsies"—the Orang laut, or Men of the Sea, who lived almost entirely on board their canoes, and only came on shore to trade or to plunder. Finally arose a warlike Malay tribe of eastern Sumatra (Menañkabau), who, becoming converted to the Muhammadan faith about six hundred and fifty years ago, left Sumatra to become a conquering, colonizing, trading people, who in the course of some four hundred years had settled on the coasts of the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Java, and the other Sunda islands, Celebes, the Moluccas, Philippines, and the north-western parts of Papuasia, and had founded kingdoms, spread everywhere their Muhammadan faith, and everywhere between Sumatra and New Guinea imposed their own Malay dialect as a medium of intercourse and commerce. In these wonderful adventures—which may have carried them and their civilization as far east as the New Hebrides, besides spreading still farther products of the Indian world, such as the domestic fowl,[17] the orange, lime, and betel pepper-vine—they undoubtedly discovered the north coast of Australia about five hundred years ago, and communicated their discovery to the Chinese, the Arabs, and finally the Portuguese and Dutch.

Assisted by Persians of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs of southern and western Arabia revealed East Africa and Madagaskar about the beginning of the Christian Era, and before this period had found their way to western India, Ceylon, and even the Malay Peninsula. After the convulsion and awakening caused by the promulgation of the Muhammadan religion, Arab voyages to the Far East (largely instigated by the merchants of Persia) increased to a remarkable extent; and wherever the Arabs went they endeavoured to spread the faith of Islam. Thus, as early as the thirteenth century, the Arab religion, dress, and customs had been introduced into the Island of Borneo, into the north of Sumatra, and the south of the Malay Peninsula. By 1470 the whole of Java had been converted to the Muhammadan religion, and the great mass of the Malay people became ardent advocates of that faith.

The Arabs, of course, belong to the Caucasian sub-species: they are emphatically White Men in body and mind, though their skin colour may have been darkened by ages of exposure to a hot sun and by occasional intermixture with the Negro. But they have gradually grown to be distinct in cast of mind and sympathies from the peoples of Europe; and the institution of the Muhammadan religion separated them still more widely from the world of Greece, Rome, Paris, Lisbon, and London. Until the fourteenth century of the Christian Era they and their Persian allies monopolized the whole of the trade which had grown up between Asia, Malaysia, and Africa on the one hand, and Europe on the other. Then the movements of the Mongols and Tatars in central and western Asia, and their temporary respect for and curiosity concerning Christian Europe, enabled Italian commercial travellers to penetrate to the farthest parts of Asia. Thus there reached Europe not only more or less accurate descriptions of Java and Sumatra, but vague hints as to a "great Java" which lay to the south and was a whole continent in itself. These hints became more precise at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when not only had the Malay Archipelago been traversed almost to the limits of New Guinea by adventurous Italians, but French and Portuguese navigators may even have been driven out of their course by storms, and obtained some glimpse of the Australian coastline.[18]

The definite revelation of Australasia will be dealt with in succeeding chapters. Meantime, before we begin to review the historical discovery of the Australian continent and the islands and islets of Malaysia, Papuasia, and of the Pacific, let us first of all realize what were the conditions of life amongst the savage or semi-savage inhabitants of these regions before they came into contact with the men of strong minds and strong bodies who left western Europe from the sixteenth century onwards to found colonies in the new worlds of America and Australasia.

In the sixteenth century the distribution and condition of the native races in Australasia and the Pacific islands stood thus: Java was thickly populated, far more so than any other island in Malaysia. This population consisted almost entirely of a short, yellow-skinned people of Malay speech and more or less of Mongolian type, but with some ancient Hindu intermixture. In the mountainous regions of the interior was a forest-dwelling race—the Kalangs—(now extinct), a wild people, supposed to be negroid but in reality more like the Australoids. Java, colonized some two to three thousand years ago by the Hindus, and at a later date much visited by Arabs and Chinese, had attained a high degree of civilization (of a very Indian character) when first visited by Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under the Dutch from the seventeenth century onwards it became the great centre of Malaysian commerce.

Borneo, on the other hand—a very much larger island—was in a less advanced stage of culture, except on the north coast, along which both Indian and Chinese—and, later, Arab—civilization had come into play. North Borneo was a very old colony of the Chinese, and under Arab influence after the thirteenth century had become a region of considerable wealth and power. The Muhammadan religion had spread over the North Bornean kingdom of Brunei and thence to Palawan and the Sulu archipelago, between Borneo and the Philippines. The Malays from Celebes wielded a considerable influence over the south coast; but all this Eastern civilization did not penetrate far into the interior, which was inhabited mostly by a Mongolian people (like the Malays and Indo-Chinese in appearance) generally known as Dayaks. Other tribes were distinguished as Dusuns, Muruts, Bukits, Kanowit, Kayan, Sagai, Madangs, Punans, Kennias, &c. All these interior peoples led a life of relative savagery, though they were very artistic, and never allowed complete nudity in either sex. They were not cannibals, but they had a passion for head-hunting and for the collection of skulls, which they preserved and decorated, and to which they attached some religious significance. In their appearance, their weapons (such as the blowpipe), arts, and industries, and this practice of head-hunting they offered most striking resemblance to the Amerindians of equatorial South America. Curiously enough, so far, there has been no trace whatever found of pre-existing Negroids or Negritos in Borneo, though this race once predominated in the neighbouring Philippine Islands, and is found in the Malay Peninsula and even eastern Sumatra. There are slight traces of Negroids in the population of the great island of Celebes, to the east of Borneo, and, with the exception of Java, in all the other parts of Malaysia. The island of Celebes, like Java, was a region of considerable Malay civilization when first reached by Europeans. The people here (except the wild forest tribes) had elaborate dresses, steel weapons and implements, were skilled in weaving, embroidery, gold and silver jewellery work, and shipbuilding. On the whole, Java and Celebes were the two most advanced of the Malay islands in the arts and industries and the amenities of civilized existence when Europeans first sailed amongst these wonderful islands of spices, of Malay pirates, of cockatoos, hornbills, and buffaloes.

In Palawan (in which live the most exquisitely beautiful peacock pheasants), and the Sulu archipelago—between Borneo and the Philippines—the natives were all Muhammadans and much under Arab influence; but in the rest of the Philippine Islands the Malays and the older Mongolian peoples dwelling on the coasts were civilized pagans, a good deal under Chinese and North Borneo influence, while the interior was tenanted mainly by the wildest pigmy Negritos, who were strong enough in numbers to keep the yellow-skinned, straight-haired people from colonizing the forested mountains. After the Spaniards came and put firearms into the hands of the Malays, the Philippine Negritos soon got the worst of it, and at the present day only number about twenty-four thousand in Luzon and Mindanao out of a total population of nearly eight millions. Unfortunately the arms and ammunition thus obtained by the Malays in the Philippines and Borneo turned them into a bold race of pirates, who began after the commencement of the seventeenth century to prey on the commerce of Malaysia and the China Sea.

The eastern islands of the Malay Archipelago—Timor, Flores, Buru, Jilolo, Ceram, and their adjacent groups of islets—were peopled by mixed races, partly of Malay and partly of Negrito or Papuan stock. In the mountainous interior of the larger islands the natives were still wild and naked pagans, but little distinguishable from the Papuans of New Guinea. But the coast population was mostly Muhammadan, or about to become so, and more or less derived from Malay settlers. In some cases, perhaps, they represented a Mongoloid stock older than the Malay and related to the Micronesians farther to the north-east.

These Micronesians were the peoples of the Mariana or Ladrone, Palao (Pelew), Caroline, Marshall, and Gilbert Islands. They were of mixed elements, partly Polynesian (which is to say semi-Caucasian), partly Mongolian, and in some degree Papuan, but many of them bear a remarkable facial resemblance to the Amerindians of North and South America. This may arise partly from the partial colonization of these archipelagoes of small islands in the western Pacific by immigrants from Japan and China, mostly shipwrecked mariners. This intermixture has imparted a "Tatar" look to some of the Micronesians, just as the same facial features in the Amerindian are undoubtedly derived from ancient migrations taking place in prehistoric times from Siberia and Japan into north-west America. On the whole the Micronesians are most nearly allied to the Polynesian group of peoples to the south of them, though their languages form quite a separate group. Before Europeans discovered them they ignored the use of metal; their implements were made of stone, of sharks' and whales' teeth, of sharp-edged bivalve shells, of cane, and wood. They had a great reverence for stones, both as objects of worship and as money. This feeling would almost seem to be due to the remembrance of more remote times, when there dwelt in these and perhaps other Pacific archipelagoes a wonderful race of stonebuilders, who may have been the Caucasian ancestors of the modern Polynesians and akin to that European Neolithic race which ranged across the Old World from Ireland to Korea, and over the Australasian islands from Sumatra to Easter Island.

A section of these Neolithic stonebuilders seems to have sojourned for a time in the Caroline Islands, one of the Micronesian archipelagoes. Here they constructed forts, palaces, quays, out of immense blocks of stone, shaped ready hewn, so to speak, by the hand of Nature: for they were cubes and four-sided prisms of basalt (like the formations at the Giant's Causeway in Ireland), the remains of ancient volcanic eruptions on the larger islands of the Caroline group. Besides the stone buildings (which were erected, like all ancient stonework, by placing block on block, without any binding mortar between) this vanished race constructed artificial canals and harbours. Their prosperity and civilization seem to have come to an end—perhaps they emigrated to America and founded some of the prehistoric civilizations there—through the partial subsidence of the Micronesian islands. Many of these ancient stone buildings are now partly under water, and there is other evidence which shows that these and other Pacific groups of islands were larger in extent several thousand years ago than they are now. The modern Micronesians may be in part descended from the great race of stonebuilders, but they have much degenerated in civilization, as has been the case with the people of Egypt and the Amerindians of Peru and Mexico.

New Guinea, four hundred years ago, and its adjacent islands, large and small, of Waigiu, Aru, Timor-laut, the Admiralty Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago (once known as New Britain and New Ireland), and the Solomon Islands were peopled almost entirely by Negroids, that is to say by Oceanic Negroes, Papuans, and Negritos, similar to the inland populations of the eastern Malay islands. The Papuans were a tall race, with abundant bushy hair of woolly texture and with arched, almost Jewish noses. Their skins were very dark, and their appearance (except for the high nose), their noisy dispositions, love of excitement and laughter, reminded travellers very much of African Negroes. The Oceanic Negroes of the Bismarck Archipelago only differed from the Papuans in being more "negro", with more tightly curled hair and flatter noses. The Negritos were like the pigmy Negroes of Africa. But here and there on the coast of New Guinea, or on the islands off it, were obvious Polynesian settlements of old times, and even on some isolated island a people quite pale skinned and Caucasian in appearance.

The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands, the New Hebrides, of New Caledonia, and the Fiji archipelago are allied to the Papuans more than to any other stock, but are usually known as Melanesians.[19] Their characteristics when first discovered by Europeans (which for purposes of accurate description was not much more than one hundred years ago) were not quite so "negro" as those of the Papuans and the Negritos. They had dark, almost black skins and broad noses, but the head-hair was less tightly curled and grew to greater length. They had often the very prominent brow ridges of the Australoid, and some indications also of mixture with a higher race—the semi-Caucasian Polynesian—and were no doubt the result of an early mixture of all these types. The civilization of the Melanesians was somewhat higher than that of the Papuans, but inferior to the arts and industries and social life of the Polynesians. They had developed agriculture to some extent, and amongst cultivated plants had the taro yam (a kind of Arum with tuberous roots), the Sweet potato (a Convolvulus), the sugar cane, the Bread-fruit tree,[20] the banana, the coconut palm, the sweet roots of a tree-lily (Dracæna), and the fruit of a Pandanus; perhaps also the Kava pepper vine. They possessed as domestic animals a pig of an east Asiatic species and a dog of a type like the pariah dog of India or the Dingo of Australia. They also had fowls of a game bantam type, which no doubt had been brought eastward by Malay traders till they passed from island to island into Melanesia, and even to most of the Polynesian islands except New Zealand. In New Caledonia there were fowls of a big breed but there were no pigs or dogs. [The domestic fowl was even found in the remote Easter Island when it was first visited by Europeans, but had not got beyond that to South America; neither had the American maize, tobacco, or other cultivated plants reached the Pacific islands till they were brought there, from Asia or Europe in recent times.]

PAPUAN OF SOUTH-EAST NEW GUINEA, NEAR PORT MORESBY
(From a drawing by the late Professor T.H. Huxley)

OCEANIC NEGRO TYPE FROM THE NORTHERNMOST SOLOMON ISLANDS
(From a photograph)

Melanesians, like Polynesians and Papuans, lived much on a fish diet if dwelling anywhere near the sea. The Papuans of New Guinea do not seem to have known the Bread-fruit until modern times, though that tree was the most important staple of life in so many Pacific islands, and under another name appears anciently to have been a favourite article of food in the Malay Archipelago. There was, however, no Bread-fruit among the New Zealanders, though they had sweet potatoes, taro yams, and gourds. Likewise the New Zealanders omitted to take the pig with them from their original home in Samoa: perhaps, however, the pig had not then reached those islands from the west. The New Zealanders ate their dogs, and the domestic dog throughout Oceania was bred for eating, and not merely as a hunting companion. Like the Dingo of Australia, and the domestic dogs of Negro Africa, the breeds of Malaysia and Polynesia could not bark. In Melanesia and most parts of the Pacific, including New Zealand, one or more species of rat were much in request as food, and were introduced by these different races of men into almost all the islands, including New Zealand.

All the Melanesians, like the Papuans of New Guinea, and the Negroes of the Bismarck Archipelago, were thorough-going cannibals, and this vice—the eating of human flesh—infected some of the Polynesian peoples, especially the New Zealanders. Cannibalism probably existed at one time in all the Polynesian islands, but had died out in most by the time they were discovered by Europeans, only remaining as a well-established custom in New Zealand and throughout Melanesia. The New Zealand Maoris used after one of their inter-tribal battles to collect the bodies of their slain enemies, cut off their scalps and right ears, and offer these first as a sacrifice to the gods. Then a row of cooking pits were dug on the right hand "for the gods" and on the left for humans. The eyes and the brain were removed from a dead warrior, and were eaten raw by the chief man of the victorious party. When the cut-up bodies of the vanquished were cooked, the chief's sons and relations first, and the whole of the army afterwards, fell on the meat cooked on the left-hand row of pits and devoured all they could at a sitting. The right-hand section of the feast was presided over by the priests and the contents of the pits partly consumed by them, and partly carried off to be stored against future requirements. What was left over on the left-hand side was packed up in baskets and sent to friendly tribes, who by accepting and eating the remains of these slain men took the side in the quarrel of the victorious force.

In Fiji human flesh was, above all, the food of chiefs, but everyone partook who could. Slaves were captured in war or purchased from other islands and were carefully fattened up for the table.

Cannibalism was partly an act of revenge, a desire more completely to extinguish a fallen enemy, and in part a sacrifice to the gods of the victorious tribe, or it began as an act of atonement or propitiation to win the favour of a deity. In New Caledonia and New Zealand—perhaps also in Fiji—it was often provoked by mere hunger for meat, a hunger less easy to satisfy than in the large islands of the Bismarck Archipelago and the mainland of New Guinea, where there were the great Cassowary birds, large fruit bats, tree kangarus, phalangers, and an immense variety of pigeons.

In religion there was mostly this difference between Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians: the two latter had castes of priests who devoted themselves to the conduct of religious ceremonies, and were often unmarried; whereas amongst the Melanesians and Papuans there were no priests, anyone—usually the chief of the village or tribe—being competent to sacrifice to the gods, or to conduct the semi-religious ceremonies (so like those of Negro Africa) connected with birth and death: most of all, the solemn rites observed in the initiation of boys and girls into the duties of adult life on their entering manhood or womanhood. The dwarf Negroes or Negritos of New Guinea and the islands to the west had very little religious belief; the Papuans more, but not so much as the Melanesians of the Pacific archipelagoes. These last, no doubt, had been taught and influenced for many hundred years by the Polynesians. All these peoples believed in a variety of gods, devils, spirits, and fairies. (The Fijians even believed in water-babies!) Sometimes the supernatural being was the soul of a deceased hero or chief, canonized after his death, and still working for or against the survivors in the form of a shark, a turtle, a fish, snake, or lizard.

Stones and trees were worshipped as the form or the home of a god; so were lizards, snakes, birds, the sea, a volcano, the sun, the moon, stars, and vault of heaven. Nearly everything of fixed form had a soul, was alive, was connected in some way with the spirit world. A belief among Papuans, Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians in the immortality of human beings was almost universal. Only perhaps among the Negritos was it absent or "not thought about".

As to the arts and industries, all this region lay outside the range of metal-using countries, except where iron had been introduced by the Malays, as on the north-west coasts of New Guinea and the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Otherwise the races of Australasia and the Pacific were still in the Stone Age. The Papuans and Melanesians, however, had a great feeling for art and colour. They carved wood most skilfully with chisels made of bivalve shells, or stone adzes. There was a great tendency, derived from Malaysia, especially in New Guinea and Melanesia, to build houses on piles, with platforms rising high above the ground: a most convenient architecture both for defending the dwelling against attack (by drawing up the ladder of approach) and for raising sleeping places above the range of mosquitoes, centipedes, snakes, and damp. In some parts of New Guinea the people constructed their houses high up in the forks of great trees, and used rope ladders to ascend and descend.

But in Polynesia and those island groups to the east and north-east of New Guinea much influenced by the Polynesians, the houses were mostly built on the ground, sometimes with a stone floor, or were raised on a mound of earth. They were usually oblong in shape, and of considerable length, with a roof of thatch or palm leaves in shape like a long boat turned upside down. In the Solomon Islands the houses (occupied by several families) were occasionally as much as 70 feet long and 40 wide. The thatched roof was in some instances carried right down to the ground, in other cases it formed a veranda supported on posts. But in parts of New Guinea and the islands adjacent to its eastern half, in Fiji and New Caledonia there were round or oval-shaped huts, looking like hayricks. The houses of the New Zealanders had firm walls made of slabs of wood, and one small window facing eastward. There was a porch over the door. In the southern part of the great South Island, near the snowy mountains, there were winter houses made by excavating a square or oblong pit in the ground and roofing this over. In wintertime a fire was lighted inside this underground dwelling, and the temperature under the heavily thatched roof became very high, whilst it was freezing outside; but as the dwelling was unventilated it was often unwholesome for its occupants. Except among the wildest Negritos and Papuans, there were in every village a club house and a guest house, or the two uses combined in one large dwelling. And on this club house the men of the village lavished their best ideas of art and decoration. The beams and posts would be handsomely carved and painted, or even inlaid with beautifully coloured sea shells; mats woven of palm fibre or grass covered the walls, and the timbered floor might be lacquered with some vegetable varnish. Similar decorations were bestowed on their temples and their chiefs' houses.

The furniture consisted of little else than a rude bed made of slabs of wood covered with matting; chairs or stools were carved out of solid blocks of wood, or made from bamboo sections. The fireplace was a thick cane basket covered with clay. Canes or reeds and the invaluable bamboo equally made light but firm frames which did duty as tables in Polynesian households, but the Melanesians were usually content with mats and stools for all furniture. Pottery—baked clay—was made by the Melanesians and by most Papuan (but not Negrito) and Micronesian tribes; it was also known to the Polynesians, but for some reason had in late centuries almost gone out of use, its place being taken by wood vessels, gourds, the halves of coconuts, and the shells of clams. Still, the manufacture and use of clay pots were retained by the Polynesians of Easter Island. Food was cooked by placing it between hot stones, which were then sprinkled with water, and the whole thing covered over till the food was steamed and cooked. Water was boiled in wooden vessels by dropping in red-hot stones.

Sharp knives in New Guinea and Melanesia were made from splinters of bamboo. The ground was tilled and prepared for cultivation all over these Oceanic regions by wooden implements—pointed stakes, forked branches made into hoes, flat slabs rubbed down into smooth spades. Papuans (but not Negritos)—still more Melanesians, Micronesians, and Polynesians—were industrious agriculturists, and besides food plants they cultivated bright-coloured flowers (such as the crimson Hibiscus) and the paper Mulberry tree, from the bast of which they obtained the famous tapa "bark cloth", as also from the bast of fig trees and a relation of the Bread-fruit. There was no loom or idea of weaving anywhere, except here and there on the coast of New Guinea and in the Santa Cruz Islands (near the New Hebrides), whither it may have been introduced by Malay seafarers. But the plaiting of leaves, rushes, and fibre was carried to a fine art by all these Oceanic peoples. In New Zealand the Maoris made much use of the now-celebrated New Zealand flax, the fibre of Phormium tenax, a liliaceous plant related to aloes.

Not having any metal (as already related), axes were made of chipped flakes of obsidian (a glassy, flint-like volcanic stone) or of other stones ground to a sharp edge, or of hard, sharp-edged bivalve shells, or sharp-edged bones from the flattened spine of the tortoise or turtle. Terrible instruments for slaying and beheading were devised from the lower jawbones of large fishes, with saw-like rows of recurved teeth; or by implanting razor-edged sharks' teeth into the sides of wooden swords. Daggers with saw-like edges were made from the spines of the ray or skate, as well as from very hard wood rubbed down into a sharp cutting edge by sharks' skin. Spears and pikes were also made from hard wood and sharpened by burning the point in the fire. Or the point of the spear was made from the bony spines in the tail of the great Ray fish, or the wooden haft of the spear was fastened to a sharpened stone or obsidian blade by means of resin. Bows and arrows were in use nearly throughout New Guinea and most of the adjacent island groups; also in the New Hebrides. But they had not been introduced into New Zealand, and had fallen into disuse in most parts of Micronesia and Polynesia, though they were originally used by all these Oceanic peoples. In the eastern Melanesian islands slings were employed to hurl stones. Clubs and throwing sticks were common Papuan and Melanesian weapons, some of the former as executioners' weapons being fitted with stone heads. Shields scarcely penetrated to Polynesia, but were much developed and most fantastically carved and painted in New Guinea and some of the western Melanesian islands. In the northern parts of Oceania armour made of fibre, cord, or matting, and helmets of fibre, wood, or basketwork were worn, but more for ornament than to shield the head.

The Negritos, Papuans, and most of the Melanesians went about in complete, or almost complete, nudity before they were influenced by the Malays or by Europeans. On the other hand, the Polynesians were scarcely ever seen without some covering; they had, in fact, a sense of decency which was almost entirely absent from the negroid races of Oceania in their primitive condition. But whether or not clothing was worn for a covering or for propriety, the men, and in a lesser degree the women, of all the Oceanic races were passionately fond of ornaments. The more highly developed Polynesians decorated the face and body of men and also women by tatuing; that is to say, by pricking the skin with a sharp implement and rubbing in some colouring matter. The Melanesians and Papuans, however, were more addicted to what is called "cicatrization", that is to say, slashing the skin and raising permanent blobs or blisters by introducing some irritant. The more or less bushy hair was dressed sometimes with great elaborateness. Necklaces of teeth (human, dogs', pigs', kangarus', phalangers', fishes', and whales'), of seeds, shells, pebbles, bones, and pieces of wood were worn, together with armlets, bracelets, and anklets; so also were girdles of plaited fibre. The brightly coloured feathers of birds entered largely into personal adornments—in breastplates, masks, headdresses, and robes.

All these Oceanic races possessed musical instruments, chiefly drums, flutes, Pan pipes, and slabs of resonant wood. They loved singing—especially the Melanesians—and dancing.

In both Melanesia and Polynesia—even also in Australia—there were the rudiments of picture writing, which in Easter Island became developed into regular hieroglyphics.

All the Oceanic peoples, except the dwarfish Negritos, were fond of birds, partly owing to their love of colour and partly due to a sense of the poetry of nature which thrilled them all, the handsome Polynesians most of all. In Easter Island the pretty little terns, or "sea-swallows", were tamed and trained to perch on the men's shoulders. Some of the island pigeons were partially domesticated. In New Guinea and the big islands near by a great admiration was felt for the fantastic Hornbills, and to wear a hornbill's head and casque was a privilege of brave men only. The New Zealanders regarded their parrots as semi-sacred. They would seem, however, in the earliest days of their settlements on these two great islands, to have exterminated the gigantic Moas. Perhaps, however, Nature had already begun the killing off of most of these flightless birds before man came on the scene. Certainly some Moas survived to the coming of the Polynesian New Zealanders from Samoa and Tonga; for the legend goes that, when the earliest pioneers of these adventurous people returned to Samoa with proofs of the discovery of a vast New Land in the southern ocean, they brought with them the bones and feathers of a gigantic bird.

Most of these Oceanic peoples had some idea of a currency, except in the savage interior of New Guinea; that is to say, there were objects used in trade which had a more or less fixed value, such as, in some island groups, the red hair-tufts from the necks of fruit bats, parrots' feathers, the feathers of the starling-like Drepanidæ (in Hawaii), brightly coloured shells—or, in others, pieces of bark cloth, rolls of matting, beautiful seeds, disks, pieces or points of shells strung on fibre (like the wampum of America), or the teeth of dolphins, whales, dogs, phalangers, and boars; also the vertebræ of the Dugong. (See p. 40.) In Micronesia the currency was more in objects like stones, either large "millstones" made of a yellowish limestone in Palao Island; or small red stones, polished pebbles, enamelled beads of unknown age and origin, prisms of polished, baked, red clay (known as brak), bits of glass or porcelain (obviously from China).

How were the Oceanic peoples living, from a social point of view, before the advent of the European? The Negritos of New Guinea and those which lingered in the interior of Malayan islands like Buru led an absolutely savage existence scarcely superior in intellectual level to that of the ape. They were hunters dwelling in the dense forest on grubs, termites, wild fruits, roots, and edible leaves; on the flesh of such birds and beasts or monitor lizards as they could snare or slay. They built rough shelters as temporary dwellings, and wandered from one part of the forest to another in search of food. They were expert at catching fish or climbing trees after birds' nests or honey, but they had no canoes, no implements, no religion (only a vague belief in a life beyond the grave), and no ceremonies connected with birth, puberty (or the "coming of age"), marriage, death, or burial. They belonged to the human species, but were primitive human types who had degenerated rather than advanced, and were almost drifting back into the life of the beast.

Then there were the jolly, ferocious, excitable, laughter-loving vigorous Papuans, with their nearly black skins, their mops of frizzled hair, their big arched noses and tall, well-made bodies. The Papuans lived in small tribes and passed their lives raiding other tribes, eating their captives, hunting ground kangarus, tree kangarus, phalangers, cassowaries, Birds of Paradise, parrots, and Crowned pigeons. They came to trade with the Malays on the coasts, where sometimes they settled down under Malay sultans. As often as not, however, they would turn treacherous, fall on some band of traders (if they could take them at a disadvantage), slay, and eat them.

On parts of the north-west and north-east coasts of New Guinea, as on some of the outlying islands of the Jilolo group and of the Bismarck Archipelago, there were settlements of Caucasian-like people, called by anthropologists Indonesian—a term scarcely distinguishable from Polynesian. They were of the same stock as the similar folk (with faces like dark-complexioned Europeans) to be met with on the islands off western Sumatra. These Indonesians had broadened out into Polynesians eastwards of New Guinea. They had mingled in most of the Melanesian islands with the primitive Negroes, and had introduced many new ideas in religion, warfare, and art. They were a little less cruel, perhaps, than the Papuans. In the extreme limits of their range to the north-east—Hawaii archipelago—and to the south-east—Easter Island—they had developed a considerable civilization, though it is by no means certain whether they were the first inhabitants of those islands (the existing Hawaiians, according to their traditions, came from Samoa and had only been in the Hawaiian archipelago for about nine hundred years when they were discovered or re-discovered by Captain Cook). They may have been preceded in both groups by the ancient race that built in huge blocks of stone, but which either passed on to America or died out, leaving, however, its mixed and slightly degenerate descendants in the Polynesians, who from some such centre as the Marquezas Islands and Tahiti spread westwards to Samoa, and thence to nearly all the Pacific islands.

Both in Easter Island and in Hawaii the development of religion was a development of terror. The common people were especially harassed by their belief in evil spirits waiting to torture them cruelly after death (a belief engendered in the Hawaii archipelago by the terrible earthquakes and the active volcanoes with their seething craters). And at any moment they were liable to be seized by the priests, the nobles, or the king to be offered up as human sacrifices to the gods of sky, earth, mountains, and sea. The priests and kings or chiefs (and in some islands a king or chief was not merely a high priest as well, but was often worshipped as a god during his lifetime) had immense power over the community by being able to establish "tabu". To declare a thing or a person "tabu" was equivalent to saying that it was sacred, under the protection of the gods—might not be touched, drunk, eaten, smelt, or even looked at, without risk of death, through the action of some supernatural force or as a punishment administered for impiety by the human authority. This practice penetrated to New Zealand and spread its influence over much of Melanesia. It could be wielded with great benefit in keeping the people in order, but it also checked their enterprise in many directions, and was shockingly misused by both priests and chiefs for their own advantage.

All the Oceanic peoples were immoral, and their numbers were slowly decreasing in the Pacific islands as the result of superstition, vice, and selfishness. In order that there should be no scarcity of food in the smaller islands families were often limited to one or two children, many infants being killed at birth. They were particularly averse from daughters, so that in not a few tribes and communities the women were much fewer than the men, perhaps only one woman to four men; thus not a few of the men (priests, generally) were unmarried. Women were very unfairly treated, as is frequently the case among barbarous peoples. They were often forbidden to eat the more nourishing forms of food, in case there should not be enough for the men. In Hawaii, for example, they were put to death if caught eating bananas, coconuts, or the flesh of pigs or turtles. Their husbands (in Tahiti and Samoa) sometimes made them wean their children and bring up instead young pigs or puppies. (A similar practice is referred to in my book on the Pioneers of Canada in regard to the rearing of young bears by Amerindian women.)

Wars were constantly being waged between island and island, tribe and tribe—especially in the Melanesian division of Oceania. In the western Pacific, indeed, the lives of the natives, before the establishment of the White Man's rule, was one perpetual acquaintance with terror. At any moment in the offing might appear the war canoes of an enemy, and ensue the sudden invasion of a village, the defeat of its fighting men, the cannibal feast on the bodies of the slain, the carrying off of the young women and children into captivity, there perhaps to be fattened up and killed for more cannibal feasts. Or when bathing and swimming (which nearly all these people delighted in) they might be seized and devoured by sharks; or their islet or island coast was suddenly swamped by an enormous tidal wave, or a mighty earthquake swallowed up the village in an earthcrack or landslide; or red-hot ashes and burning lava from a suddenly active volcano destroyed several communities; or hurricanes devastated their settlements and swamped their fleets of canoes. It is true that they never suffered from cold (except in New Zealand), and seldom from famine; for the sea provided bountifully fish and edible seaweed, there were the sea birds' eggs on the rocks, innumerable oysters, clams, sea slugs[21], crabs, langoustes, and prawns; there were pigeons, parrots, rails, plovers, ducks, on most of the smaller islands, and a bewildering abundance of bird life in New Guinea and the big islands. There was the Bread-fruit tree, there were bananas, yams, the invaluable coconut—giving food and a wholesome drink; and in New Zealand, where tropical products were mostly lacking (though the Maoris introduced sweet potatoes and taro yams), there was the bracken fern, which from root stems yielded a palatable substance like that sago which in west Melanesia and Fiji, as in Malaysia, was an important article of diet.

Yet in spite of an abundant food supply and a genial climate, these Oceanic peoples suffered a good deal from disease before the Europeans came. There was leprosy, which was a terrible plague in some islands; there were various forms of germ fevers introduced into the blood by mosquitoes; smallpox had come from the west, spread by the Malays. Mostly these primitive Oceanians led short lives; and if they were mainly merry and irresponsible, these spells of light-heartedness, of dancing, immoderate feasting and drinking, song-singing, lovemaking, gambling, and living the life of mermen and mermaids in the foaming breakers of a warm sea, alternated with heart-breaking struggles against the forces of nature, panics in regard to new diseases, terrors of unseen devils, torturing sacrifices to malevolent gods, murders, cannibal feasts, poisonings, and enslavement.

In this description of the condition of man in Oceania I have made no allusion to Australia and Tasmania, for the reason that the natives of the southern continent (of which Tasmania recently formed an outlying peninsula) differed so remarkably from the peoples of the Malay islands, New Guinea, Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia (including New Zealand) as to require separate treatment.

The aboriginal Australoids are the most primitive, the least improved of existing human races: although peculiarly developed in some points, they are the lowliest form of real mankind known to us. They were considered at one time to be the descendants of a brutish but big-brained type, a veritable "ogre" which dwelt in Europe some hundred thousand years ago: the Man of Neanderthal. But this impression was wrong; the Australoids more nearly resemble the less specialised, ancestral human race of Europe. Australia was originally peopled by two distinct types of men: the Australoids and the negroid Tasmanians. These last had the curly black hair and depressed noses of Negroes, though they were also akin to the Australoids; which last people, except that they are dark-skinned and brutish-looking, are remarkably like savage white men! They have head-hair which is neither lank like that of the Mongolian nor frizzly or tightly curled like the "wool" of Negroes and Papuans. Unlike the Papuans, moreover, and still more unlike the smooth-skinned Mongolian and Amerindian, the Australoid has much hair growing on the face and body, as is often the case among European and Indian peoples. But they also exhibit a feature present both in primitive man and in the modern European—an exaggerated projection of the brows, of the bones of the forehead which shade the eyes. The stature is not much below the European mean, but the lower limbs are usually short and rather slender. The forehead is retreating, the large jaws prominent, and the teeth bigger in proportion than in other races of modern men.

Considering the great area of the island-continent on which the Australoids must have lived for many thousand years, there is considerable uniformity of physical appearance amongst them, and a general resemblance in the structure and sounds of their languages, though these last are divisible into two main groups: those of the north and north-west, and the speech of the remainder of Australia. In considering their language, to some extent, and still more in examining their rudimentary arts and religious ideas, it is obvious that the people of the north-east of Australia have been visited for centuries by Malays, Papuans, and even Polynesians, yet that none of these superior races succeeded in getting a permanent foothold.

So far as any sense of shame was concerned, the Australoids of both sexes went quite naked, or merely wore a girdle round the hips, to which strings or strips of fur were attached; but in cold weather or at night they put round their shoulders cloaks made from the skins of marsupials, skins sewn together after being scraped, softened, and dressed. Their own bodies they decorated or mutilated in various ways, such as knocking out two of the upper front teeth, passing a bone nose pin 5 or 6 inches long through the septum of the nose, cutting off the end joints of their fingers, and marking the skin of the upper arm, chest, and belly by terrific scars of raised skin. This was "cicatrization", so often referred to in describing the skin decoration of savages, especially the negroes of the Congo basin. The Australoids did not tatu their bodies (with pin-pricks and paint) like the Polynesians and Malays. They painted their skins for warfare or for ceremonial dances with red and yellow ochre, white and grey clay, and black mineral substances or charcoal. Also the men would gum to their bodies the white down or fluff of certain birds and beasts.

A TYPICAL POLYNESIAN
(A man of Tongatabu, Tonga Archipelago)

AN AUSTRALOID TYPE FROM NORTHERN QUEENSLAND
(From photographs)

They had no agriculture, and no domestic animals but the Dingo. This dog they kept as much for eating as for hunting. Although each tribe occupied a definite area, they had scarcely any settled homes or permanent villages. They roamed about looking for food, and living for days, weeks, or months alongside their food supply, which consisted of the produce of the chase—kangarus, phalangers, wombats, koalas (tailless phalangers), emus, bustards, swans, parrots, and pigeons; fish, snakes, lizards, turtles (on the coast), and shellfish. They ate a good many insects—fat-bodied moths, beetle grubs, termites (white ants), the pupæ of real ants, and the larvæ of bees. Honey was, of course, much liked and much sought after, and from it they made with water a sweet drink which sometimes became slightly fermented like mead. Their women obtained from the ground wild yams, truffles, and the roots and tubers of various plants or the seeds of others. They cooked their food by broiling, by baking in the ashes, and by the use of hot stones. Although they did not know tobacco till the Europeans introduced it, they already possessed the idea of inhaling the smoke of other dried leaves through a bamboo pipe, and chewed some leaves for their soothing qualities.

When hard up for food, they occasionally became cannibals, and after an inter-tribal fight the slain were generally eaten. They had a vague sense of religion, believed that there was a life after the grave, that men's spirits mostly went to a land beyond the visible sky, and sometimes returned again in the bodies of newborn children. But some of these men—famous chiefs in their day—stopped in the sky and became gods. There was one principal God, who was sometimes identified with the creator of all things, and who might be seen at night time in the form of a very bright star. Much of their religion was associated with the discipline of the community, and was manifested in elaborate dances. Nearly every clan or tribe had "medicine" men—individuals who were learned in the customs and laws of the tribe, and who had some rough knowledge of medicine and surgery. Their tribal organization was based on the association for common purposes of defence of a number of groups, which last were either united by family ties or formed a brotherhood because they all inherited or adopted the same "totem"[22] or crest. It was usually forbidden for a man to marry a woman who belonged to the same clan or totem group as himself; he must secure a wife from another coterie. Marriage was actually or generally pretended to be an affair of capture, though frequently based on a bargain; and the unwilling young woman was sometimes dragged to her new home by the hair of her head, or knocked senseless by a club and then hoisted on to her husband's shoulders. The women, in fact, were very badly treated, and did all the hard work of the community.

The Australoids when first discovered were a degree or two farther advanced than the "Eolithic"[23] Tasmanians. They were, in effect, in a "Palæolithic" stage of culture, similar to that of Europe some fifty thousand years ago. Their weapons and utensils were made of wood, stone, and bone. They did not know the bow and arrow, but used a rather elaborate wooden rest for throwing their spears with greater force than by the unaided arm. The spearhead was either of finely pointed hard wood, carved with notched barbs, or it was a separate piece from the haft and made of stone, bone, or shell, tied strongly on to the haft, and further fastened by resinous gum. This gum from the Eucalyptus trees was very useful for attaching the blades of stone axes and knives to their handles.

But the Australoids were specially celebrated for two things: their "bull-roarers" and their "boomerangs". The bull-roarer was a carved and flattened piece of wood or stone something in the shape of an axe blade. At the narrow end of this implement (which had a sacred character, as it was usually inscribed or painted with the "crest" or device of the clan's totem) were indentations, to which a piece of fibre string or strip of hide could be tied. The "churinga" (as it was called in south-east Australia) was then whirled round and round in the air till it made a loud booming noise. This the women were persuaded was the voice of a spirit, and only youths after their initiation, or full-grown men, were in the secret. [All over the world of savagery in ancient times, and in the few places where savages now remain, women have been very easily "gammoned", and have been made to believe much nonsense which the men invented to scare them and keep them in submission.]

The boomerang was a wooden throwing stick, very thin and flat, and curved or crooked in the middle. Although more or less fiat in surface, it nevertheless had a slight twist, a little like the plane of a bird's wing. Hurled flat-wise through the air it was a very effective weapon; and some kinds, if they did not hit the object aimed at, would return and fall near the place from which they had been thrown. But both boomerang and bull-roarer, though they seemed very novel and unusual to the early pioneers in Australian discovery, were really not peculiar to this savage people. They have existed in many parts of Negro Africa, and even anciently in Europe, India, and in Egypt.

The houses of the Australoids were rough shelters of sticks, fronds, and grass. In warm weather the natives did not bother to put up huts, but slept with their feet towards the fire and their heads against a low wind screen of boughs and grass. The aborigines of Australia had some gift for painting and drawing objects, and had even invented a rough alphabet of symbolic signs or primitive writing, with which they marked their "message sticks" or churingas. These message sticks, in fact, were the germ of letters.

Finally, it might be mentioned that, even when first discovered, Australia—an island continent of 2,946,691 square miles—was very sparsely inhabited, and the bulk of the population was confined to the districts near the seacoast. If there are, as is sometimes computed, one hundred thousand aborigines still living in Australia at the present day, there were probably not more than double that number a hundred years ago. They did much to limit their own increase by killing or abandoning their children; they were often engaged in civil wars; in times of scarcity they turned cannibal. What, however, is so remarkable about this isolated people is their having gone on living with very little change or improvement in the life which was that of our ancestors fifty thousand years ago. While the races of Europe and northern Asia have tried so many experiments, have achieved so many conquests over nature, have had such a marvellous insight into the workings of the universe—have, in fact, for ten thousand years or so, been leading the lives of demigods, the Tasmanians and the Australoids have been content just with the day's provision of food, a fairly dry sleeping place at night, a little fighting and dancing, lovemaking of a more or less brutal kind, and a span of life which, owing to its excessive hardships and the callous if not cruel treatment of the men and women past their prime, was seldom more than fifty years. They have, it is true, seen God in the stars, and they have felt like us the tragedy of death and the hope of a resurrection; but, unlike us (their far-off cousins, whose "Tasmanian" and "Australoid" ancestors stayed in Europe), they achieved no conquest over nature, their lives were scarcely better than the lives of beasts.

The Tasmanians shared some of the physical features of the Australoids. Like them they were dark-skinned—a very dark brown—and of brutish appearance, especially in the women. The men were usually better looking than the females, but both alike represented perhaps the lowest type of humanity which has been known to scientific men in a living state—for they just lived long enough to be photographed. The Tasmanians were distinctly more negroid than the Australoids. They were of medium height. The nose was broader, shorter, and more depressed than that of the Australoid, and the hair inclined to be tightly curled. They looked, in fact, with their long and large upper lips, their receding chins, projecting brows and jaws, big teeth, woolly hair, small, deepset eyes, and hairy faces and bodies (even the women had slight whiskers) like the most primitive form of Homo sapiens, and the joint ancestor of the Negro and the European.

Probably they entered north-eastern Australia at a very remote period, and were pushed down by the succeeding Australoids into the south-easternmost extremity of the continent—first the peninsula, then later the island of Tasmania. They were then (and they remained) in the lowest stage of human culture, like the Negritos or pigmy Negroes of Malaysia and Africa. They had no dwelling good enough to be called a hut: merely a circle of sticks stuck in the ground with their points converging. On to the top of these bent wands was thrown a mass of fern or grass, which made a rough thatch. Or the savages contented themselves in fine weather with a mere wind shelter of branches and bark strips. Whenever there was a cave or a cranny in the rocks handy to their hunting ground, they lived in that. They had no agriculture and no domestic animals, not even the Dingo or semi-wild dog of Australia. They lived much on shellfish, on the cray-fish of the streams, and the flesh of kangarus and other marsupial beasts, and such birds as they could bring down with their throwing sticks; though they also ate roots, fungi, fruits, gum, and the sweet sap of certain trees. This even they sometimes allowed to collect in hollows at the base of the trunk till it became slightly fermented. Their method of cooking was by broiling over a fire or placing the dead beast to cook in its skin in the hot ashes. Their only weapons and implements were heavy stones used as hammers; flaked stones—big chunks of sand-stone with sharp edges, held in the hand as scrapers or choppers; long stakes, their points sharpened and hardened by being charred in the fire, and their stems straightened by heat and pressure; stems of small trees fashioned into rough clubs; and short, straight, thin but heavy sticks used as missile weapons for hurling at birds or small mammals.

Their language was never properly written down by the Europeans. It is described as being full of rough sounds and not possessing a great number of words, but we really know very little on the subject. They were without any sense of shame, and if they wore any clothing it was for warmth or ornament. As a matter of fact, it was limited in the men to strips of kangaru hide tied round the neck or ankle, and other pieces of hide which were fastened round the legs like gaiters when travelling through thorny bush country. The women tied an undressed kangaru skin round the neck and waist, in which they carried their babies. Both sexes wore necklaces of shells, flowers, or seeds; and the men decorated their hair with kangaru teeth. The bodies—especially of the men—were anointed with kangaru fat and coloured with red ochre, and this red dust and fat were also rubbed into the hair and beard.

They had no religion, other than a vague belief in a life after the death of the body. Yet they were not cannibals, as was the case with the Australoids and the Oceanians; and they treated their women better than did the brutal Australoids. But their tribes or clans were constantly at war with one another, and this fact rather than any scarcity of food was the cause of their being in small numbers after many thousands of years of settlement in this large and fertile island. At the end of the eighteenth century—when Tasmania was first explored by Europeans—it was estimated that the aborigines numbered a total of between six and seven thousand. Between 1800 and 1830 they were reduced to only two hundred by warfare with the invading English settlers, by murder, by the effects of alcohol, and the spread of European diseases. After 1830 the two hundred gradually died out, till in 1876 the last of the old Tasmanian race expired.

[CHAPTER III]

Spanish and Portuguese Explorers lead the Way to the Pacific Ocean

It is remarkable what a bait to the European in discovery have been both spices and strong perfumes, once so popular in cookery and in the toilette. The Romans and Greeks were drawn through Egypt to the Indian trade by the pepper and cinnamon of India and Ceylon, by the sweet-smelling woods and gums of India and Further India—sandalwood, eaglewood, benzoin, storax, dragon's blood from the Calamus palm, rasamala—the resin from a liquid-amber tree of Java. It was to reach pepper-and-spice-producing regions that the Portuguese (and after them the English) were drawn into the exploration of the Guinea coast; and that the Portuguese felt impelled to circumnavigate Africa, so as to gain unfettered access to the commerce of India. The search for an Atlantic route to India and China impelled Spaniards and English, under Genoese and Venetian leadership, to discover Tropical and North America. And having reached India, Ceylon, Sumatra and Malacca, the Portuguese found that the most precious of all spices (cloves and nutmeg) still lay in undiscovered regions to the East—the Maluk or Muluk Islands, as they were called by Arab seamen: a name afterwards corrupted to Moluccas.

When Malacca on the Malay peninsula had been conquered by the Portuguese, the great viceroy Albuquerque dispatched in the same year, 1511, one of his boldest captains—Antonio de Abreu—to search for the Molucca and the Banda Islands, whence the Malay ships brought cloves and nutmegs. De Abreu touched at Java and the Sunda Islands and reached first Amboina, a small island off the south-west coast of Ceram; then passed on northwards till he again anchored off Ternate, one of the smallest of the five small Spice Islands lying close to the west coast of the big island of Jilolo. Here he found the clove trees growing, and probably met Chinese junks trading in cloves: for the Chinese had for several previous centuries been accustomed to travel as far afield as Papuasia in their quest of spices and perfumes. In 1512 de Abreu discovered the little Banda archipelago, lying in the open sea to the south of Ceram, and consisting of twelve islets, all very small, and one of them containing a terrific volcano, Gunong Api—which occasionally becomes active and devastates the neighbourhood of its cone. Just as the original "Moluccas"[24] were five very small islands (Ternate, Tidore, Mare, Mutir, and Makian), off the coast of Jilolo, and were the only places, in those days (besides the not-far-distant island of Bachian), where the right kind of clove tree grew; so the Banda Islands—only 17 square miles in area altogether—were the only home of the proper nutmeg, though inferior nutmegs grew on some of the other islets off the coast of Ceram and the west end of New Guinea.

Cloves nowadays are cultivated on other equatorial islands far away from eastern Malaysia; but in the sixteenth century they were only to be obtained from the Moluccas. The clove tree is a member of the great Myrtle family, and belongs to the genus Eugenia. It grows in favourable places to a height of 40 feet, bears a rich evergreen foliage of large oval leaves, and clusters of long, slender crimson flowers growing at the extremity of the twigs. These flowers have their petals concealed in the centre of the calyx opening, but the sepals (false petals or petal-like leaves which often precede the real petals in flowers) stick out in four projections round the mouth of the calyx. These tubular flowers, with their four short sepals at the ends, are in fact the cloves of commerce. They are gathered when ripe, and are a bright crimson in colour, afterwards turning brown or black. The nutmeg (the name is a mixture of English and old French and means musk nut) is the fruit of a tree with the Latin name of Myristica, which has a natural order all to itself, Myristicaceæ. It is evergreen, grows to about 50 feet in height in the Banda Islands, and bears male and female flowers without petals, that are green in colour and inconspicuous. The female flowers produce a quince-like downy fruit, which when mature and dry splits and reveals inside a walnut-like nut surrounded by a network of crimson fibre. This fibre is as precious as the actual kernel or nut, for it is the spice known as mace, quite distinct in flavour and use from the actual nutmeg. This last is, of course, the kernel of the hard-shelled nut which is surrounded by the crimson fibre of the mace, and the outer husk of the pear-like fruit.

The Portuguese—to put it vulgarly—soon knew they had got hold of a good thing in these small islands of clove and nutmeg trees. They established themselves more or less as the rulers of the Moluccas, with their headquarters at Ternate. But they treated the Malay subjects badly, and these were soon on the lookout for the arrival of other foreigners whom they could play off against the Portuguese. Yet for some ten years the Portuguese had no rivals in Malaysia. Their conquests and discoveries spread far and wide. They entered into relations with Celebes, reached the Island of Mindanao (the southernmost of the Philippines), and even passed out into the open Pacific, and sighted the Caroline islands of Micronesia. They seem also to have been the first to discover the western promontories of New Guinea, the Island of Timor, and to have had news of a continental territory to the south—Australia—all of which information soon afterwards reached the Spaniards, who put it to practical use.

Among the Portuguese, who thus became acquainted with the Spice Islands of eastern Malaysia, was Fernão de Magalhaẽs—stupidly miscalled, in English literature, Magellan. His earlier story has already been told in a previous volume of this series.[25] Having been very badly treated by the King of Portugal, Magellan and several of his friends and relations passed over into the service of the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, which were about to become the great kingdom of Spain. It will be remembered by the reader that, in 1494, the King of Portugal and the King and Queen of Aragon-Castile, to avoid quarrelling about the marvellous discoveries their adventurers were making, had concluded the Treaty of Tordesillas under the auspices of the Pope, a treaty which practically divided between these kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula all the non-Christian world outside Europe and the Turkish Empire. Their boundaries were a meridian of longitude running from pole to pole, and cutting the globe into two divisions. The meridian was fixed at a distance of 1110 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, and more or less coincident with the fiftieth degree of longitude west of Greenwich. Consequently, in the west it gave Portugal the Brazilian part of the South American continent; while on the other side of the globe the corresponding meridian (130° E. of Greenwich) cut off the Portuguese from entering into possession of all Australasia, and afforded Spain the pretext of attempting to reach Malaysia from the east (across the Pacific), and thus of laying claim to the Spice Islands which might be found to lie outside the Portuguese sphere. [As a matter of fact, when the longitude was correctly calculated, both Philippines and Moluccas lay in the Portuguese domain.] The great Spanish adventurer, Nuñez de Balboa, had in 1513, "from a peak in Darien" near the isthmus of Panama, sighted the Pacific Ocean, which the Spaniards at first called the Southern Sea. The Portuguese realization of the wide ocean which lay to the east of Malaysia, combined with the news that Central America had on the western side of it an ocean at least as vast as the Atlantic, decided Magellan to propose to the new ruler of Spain, the Emperor Charles V, the great project of finding a way round—or a strait through—South America, and the complete fulfilment of the original plan of Columbus—the reaching of the Indies by a western route across the Atlantic. His proposals were accepted, and he was given, in 1518, command over a little fleet of five ships,[26] the largest of which (the San Antonio) was only 120 tons in capacity and the smallest 75 tons. He left Spain on September 21, 1519, to search for this passage round or through South America to the Southern Sea. His expedition included 190 Spaniards, and a number of Portuguese, Genoese, and other Italians—including the famous Lombard geographer of those days, Antonio Pigafetta—several Frenchmen and Flemings, one Englishman (named Andres, a gunner from Bristol), and one or two German gunners or artillerymen. The first account given to the world of this first-recorded circumnavigation of the globe was written by the accomplished Antonio Pigafetta, who accompanied Magellan from mere love of knowledge, and was one of the few who actually returned to Spain after voyaging right round the world.

Magellan explored the east coast of South America for an opening which should lead into the other sea. At first he thought he had found it in the estuary of the Rio de la Plata, but as soon as he noticed the water was fresh he continued southward along the coast of Patagonia, spending five months in that region to rest ships and men, and quelling a dangerous mutiny, till at last he found a likely opening between the mountains of Patagonia and the snowclad peaks of Tierra del Fuego. He had already lost the smallest of his ships on the Patagonian coast, and in the Straits of Magellan the San Antonio deserted and sailed back to Spain; but the crews of the others remained faithful to Magellan after their captains had taken anxious counsel together. At length these three little vessels rounded "Cape Deseado"—the desired Cape—and found themselves within sight of a mighty ocean at the end of November, 1520; an ocean which seemed so calm after the stormy Atlantic that Magellan called it the "Pacific Sea".

After emerging into the Pacific Ocean, Magellan's three ships voyaged for ninety-six days without stopping at any land, and the crews went for no days (from the Straits of Magellan to the Ladrone Islands) without getting any kind of fresh food. "We ate", wrote Antonio Pigafetta, "biscuit which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms and stinking terribly because it had been befouled by rats. We drank yellow water which had been putrid for many days. We also ate ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the mast from chafing the shrouds, which had become exceedingly hard because of its exposure to sun, rain, and wind. These pieces of hide were soaked in sea water for four or five days and then placed for a few minutes on top of glowing charcoal and afterwards eaten." But in their hunger the men often ate sawdust, and as to the rats that were caught, they were sold at a high price. Scurvy soon broke out, and the gums of the men's jaws swelled so that some could not eat at all, and therefore died of starvation—nineteen in all, amongst them a giant Patagonian captured in South America to be carried back to Spain. And thus they sailed some 12,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean. "Truly it was very pacific," wrote Pigafetta, "for during that time we suffered no storm. We saw no land except two desert islands on which were found nothing but birds and trees." The water round them swarmed with sharks. But that they were favoured with such good weather, and sailed a steady 180 to 210 miles a day, they "would all have died of hunger in that exceeding vast sea". But Magellan held on with a tenacity which leaves Columbus behind in resolution, for Columbus reached land on his first voyage after only thirty-six days of anxious expectancy, whereas it was the ninety-seventh day of Magellan's long agony before a land was reached which was likely to be of use as a place of refreshment.

They noted that the skies in this Southern Hemisphere were not so full of stars as in the North, but they also observed the splendid Southern Cross with five bright stars pointing straight towards the west. They passed not far from the Marquezas Islands. Apparently the only land they sighted on their way across the Pacific, except the small islands frequented by birds, was St. Paul Island, of the Paumotu group, and perhaps Malden Island. Magellan's voyage, amongst other things, was remarkable for what he missed quite as much as for what he attained. It is wonderful to think that he sailed across the Pacific from the coast of Chili to Guam, which is well within the Asiatic region, and only sighted land four times, and then only in the form of small and desert islands. His chiefest desire, however, was to get out of stormy latitudes into the peaceful equatorial belt, and to reach as quickly as possible the comparative security of the known, not liking to trust the fate of his crews to unknown lands which might be without good supplies of fresh water and food, and be peopled by savages incapable of understanding them. For it must be remembered that his previous experience had given him a great deal of insight into the islands of Malaysia, and he had managed to obtain from Sumatra before he started on this great voyage an interpreter named Henrique, who spoke Malay as his native tongue.

On the 6th March, 1521, the Spaniards sighted three islands, of which one was higher and larger than the other two. Off this the next day they came to a stop. It was afterwards known as the Island of Guam. The inhabitants, without any fear, boarded the ships and stole whatever they could lay their hands on, even wrenching off and carrying away the small boat that was fastened to the poop of the flagship. Thereupon Magellan in great anger went ashore with forty armed men, burnt many houses and canoes, and killed seven of the natives. He recovered his small boat and the expedition immediately sailed away. Yet so terrible was the craving for fresh food on board that when the sick men, dying of scurvy, realized that the armed party were going on shore, they begged them to bring back the entrails of any man or woman they might kill, the eating of which these poor mad sailors believed would restore them to health!

It is noteworthy that the Spaniards when they landed fought with crossbows and arrows, which were in those days much more effective weapons than the guns of the period. The Micronesian people they met on the Island of Guam they described as going naked, many of the men being bearded and having black hair that reached to the waist. They wore small palm-leaf hats, were as tall as the Spaniards, well-built and of tawny skin, with teeth turned red and black by the chewing of betel. The women, who were good-looking, delicately formed, and much lighter in complexion than the men, had black hair which was worn loose and reached almost to the ground. The women did not work in the fields but stayed at home, weaving mats and baskets from palm leaves. The mats were beautifully made and used to decorate the walls and the floors of their houses. They slept on palm straw, which was soft and fine. Their houses were built of planks and thatched with banana fronds. The food of the people was chiefly coconuts, sweet potatoes, fowls, bananas (really long plantains 1 foot in length), sugar cane, and flying-fish. The chief amusement of both men and women was to plough the seas with their small boats, which were usually painted black, white, or red. Pigafetta describes the outriggers, and says the sails were made of palm leaves.[27] Having no fixed rudder, but only using a long paddle for such a purpose, and the boats being sharp at both ends, they could be sent backwards or forwards without turning round.[28]

At dawn on 16 March, 1521, the expedition sighted high land. This was the Island of Samar, on the eastern side of the Philippine archipelago.

Magellan's first thought was for his sick men, and to give them some chance of recovering he landed them on an uninhabited islet, put up tents there, and had a pig killed to provide fresh meat. Two days afterwards they saw a boat coming towards them and nine men in it. These were very different from the wild-natured barbarians of Guam. They were evidently familiar with the idea of white men and white men's ships, being of course Malays. They were described by Pigafetta as "reasonable men". Presents were exchanged, the Spaniards giving red caps, mirrors, combs, bells, ivory, and cotton cloths of Turkish manufacture. The Philippine Islanders offered fish, a jar of palm wine, a few coconuts, and bunches of long bananas. They promised further supplies of fresh food in a few days, but in the meantime the coconuts seemed to the Spaniards perfectly delicious, and Pigafetta wrote a long description of the tree and its many useful products, and of the nuts with their rich pulp and pleasant-tasting milk.

The name of St. Lazarus, because of the saint's day on which they were first discovered, was given to the islands of this archipelago.[29] The people encountered in the coast regions of these western and southern Philippine Islands do not seem to have been negritos or little negroes like those of the great Island of Luzon, but all more or less of the Malayan-Mongolian stock. They had very black straight hair which fell to the waist; went nearly naked except for cloths round the waist—but some of these cloths were beautifully embroidered; and in the waistbelt the men thrust large daggers ornamented with gold.

The expedition passed on between the islands of Samar, Leyte, and Mindanao, and came to anchor off a small island named Masawa, now not easily identified, but apparently between Leyte and Bohol, arriving there on 7 April. The ruler of this islet, whom they referred to as "the king", received them with some wonderment but great friendliness, and expressed a wish to enter into brotherhood with Magellan. The king understood the Malay spoken by the interpreter on board, for, says Pigafetta, the kings of these districts knew more languages than the common people. He presented Magellan with a basketful of ginger and a large bar of gold, which for some reason or other the great Portuguese would not accept. The next day, Good Friday, the king came on board Magellan's ship, embraced him, and gave him three porcelain jars full of raw rice, two very large fish, and other things. He received in exchange a Turkish dress and a fine red cap, while to his courtiers were given knives and mirrors. The king and Magellan made brotherhood together. In order to impress him, Magellan had one of his men put into complete armour, and then placed this man in a group of three men armed with swords and daggers, who forthwith struck him in all parts of his body, but of course did him no harm; "thereby the king was rendered almost speechless". Magellan went on to impress the monarch with the fact that one of these armed men was worth a hundred naked savages, and as there were 200 men in the ships armed with this steel armour from head to foot, the expedition was invincible.

Magellan, and amongst other people Pigafetta, went on shore to return the visit. They were received by the king on the stern deck of a very large prau or native vessel[30] (about 70 feet long). Here pork was brought to them, together with jars filled with palm wine. Although it was Good Friday, they were obliged to sink their religious scruples and feast with the king. Pigafetta then applied himself to writing down a vocabulary in their language, with which feat the natives were greatly astonished. Later on, when it was time for the evening meal, two large porcelain dishes were brought, one containing rice and the other pork and gravy. After this meal was consumed the party of Europeans went to the king's palace, which was raised up high from the ground on huge posts of wood, so that it was necessary to ascend to it by means of ladders. There more food was brought, a roast fish cut in pieces and freshly gathered ginger and palm wine. As it grew dark, lights were furnished, a kind of candle made of resin wrapped in palm or banana leaves. All the party went to sleep where they were, and when day dawned Pigafetta and the Spaniards returned to the ship.

He relates that pieces of gold of the size of walnuts and eggs were found by sifting the earth in the island of Masawa. All the dishes of the king were of gold, and also some part of his furniture. The king is described as being a fine-looking man, with glossy black hair hanging down to his shoulders, a covering of silk on his head, two large golden ear-rings, and a cotton cloth embroidered with silk covering him from the waist to the knees. At his side hung a dagger, the haft of which was of gold. Moreover, this king had anticipated American fashions, and had three plugs of gold let into each front tooth, while gold seems also to have been rammed in between the teeth. He was perfumed with storax and benzoin, and his skin was tatued all over. A brother king was apparently chief of the northern part of the great Island of Mindanao, lying to the south. On Easter Sunday Magellan decided to land with his chaplain and have Mass celebrated on shore. He came with fifty men unarmed and dressed in their best clothes. The two kings of Masawa and Mindanao embraced Magellan and were placed with him in the procession. Before the commencement of Mass Magellan sprinkled their bodies with musk water. Apparently at that time all these Malay people of the eastern Philippines were pagans, and had not been converted to Muhammadanism.[31] They were favourably impressed with their first experience of Christianity, and eagerly took part in the service of the mass. They exactly imitated all the Spaniards did, kissing the cross and remaining on their knees with clasped hands at the elevation of the Host.

When Mass was over, Magellan arranged a fencing tournament, at which the kings were greatly pleased.

Magellan, becoming very friendly with the King of Masawa, asked if he had any enemies whom he wished to be destroyed. The king replied that there was indeed one island hostile to his rule.

After a cruise round the islands in the centre of the archipelago—in the course of which they killed a very large fruit-bat, "as big as an eagle", and ate it, finding it to resemble chicken in taste; and also observed the mound-building megapodes (see p. 30)—they reached the important Island of Sebu or Zubu (Cebu). Here the king of the island asked them to pay tribute, and pointed out a ship which had just arrived from Siam to fetch gold and slaves, but which had paid tribute or customs duties to him. But Magellan, through his interpreter, caused the king to be told that he was the captain of so great a monarch that he did not pay tribute to any other prince in the world; that if he wished peace he could have peace, but that otherwise the Spaniards were quite ready for war. The interpreter went on to point out that the employer of Magellan was the great Emperor of the Christians and the King of Spain, a much more powerful monarch than the King of Portugal, though this last had conquered all the coast of India. After consideration, the king decided to make blood brotherhood with Magellan, and even desired to know if he should pay tribute to the Spaniards. Magellan replied, No; it was sufficient that he should give them liberty to trade. Magellan, in his conversations with the notabilities, impressed on them the importance of the Christian religion, promising them if they became Christians they would have perpetual peace with the King of Spain.

Pigafetta accompanied Magellan and his party on shore to visit the King of Sebu. They found this prince in his palace surrounded by many people. He was seated on a palm mat on the ground, an embroidered scarf round his head, and nothing but a cotton cloth about his waist, in order, no doubt, that his elaborately tatued skin might be duly exhibited. He wore, however, a necklace of great value and two large gold ear-rings set with precious stones. In person he was fat and short. At the time the visit took place he was eating turtles' eggs out of porcelain dishes, and had four jars full of palm wine in front of him, covered with sweet-smelling herbs and arranged each with a small reed in the jar, through which he sucked up the palm wine. The Spaniards, whilst joining him in his feast of turtles' eggs and palm wine, renewed their exhortations to him to adopt the Christian religion. He put the question aside for the time whilst he treated them to a concert at which four young girls played on instruments like gongs, "so harmoniously that one would believe they possessed a good musical sense". They were nearly as white skinned as Europeans, and as beautiful, with long black hair. The gongs were made of brass, and apparently came from China. They were, in fact, very like the musical dinner gongs from Japan so much in vogue at the present day.

The king decided to adopt Christianity as his religion, but he complained that some of his chiefs did not wish to follow his example. However, they yielded apparently to Magellan's arguments and agreed to the setting up of a cross. On 14 April, at a ceremonial arranged with great splendour by the Spaniards, the King of Sebu was baptized and given the name of Don Carlos, after the Emperor Charles V. The heir apparent was called Don Fernando, the friendly King of Masawa was named Juan, and all the leading chiefs and notabilities, to the number of 500, were similarly baptized and given Christian names. In the evening the chaplain of the fleet went ashore and baptized the queen[32] and forty of her women. In all, the Spaniards baptized 800 Filipinos. One village on an islet, which refused baptism for its people, was burnt to the ground.

On the following day the queen came with great pomp to hear Mass. Three girls preceded her, carrying other specimens of her tiara hats in their hands. The women who accompanied her were nearly naked, the queen herself being again dressed in black and white, with a large silk scarf crossed with gold stripes. Having made due reverence to the altar she seated herself on a silk embroidered cushion. Magellan then arose, and before the commencement of the Mass sprayed her and her women with rose-water.

In spite of the natives telling Magellan at first that they worshipped nothing but a god in the sky, they seem to have had a number of fetishes to which they paid reverence, especially when pleading for recovery from sickness. These idols were mostly made of wood, were hollow, and were probably representations of wild boars. Magellan incited the people to the destruction of their idols in order that their conversion to Christianity might be better affirmed. This they did, crying out: "Castilla, Castilla!" as they threw the idols and the meat consecrated to them into the flames.

The islet on which a village had been burnt as punishment for its refusing Christianity was called Maktan, and towards the end of April the chief of Maktan sent messengers to Magellan with a present of two goats, and a request that he would send soldiers to assist him in fighting another chief on the islet who had refused allegiance to the King of Spain. Magellan decided to go himself with three boatloads of soldiers. Many of his officers entreated him not to take such a risk, but he persisted, and reached Maktan three hours before dawn with sixty armed men. He then sent messengers to the refractory chief, calling on him to recognize the King of Sebu as his immediate sovereign, and to give in his allegiance to the Crown of Spain and pay the Spaniards tribute. The natives sent back a warlike message. The Spaniards advanced, but found the people had dug pit-holes before their houses in order that they might fall into them. In the village the Spaniards were attacked by about 1500 people, who charged down on them with shouts and cries. The musketeers and the crossbowmen discharged their pieces with little effect on natives who leapt hither and thither incessantly, and covered themselves nimbly with their shields, while at the same time they shot so many arrows and iron-tipped bamboo spears at the Spaniards (besides pointed stakes hardened with fire, stones, and mud) that Magellan and his sixty soldiers despite their armour were overwhelmed. Eight of the soldiers were killed, and Magellan was shot in the leg with a poisoned arrow. [The steel armour of which Magellan boasted seems to have been of little avail.] The order to retreat was given, and as the small party waded back through the water to the boats Magellan was killed by the impetuous assault of the natives, who hurled themselves upon him and practically cut him to pieces. He fought long for his life, and ever and again turned his face seaward, to assure himself that his men were safely retreating to their boats. Some of the Spaniards, it is true, stayed to see what was happening to their captain, but their defence of him seems to have been half-hearted, and as soon as he was down they made the best of their way to the boats.

The King of Sebu is said to have wept on hearing of the death of Magellan (on 27 April, 1521). Nevertheless, this death changed very considerably the attitude of the king and his chiefs towards the Spaniards. It was now realized that the armoured Europeans were mortal like the Filipinos, and could be killed in battle. Therefore a plot was laid to get rid of them altogether, a plot apparently instigated by the Sumatra interpreter already referred to, who was a slave and wished to regain his liberty. By means of fair words, invitations to a banquet, and promises of a present of jewels for the King of Spain, the King of Sebu lured on shore twenty-four Spaniards, including "an astrologer" and the commanders of three of the ships.[33] Pigafetta, fortunately for our records of this voyage, could not go, as he was suffering from the wound of a poisoned arrow in his face. The Spaniards, soon after they landed, were set upon by the natives, and all of them killed except the Malay interpreter. One commander, Juan Serrano, was seen running down to the beach nearly naked and wounded, and crying out to the Spaniards not to fire any more, as he too would be killed. He then told them how the others had been massacred, and begged that he might be redeemed with merchandise. He made a special appeal to his boon companion, the pilot Joam Carvalho, but the latter would not run the risk of sending any boat on shore, and poor Serrano was left weeping on the strand and probably soon shared the fate of his companions.

Off one of the islands near Sebu the survivors of Magellan's expedition decided to burn the ship Concepcion, as too few men were left to work it. There then remained 115 men for the working of the two remaining ships of the squadron, the Trinidad and the Victoria. These two vessels forthwith sailed to the Island of Panglao (off Bohol) where they noticed that the natives were black-skinned and like negroes. Thence they passed to the large southern island of Mindanao, whose principal chief at once made friends with them. The abundance of gold in the possession of the natives of Mindanao was duly noted. From Mindanao the expedition sailed to the little Kagayan islands in the Sulu Sea, where the people had blowpipes with tiny poisoned arrows, daggers with their hafts adorned with gold and precious stones, and wore armour made of buffalo hide. They were more or less Muhammadans, but called the Spaniards "holy beings". The two ships next visited the long island of Palawan, which seemed to their crews the Land of Promise, because they had suffered great hunger before they found it, and were even on the point of abandoning their ships and going on shore that they might not be consumed with famine. Fortunately the king of this country made peace with them quickly. After slashing himself slightly in the breast with a Spanish knife, and touching the tip of his tongue with it in token of truest peace, he invited them to do the same. His people went naked, but they cultivated the fields carefully. They were well armed with blowpipes and thick wooden arrows tipped with fish bones and bamboo, and poisoned. They possessed very remarkable poultry, large and very tame, which were regarded with such veneration that they were seldom eaten, the cocks being kept for fighting with one another. These Palawan people distilled a wine or spirit from rice, which was very strong. They possessed goats and pigs as well as fowls, and grew quantities of rice, ginger, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, bananas, and different kinds of edible roots. Passing from Palawan to the coast of North Borneo, and stopping off the town of Brunei, the expedition was greeted at one place by a chief who sent to meet the Spanish ships a very beautiful prau, the bow and stern of which were illuminated with gold, while it hoisted a white and blue banner surmounted with peacocks' feathers. This prau contained a band of musicians and eight old men who were chiefs. These came on board the Spanish ships and took seats on a carpet, presenting the Spaniards with a painted wooden jar full of betel paste, jasmine, and orange blossoms, a covering of yellow silk cloth, two cages full of fowls, a couple of goats, three jars of arrack (rice spirit), and bundles of sugar cane. They gave some presents to the other ships, and, after embracing the Spaniards, took their leave. Six days later the king of this district sent three more praus with great pomp, which encircled the ships whilst bands of music were played and drums beaten. Amongst the food given to the Spaniards were "tarts made of eggs and honey". The king and queen of this region—the sultanate of Brunei—were sent green velvet robes, violet velvet chairs, a good many yards of red cloth, writing-books of paper and a gilded writing-case, needlecases, drinking-glasses, and caps.

The Spaniards, being invited to land, dispatched a party on shore, who found elephants awaiting them, on which they rode to the house of the governor of the port, where they slept on beds with cotton mattresses and cotton sheets, and had an excellent supper. The next day elephants were supplied to bring them to the king's palace, where they found 300 foot soldiers with naked swords guarding the king. A brocade curtain was drawn aside from a large window, and through it they could see the Sultan of Brunei seated at a table chewing betel. They were told they could not speak to the king, but they could send their message through his courtiers. One of these would communicate it to the brother of the governor, and this man would send it by means of a speaking-tube through a hole in the wall to another official who was in the king's chamber. They were taught to make three obeisances to the king with their hands clasped above their heads, raising first one foot and then the other, and then kissing their hands towards him.

The king was graciously pleased from a distance to reply to their greetings, that since the King of Spain desired to be his friend he was willing that they should have food and water and permission to trade. After they had returned to the governor's house nine men arrived from the king carrying a splendid repast on large wooden trays. Each tray contained ten or twelve porcelain dishes full of veal, chickens, peacocks, and fish, in all thirty-two different kinds of meat, besides fish and vegetables. After each mouthful of food the visitors drank a small cupful of rice spirit and ate sweetmeats with gold spoons. During the night their sleeping quarters were lit with torches of white wax in tall silver candlesticks, and also with oil lamps, each containing four wicks. Two men sat by each lamp to snuff it continually during the night. They were sent back the next morning on elephants to the seashore, while native vessels conveyed them back to the ship.

The town of Brunei (now a miserable place) was a water city like Venice, the houses being raised on poles rammed into the mud. The king was a Muhammadan, and, as can be seen, his state enjoyed a very large measure of Eastern civilization, derived from traffic with the Arabs, from ancient Indian influence, and from direct trade with China.

A few days later, however, the Spaniards took fright at the approach of a fleet of a hundred praus, cut their cables and hoisted their sails. They were pursued by one or two of the native boats, but they soon beat these off with their guns. In attacking these vessels they captured a number of prisoners, some of whom they released; retaining, however, nineteen Malays (three of them women) for the purpose of taking them to Spain.[34]

As to the Malay junks or ships with which they had now come into contact, Pigafetta writes an interesting description. The hull of the vessel was built of planks fastened together with wooden pegs, the carpentry being very clever and neat; but at a height of about 15 inches above the water level the construction was continued with large bamboos. The masts were of bamboo and the sails were of bark cloth, or palm-leaf matting.

North Borneo, like the Philippines, had long been semi-civilized by intercourse with China. All well-to-do people possessed porcelain dishes and cups, and the Muhammadan Malays used bronze money impressed with Chinese characters. The Bornean Malays had a curious habit of taking small doses of mercury (quicksilver), not only to cure illnesses, but in the belief that it prevented sickness by purging the body. Pigafetta also relates that the Sultan of Brunei possessed two pearls as large as hens' eggs, so round, however, that they would not stand still on a table. These pearls came from the south-western islands of the Philippine archipelago. They had belonged to the king of the principal island of the Sulu archipelago, whose daughter had married the Sultan of Brunei, and had unwisely boasted of her father's pearls as big as hens' eggs. Her husband determined to get possession of them, by force if necessary, so had assembled a fleet of 500 praus (or, as another variant of the story puts it, 50), and sailing by night he surprised the King of Zolo, or Sulu, and two of his sons, and carried them off to Brunei, where he held them as captives until the pearls were delivered to him.

Pigafetta realized the immense size of the Island of Borneo—the second largest island in the world, only New Guinea being of greater area if Australia be considered a continent—he was informed that it took three months to sail round it in a Malay prau. It was a region that produced camphor,[35] cinnamon, ginger, myrobalans,[35] oranges, lemons, water-melons, cucumbers, gourds, and many other vegetables and fruits; buffaloes, oxen, swine, goats, fowls, geese (derived from China), deer, elephants, and horses.

After leaving Brunei the two ships directed their course towards the Sulu archipelago, which lies between North Borneo and Mindanao. They seem to have made little scruple of behaving like pirates towards any Malay prau which could not offer much resistance. In this way they captured a vessel full of coconuts, which was a great resource to them in the way of food. They found a perfect port for repairing ships in Bungei, one of the Sulu Islands. Here they stayed for forty-two days, everyone labouring hard, their greatest fatigue, however, being the journey backwards and forwards to the forest barefoot (probably because their shoes were worn out) to hew timber for the ship's needs. On the island of Bungei they found many wild boars (of the species Sus longirostris), with very long heads 2½ feet in length, and with big tusks. There were also huge crocodiles, and on the seashore immense Tridacna clam shells, the actual flesh of one of these clams (a clam is something like an oyster) weighing as much as 44 pounds. Here also they observed the marvellous leaf-insects, which Pigafetta not unnaturally imagined to be a miracle of nature, leaves which became alive and walked about when they fell to the ground. He kept one of these in a box for nine days, and at the end of that time the leaf-insect was still active, though no doubt it soon died, since he believed it fed on nothing but air.[36]

Stopping off the coast of the large island of Mindanao, the southernmost part of the Philippines, they again captured a Malay vessel (killing several of its seamen) apparently only for the purpose of getting information about the right course to pursue in order to reach the Spice Islands. From these captives they obtained, besides other information, the story that in the southern parts of Mindanao existed a race of hairy men who were fierce fighters and used bows and arrows with great effect. They also possessed swords or daggers, and when they were successful in battle they cut out the hearts of their slain enemies and ate them raw, seasoned with the juice of oranges or lemons. These hairy people were called Benaian.

Sailing away from Mindanao the two Spanish ships encountered a furious storm, and in their terror the crews lowered all the sails and offered up fervent prayers to God for their safety. "Immediately our three patron saints of San Nicolau, San Elmo, and Sta. Clara appeared to us like torches of light on the maintop, mizentop, and foretop.[37] We promised a slave each to St. Elmo, San Nicolau, and Sta. Clara, and offered alms to each saint." After this the storm abated and the ship found a welcome refuge in a harbour, where again they captured forcibly Malay seamen to show them the way to the Molucca Islands.

At last, on 8 November, 1521, they reached the five islands known as Maluk or Molucca, and on that date came to an anchor in a harbour of Tidore, where they fired a tremendous salute with their artillery. The next day the king of the island—evidently well used to Europeans and their ways—came off in a prau, and a deputation of Spaniards went in a small boat to meet him. They found him seated under a silk awning which sheltered him on all sides, and in front of him squatted one of his sons holding the royal sceptre, and on either side were persons with jars ready to pour water over his hands, while two others held gilded caskets filled with betel paste. The king bade the white men welcome, and said that he had dreamt some time ago that ships were coming to the Molucca Islands from remote parts, and from that assurance he determined to consult the moon, whereupon he had seen the ships coming. He then came on board; all kissed his hand and led him to the stern, where he was honoured with a red velvet chair and given a yellow velvet robe made after the Turkish fashion. The king professed his desire to become the most loyal friend and vassal of the King of Spain, and declared that henceforth his island would no more be called "Tadore" (or Tidore), but Castilla, because of the great love which he bore to the mighty sovereign of Spain.

This Malay chief of Tidore was a Muhammadan, about forty-five years old, well built, of royal presence, and much skilled in astrology. He was clad in a shirt of delicate white muslin, the ends of the sleeves embroidered in gold. Round his waist, and reaching to the ground, was a coloured cloth, while a silk scarf was wrapped round his head, and above it was placed a garland of flowers. He asked for a royal banner and a signature of Charles V, and he would then place his dominions, which included the Island of Ternate, under the direction of Spain. He would also load up the ships with cloves, so that they might return to Spain with good commerce.

Eight months previously a notable personage had died in the Island of Ternate, poisoned by the orders of this same King of Tidore. He was a Portuguese, Francesco Serr[~ao], who had been, curiously enough, a most intimate friend of Magellan, and who was apparently the brother of the Jo[~ao] Serr[~ao], or Juan Serrano, the commander of the Concepcion, who had been left behind and perhaps killed at Sebu. Francesco Serr[~ao] had been sent as captain of a Portuguese ship to the Moluccas in 1511, and had remained in those islands partly on account of disasters having happened to his ship. In course of time he became a very great man, and the Prime Minister, so to speak, of the King of Ternate. He had married a woman from the Island of Java. It was he who had strongly incited Magellan to attempt to reach the Moluccas by way of South America and the Pacific. But Serrano, having excited great jealousy by his powerful influence over the King of Ternate, was poisoned by this same King of Tidore, now so friendly towards the Trinidad and the Victoria; and soon afterwards the King of Ternate was likewise got rid of by means of poison, and so the monarch of Tidore was the chief person then in the archipelago of the Moluccas.

Whilst remaining at Tidore to load up with cloves, Pigafetta collected some information about the large island of Jilolo lying to the east.[38] He describes it as being inhabited both by Muhammadan Malays (on the coast) and by Papuan heathens (in the interior), and says it was very rich in gold, and that it grew enormous bamboos as thick round as a man's thigh, the segments of which were often filled with water that was very good to drink.

When the King of Tidore heard of their piracies, and of the number of Malay seamen they had captured, he dealt with the question humanely and diplomatically, suggesting that all these prisoners should be returned by him to their island homes, where they could make known the greatness and splendour of the kingdom of Spain. This the Spaniards consented to do, reserving only the people from Brunei, who, as already related, were brought to Seville. As the king was a very zealous Muhammadan, they also killed all the swine on board to please him, and he in return gave them a large number of goats and fowls, besides quantities of vegetable food, including sago derived from the sago palm, which was the principal nourishment of these Molucca Malays.

In the Island of Ternate there arrived presently a Portuguese in a Malay prau, who gave them very interesting information derived from the visit a year previously of a Portuguese ship. The survivors of Magellan's expedition learnt then that the main facts of their voyage had become known to the King of Portugal some time after their departure, and that ships had been sent to the Cape of Good Hope and to other places to prevent their passage. When it was learnt that they had rounded South America and made their way across the Pacific, an attempt was made to dispatch a Portuguese fleet of six ships to the Molucca Islands to capture Magellan's expedition. But this fleet was prevented from accomplishing its purpose through its being detained in the Red Sea by the necessity of fighting a Turkish fleet.

Whilst the two ships stayed at Tidore many festivities took place in connection with the visits of chiefs or kings of the other Molucca Islands. These Malay princes came in their praus, some of which had three tiers of rowers on each side, in all 120 rowers, and they hoisted great banners made of white, yellow, and red parrot feathers. Gongs of bronze and brass were sounded and timed to the rowers' actions. Sometimes the praus would be filled with young girls, female slaves (though not feeling any of the misery of slavery), who were to be presented as household servants to the daughters of chiefs betrothed to this and that heir apparent. The kings of the islands sat on rich carpets, no doubt received by indirect trade from Persia. They wore cloths of gold and silk manufactured in China, and the women were clad in beautiful silk garments from the waist to the knees. They brought with them, amongst other presents for the King of Spain, "two extremely beautiful dead birds". These were as large as thrushes, with a small head and a long beak. They were of a tawny colour, but with beautiful long plumes of a different tint.[39] The natives who brought them called them the Birds of God, and said that they came from the terrestrial Paradise. This was probably the first mention in our European literature of Birds of Paradise.

At last the ships were ready to go, in December, 1521. Juan del Cano (or de Elcano, as it is sometimes written), an officer hitherto scarcely mentioned, had been elected captain of the Victoria, and the command of the Trinidad had been given to Espinosa, replacing Carvalho, the pilot, who had behaved very badly in regard to the captured natives as well as towards the members of the expedition. [It was Carvalho who refused to stay and ransom poor Juan Serrano.] The Victoria set sail on her way towards Timor and the Indian Ocean, when her cruise was suddenly stopped by the news that her consort the Trinidad had suddenly developed a dangerous leak. They found the water rushing in as through a pipe, and pumping was useless. The kindly King of Tidore sent down divers, who remained more than half an hour under water, endeavouring to find the leak. Some of these even remained an hour under water (this no doubt was a great exaggeration), and, by wearing their long hair loose, attempted to find the leak by letting it be drawn by the suction of the water towards the place. But it was decided at last that the Victoria should start for Spain and the Trinidad remain behind for repairs.[40] The Victoria therefore left with a crew of forty-seven Europeans and thirteen Malays, chiefly from Borneo.

The Victoria on her way to Timor passed the Shulla Islands (Xulla), and heard from their Malay pilots that the inhabitants were naked cannibals. In other islands there were pigmies (negritos); others, again, were more civilized, producing rice, pigs, goats, fowls, sugar cane, and a delicious food made of bananas, almonds, and honey, wrapped in leaves and smoke-dried, then cut into long pieces. Buru Island was noted (though they did not land there) as inhabited by Muhammadan Malays on the coast and cannibal savages in the interior; also the Banda Islands, producing mace and nutmeg. After leaving the vicinity of Buru the Victoria encountered a fierce storm, which drove them to seek refuge in a harbour of a lofty island[41] which was inhabited by savage, bestial people, eating human flesh and going naked, except that their warriors wore armour made of buffalo hide and goatskins. They dressed their hair (like the New Zealanders) high up on the head, held in position by long reed pins, which they passed from one side to the other. Their beards were wrapped in leaves and thrust into small bamboo tubes. They were the ugliest people Pigafetta had seen, and were armed with bows and arrows of bamboo. Nevertheless they behaved in a friendly way to these Spaniards and sold them quantities of provisions, beeswax, and pepper.

On 26 January, 1522, the Victoria reached the Island of Timor, where it laid in a great supply of buffaloes, pigs, and goats. The people, though going almost naked, wore many gold and brass armlets and ear-rings, and bamboo combs in their hair adorned with gold rings.

On 11 February, 1522, the Victoria sailed away from Timor into the great Indian Ocean. She was only a little vessel of 85 tons, and she had to buffet her way amidst various storms and high waves across the southern Indian Ocean, as far as the forty-second degree of south latitude before she could beat up north and round the Cape of Good Hope. The sufferings on board were terrible, the ship leaked badly and the pumps were always going, the provision of buffalo meat had putrefied, as they had had no salt to preserve it. There was little other food than rice. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope it took them a further two months before they could land anywhere to obtain fresh provisions, and twenty-one men died of scurvy and starvation during this terrible period. At last, constrained by their despairing condition, they stopped off the Island of Sant Iago, in the Cape Verde archipelago, which for some time had been a settlement of the Portuguese. Here they sent a boat ashore for food, with a concocted story to deceive the Portuguese into believing that the Victoria was a ship coming from Spanish America and driven out of her course by storms. But on its second voyage to the shore the boat, containing thirteen men, was detained, because, having no money, they offered cloves in payment of the things they purchased. Seeing from a distance that the men had been arrested, the captain of the Victoria felt obliged to abandon them to their fate and hastily sailed away.

At last, on 8 September, 1522, the Victoria, having sailed into Spain up the Guadalquivir River, dropped anchor at the quay of Seville and discharged all her artillery in crazy joy at this return to the Motherland. On the following day all the survivors of this wonderful expedition—eighteen in number—went in shirts and barefooted, each man holding a candle, to visit the shrines of Santa Maria de la Victoria and of St. Mary of Antiquity in two different churches. As to the thirteen men left behind, they were not so ill treated after all by the Portuguese, but were ultimately dispatched to Seville, so that it may be said of the five ships which started with Magellan in 1519 to reach the Moluccas by way of the Pacific Ocean only one returned to Spain—the Victoria, the Trinidad having been lost near the Spice Islands; while of the original 265 men (more or less) who left Spain in 1519 only 36 returned to Spain after circumnavigating the globe—18 in the Victoria, 13 in Portuguese ships from the Cape Verde Islands, and 5 survivors from the Trinidad sent back by the Portuguese from Malaysia.

In spite of all these disasters, however, the cargo of cloves and spices brought back by the Victoria sufficed, not only to pay the whole cost of the equipment of the original expedition of five ships, but left a profit of about £200 in value over and above.

This fact, as well as the information (no doubt much exaggerated) about the Philippines and Borneo and the gold to be met with in these islands, made a deep impression on the Court of Spain, and not many years elapsed before further attempts were made to reach Malaysia across the Pacific from Spanish America, the Spaniards being precluded by their agreement with Portugal from adopting the more convenient route round the Cape of Good Hope.

As already related, the Spaniards and Portuguese were out of their reckoning in regard to longitude when they supposed that any part of the Philippines or the Moluccas lay to the east of 130° of E. longitude, and consequently within the domain of Spain. They believed that the Moluccas did come within the Spanish sphere, while the Philippines were, by the same reckoning, Portuguese. After a good deal of wrangling the matter was settled in 1529. A considerable sum of money was paid by Portugal to Spain, the Spanish claim to the Spice Islands was withdrawn, and nothing was said about the Philippines. This archipelago, a few years afterwards, was tacitly recognized as within the Spanish sphere, which also included the lands afterwards to be styled New Guinea.

Borneo thus became part of the Portuguese "sphere of influence" (as it would now be called), though this large island had first been visited by Magellan in Spanish ships. The Portuguese attempted to enter into relations with the then powerful Muhammadan sultanate of North Borneo (Brunei), but (according to the Portuguese chronicler, Barros) their efforts came to nothing through a very curious mischance. Realizing that the Sultan of Brunei was a very powerful prince, a Muhammadan, and therefore much in touch, through Arab and Persian traders, with the civilized world, it was resolved to send him, by the embassy dispatched from Ternate to Brunei in 1528, a selection of really superior and costly presents. Amongst these was a large piece of tapestry illustrating in a most lifelike manner the marriage of Catherine of Aragon (afterwards the unhappy wife of Henry VIII) to Arthur, Prince of Wales—the first link, possibly, in the long history of the relations between the British and North Borneo. But the figures thus portrayed by the needles and wool of industrious Spanish women seemed to the superstitious Malay sultan a work of subtle magic. He believed them to be real persons sent to sleep by the spell of a magician, and that some night they would be released from their enchantment, come to life, and slay him as he slept. So the Portuguese envoy was dismissed, the presents declined, and no political relations entered into between North Borneo and the Portuguese. This was one reason, probably, why the Dutch, not having been preceded by the Portuguese, got no foothold in North Borneo, and therefore left this side of the island open to British administrative enterprise in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Spanish research in the Pacific was resumed five years after the return of Sebastian de Elcano in the Victoria in the autumn of 1522. In 1528 two Spanish ships, intending to sail from Mexico to the Philippines, were blown out of their course in a storm and accidentally discovered the Hawaii Islands. They were wrecked there, and such of the crews as were saved from drowning—amongst them were several Spanish women—could not get away from Hawaii, and settled down there for the rest of their lives, marrying the people of the country, and no doubt leaving a strain of Castilian blood in the ruling classes of these cannibal islands.

Hawaii was, however, again visited by Spanish ships in the middle of the sixteenth century; and when, long afterwards, the archipelago was rediscovered by Captain Cook, the people were found to be practising several Spanish customs. The real fact is that Spain knew a good deal about the Oceanic islands in the sixteenth century, but out of jealous dread that her monopoly of the Pacific Ocean might be invaded by other European nations she kept this geographical knowledge, set forth in her charts and logbooks, hidden in her State archives, only to be revealed in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when there was no longer anything to conceal from the adventurous French and English.

In 1542 the Philippines were again visited by Spanish ships under the command of Lopez de Villalobos, who penetrated to the large northern island of Luzon. On his return to Mexico he named this archipelago after Philip, the heir to the Spanish throne. In 1564 an expedition under Lopez de Legaspi was dispatched from the west coast of Mexico to the Philippines for their conquest and their conversion to Christianity. Four ships conveyed 400 Spanish soldiers and a few friars or missionaries. Between 1565 and his death in 1572 Legaspi had actually achieved the wonderful feat of founding the city of Manila in the large island of Luzon, and making the Spanish power predominant over all this large archipelago. A number of the natives became converted to Christianity, and only the Sulu Islands and Palawan remained Muhammadan.

In 1579 a new portent appeared in the Far East. In the month of November there arrived at the Island of Ternate, from nowhere, as it seemed, an English ship, the Golden Hinde, commanded by Francis Drake. This most remarkable English adventurer—then only thirty-four years old—had been purser to a ship trading to the north of Spain when he was only eighteen, and by the age of twenty-two had not only made a voyage to Guinea, but was commanding a ship as captain in an attack on the Spaniards off the coast of Mexico. In 1577 he had navigated the Straits of Magellan in the Golden Hinde (originally the Pelican, which he renamed thus as a remembrance of the heraldic device of Sir Christopher Hatton and a mark of joy at having safely reached the Pacific Ocean), had sailed up the west coast of South America, attacking and plundering Spanish ships and towns "till his men were satiated with plunder"; and, failing to find another Magellan's Straits in North-west America to take him back to the Atlantic, had boldly sailed from the coast of New Albion (the modern State of Washington) aslant the Pacific Ocean and steered a straight course for the Moluccas.

The Portuguese, of course, were then predominant in the Spice Islands and elsewhere in Malaysia, and with them Drake had no quarrel. He therefore sailed on to Java (after nearly coming to grief by striking a rock off the coast of Celebes), and from Java made his way round the Cape of Good Hope to the Guinea coast, and thence to the Azores and England. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth on board the Golden Hinde at Deptford, after the queen had partaken of a banquet on board the famous ship which had sailed round the world in two years and ten months.

His voyage was a splendid answer to the Spaniards, who believed themselves perfectly safe from interference in the waters of the "great Southern Ocean", and who forbade the rest of the world to trade with America and Australasia. Within eighteen years it was to be followed up by Dutch and British attacks, by way of the Cape of Good Hope, on the Portuguese and Spanish monopoly of intercourse with the East Indies and Malaysia. It is, however, only fair to mention that in the matter of commercial morality the British, French, and Dutch were no more enlightened than the Spaniards. Each sought in turn to make their oversea dependencies regions closed to the trade of other nations than themselves, and even to restrict the commerce of their Asiatic, African, and American colonies to privileged persons or companies.

The Spaniards who sailed to the Moluccas in the two remaining ships of Magellan's squadron had practically got into touch with Papuasia, with the lands of New Guinea and its surrounding islands; and had realized that in this direction there lay a new Negroland, a "New Guinea", in fact. Exactly when the New Guinea coast was reached from the west—whether by Alvaro de Saavedra the Spaniard in 1528, or in 1511 and 1526 by the Portuguese who had taken possession of the Moluccas—is not known; nor by whom this very appropriate name was first given. Probably it was named "Nueva Guinéa" in 1546 by a Spanish captain—Ortiz de Retez—who mapped a portion of its northern coast. The impression that this vast island—the biggest in the world—was first called "New Guinea" by Torres when he reached its southern shores in 1607 is incorrect; he, seemingly, was only recognizing a land already named thus for its great superficial resemblance to West Africa. But the Spaniards had heard rumours from the Malay sea captains of a vast land eastward of the Moluccas where there was gold in abundance, besides beautiful birds and curly-haired black people. They jumped to the fantastic conclusion that here lay, not only the Earthly Paradise, but also the Ophir from which Solomon had derived his gold. Mingled with these beliefs was the ever-growing conviction that in this direction must lie a great Southern Continent; and to search for this an expedition was dispatched in 1567 from Callao, the principal port of Peru, under the command of Alvaro de Mendaña de Neyra, with the express purpose of discovering the great Antarctic continent and the "Islas de Salomon". Mendaña voyaged for eighty days across the Pacific, more or less through the equatorial belt, and thus discovered and named the Solomon Islands[42] to the east of New Guinea, believing that they might prove to be the Ophir from which Solomon had derived gold. His expedition surveyed the southern portion of the group, giving to three of the large islands the Spanish names, which they still bear, of San Cristoval, Guadalcanal, and Ysabel.

Juan Fernandez was a Spanish pilot who appears to have given some study to the Straits of Magellan. About 1572 he was venturing out some distance into the Pacific Ocean from the coast of South America, and thus discovered the two little islands which have ever since borne his name, and which proved for a time such an important harbourage and resting place for the Dutch and English navigators who flouted the prohibition of Spain to enter the great Southern Ocean. Fernandez conceived the idea that there must be some large extent of land in the southern half of the Pacific Ocean, and he may have sighted Easter Island, or some other Pacific archipelago, and have believed that it was an indication of the coast line of this Terra Australis.

Mendaña de Neyra, who had returned to the coast of Peru in 1570, was very anxious to organize at once another expedition to extend his discoveries. He was not enabled to do so until the year 1595, when he again started from the coast of Peru with a fleet and a number of Spaniards who were to colonize the Solomon Islands. On his way thither he discovered the Marquezas archipelago (which now belongs to France). Sailing along a course which was more or less that of the tenth degree of south latitude, his ship at last reached the little island of Santa Cruz, the northernmost of an archipelago which is now associated with the group of the New Hebrides. Here, for some reason, his expedition came to a stop, and he landed and attempted to establish a portion of his crew as settlers. But the climate, or some other cause of ill health, brought about the death of Mendaña and many of his companions. He had been accompanied on this cruise by his young wife, who played a heroic part in rescuing the remainder of the expedition. After Mendaña's death, one of his pilots, Pedro Fernandez de Quiros (a Portuguese), brought the remains of the Spanish fleet to Manila in the Philippines. Then in one vessel he boldly sailed back across the Pacific to Peru, and thence made his way to Madrid, where he revealed to the Spanish Government the stories gathered from Malays regarding the existence of a great Southern Continent. He obtained permission from the Court to search for this Terra Australis, and for this purpose returned to South America and started on his quest from Callao (Peru) in 1605. The Viceroy of Peru associated with him, practically as admiral in command of the expedition, Luis Vaez de Torres, as well as a second ship. Directing his voyage across the southern Tropics instead of the northern, de Quiros discovered a small island, which long afterwards was renamed Osnaburg by Cook. A few days afterwards he passed one or more islands of the Tahiti archipelago, which he named "Sagittaria", probably from the month (February, under the zodiacal sign of Sagittarius) in which they were discovered. Sailing on westwards he next reached the group of the New Hebrides. This he believed to be a portion of the coast of the Southern Continent, and he named its largest island[43] Australia del Espiritu Santo, or Australia of the Holy Ghost, this being the first time that the word Australia came into being. He did not pursue his investigations any farther, because his ship's crew mutinied and forced him to sail back again to Mexico.

But his admiral, Luis Vaez de Torres, suddenly abandoned by the ship which had de Quiros on board, was less certain about the actual discovery of this continent, so in 1606-7 he pursued a westward course and thus passed through that strait which separates northern Australia from New Guinea, and thence sailed to the Philippines. He was consequently the discoverer of what is now the British province of Papua, and of the important Torres Straits.

For a long time the Spaniards kept these explorations as State secrets, for they were becoming very much alarmed at the progress in oversea exploration of the Dutch and English. The existence, therefore, of Torres Straits, separating the Australian Continent from the huge Island of New Guinea, remained practically unknown to the world of Europe until the voyages of Captain Cook, more than 150 years later. In fact, Cook, when he rediscovered and mapped the strait between North Australia and New Guinea, was not aware that he had been preceded in that direction by Torres. When, however, this fact was made clearly known through the archives of Spain, the name of the bold Spanish seaman was very appropriately (in 1796) given to a strait of water which is one of the most noteworthy passages from the Pacific to the Indian Oceans, and which may some day become of great importance in the world's history.

[CHAPTER IV]

Dutch Discoveries

In the Malay Archipelago and the Spice Islands both Portuguese and Spanish were attacked by the Dutch, and gradually dispossessed from the end of the sixteenth century onwards. The Dutch had established themselves in the Moluccas in place of the Portuguese between 1604 and 1609, in which year the Portuguese were driven from the Nutmeg Islands of Banda. The Hollanders were followed almost immediately by the English. The merchant adventurers of both nations (who were seamen, soldiers, and pirates at will) soon penetrated to the western peninsulas of New Guinea and ousted the Portuguese from Java, Celebes, and southern Timor, but at first made little or no attempt to pass beyond Malaysia in search of the southern continent. By the conquest of Malacca in 1641 the Dutch had become practically masters of the Malay Archipelago, the Spaniards being confined to the possession of the Philippines (which they administered from the west coast of America across the Pacific),[44] and the Portuguese only lingering on in the islands of Timor and Flores, while the English had been expelled from the Spice Islands and Java, and merely retained a precarious foothold in Sumatra. Encouraged by these successes to seek for further lands that might be conquered, settled, or traded with, the Dutch began to take up the quest for the Terra Australis as soon as they were established as the masters of the Moluccas and Banda.

In 1615 a bold Dutch navigator, Jacob le Maire (of French extraction), determined, in spite of the prohibition of the Dutch East India Company, to find his way independently to the seas and lands of southern Asia by way of the extremity of South America. He sailed in company with another sea captain, Schouten, and together they discovered and named Staten Island and the celebrated Cape Horn, the southernmost extremity (a little island) of South America, and since famous as the stormiest cape in the world's seas. From this point they followed closely the coast of South America till they got into equatorial latitudes, and then steered boldly across the Pacific Ocean, either not noticing or actually not seeing the many islands or islets that must have been near their course. Apparently the first land they sighted was the north-east coast of New Guinea, after which they got among the Spice Islands and thus eventually reached Batavia, where they were so severely punished by their fellow countrymen for their splendid adventure that Le Maire ultimately died before he could reach Holland. Previous to this date, however, the Dutch had evidently known something about the Australian Continent[45] (of which it was generally believed that New Guinea was a portion), and they no doubt derived this knowledge from information given to them by Malay pilots, and picked up from the Portuguese; for in a work published in 1598 by the Dutch historian, Cornelius Wytfliet, the following passage occurs: "The Terra Australis is the most southern of all lands, and is separated from New Guinea by a narrow strait.... It is ascertained by some to be of so great an extent that if it were thoroughly explored it would be regarded as a fifth part of the world." There is a tradition also that in 1606 a Dutch ship, the Duyfken or Little Dove, which was on its way from Java to the western part of New Guinea, was driven out of her course by a typhoon and sighted the north-east coast of Australia (Cape York Peninsula) as far south as Cape Turnagain. Some of the crew landed, but were repulsed by the savage natives. In the year following the arrival of le Maire at Batavia, a Dutch ship, the Eendracht, under the command of a navigator called Hertoge, or Hartog, by a similar cause was blown out of his course and touched the north-west coast of Australia at points now known as Shark Bay and Hartog Island. In 1622-3 the Leeuwin (Lioness), another Dutch vessel, penetrated along the west coast of Australia about as far south as Cape Leeuwin. In 1623 an expedition, under a captain named Cartenz, set out for the Southern Continent and explored and named the Gulf of Carpentaria, in north Australia, the name being derived from Carpentar, who was then the Governor of the Dutch East Indies (the authority says "West" Indies). Between 1622 and 1628 other Dutch expeditions, one of them under Pieter Nuyts, explored the South Australian coast ("Nuytsland") as far as the Eyre Peninsula. But from here to Cape York the east coast of Australia remained absolutely unknown till the coming of Captain Cook.

Abel Janszoon Tasman, the greatest Dutch explorer of Australasia (his middle name was equivalent in English to Johnson), was born about 1603 at Lutjegast, near Groningen, in Friesland, not far from the modern German boundary. He was married twice, first when a young man (the second time when he was twenty-nine years old), and about the age of twenty-one joined the service of the Dutch East India Company and started for Java. He revisited Holland in 1637 and returned to the Malay Archipelago in 1638. Although he had started in life as a common sailor he must have acquired a good education by some means or other, for his journals show him to have been possessed of a singularly beautiful and even handwriting, he was a clever draughtsman (assuming the many sketches in the logbook to be by him), and he had thoroughly mastered the science of navigation, so much so, that soon after his arrival in the East Indies in 1634 he was singled out for work of importance and responsibility. In 1638 he made, in company with another commander, a remarkable voyage of exploration to Japan along the coasts of China, and in 1642 he was selected to command the expedition which was to make such important discoveries in Australasia.

His principal vessel, the Heemskerk[46], described as a yacht, was probably of only 150 tons capacity; the second of the two ships, the Zeehaen (Seahen) was a third smaller than the Heemskerk. With these two small ships he left Batavia (Java) on 14 August, 1642, and sailed right across the Indian Ocean to the Island of Mauritius (the home of the Dodo), then occupied by the Dutch, wishing, no doubt, to take as wide a scope as possible for the discovery of the great Southern Continent. From Mauritius he sailed east and south, and did not sight the West Australian coast at all, his course trending so much to the south that instead he crossed the great Australian Bight[47] and first saw land off the west coast of Tasmania, in the vicinity of what is now known as Macquarie Harbour. He at once conferred on this land the name of Anthonij Van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch Indies, and the principal promoter of this exploring expedition. He overlooked the passage to the north (Bass's Strait), and directed his course southwards. On 25 November, 1642, the two ships came to an anchor off the west coast of Tasmania for consultations between the commanders. On the succeeding days they sailed round the south coast of Tasmania, and on 2 December stopped again and sent a pilot in a pinnace with four musketeers and six rowers (all of them well armed) together with another boat commanded by an officer, and containing six more musketeers, to the shore of a large bay (probably Storm Bay) to see if fresh water, vegetables, and timber could be obtained. On the return of these boats the officers reported that they found the land covered with vegetation, but with no signs of cultivation. They brought back with them various wild vegetable products which seemed suited for use as pot-herbs, besides a good supply of fresh water. They reported that they had heard certain human sounds, and noises resembling the music of a trumpet or small gong, but they saw no human beings, though there were notched trees, the notches having been made with implements of sharpened stone, to form steps enabling persons to climb the trees and take the birds' nests. These notched steps (very wide apart) were so fresh and new that they could only have been cut a few days before. On the ground they saw the footprints of clawed animals and other traces showing that there were beasts in the forest. In the interior numerous trees were observed which had deep holes burnt into them, as if to make of them fireplaces and shelters. They also saw smoke rising in clouds from natives' fires. On 3 December a flagstaff was set up on the shore of Frederick Henry Bay, and possession of this new land was solemnly taken on behalf of the Dutch East India Company.

Then they sailed away from what they believed to be the southernmost extremity of Australia, and on 13 December, 1642, they saw "a large high-lying land bearing south-east ... at about 16 miles distance". This was the great southern island of New Zealand,[48] but it was encountered by Tasman at its northernmost extremity and close to the North Island. He sailed, in fact, right into the gulf (then named the Zeehaen's Bight) between two islands, which finds its outlet to the south in Cook's Strait. He overlooked this outlet and believed the gulf to be only a great indentation. Ultimately he sailed northwards past the west coast of the North Island to its northernmost extremity, which he named Cape Maria Van Diemen. At some distance from this were three tiny islets, the size of which he exaggerated. He named them the Three Kings' Islands. On 18 December the two ships came to an anchor about a mile from the shore, off the coast of what is now called Massacre or Golden Bay, not far from the modern settlement of Waitapu. It was sunset, and calm, and as the twilight faded they saw lights on shore and two native boats coming towards them, the men in which began to call to them in rough, "hollow" voices. This people also blew several times on an instrument (probably a conch shell), the sound from which was like that of a Moorish trumpet. The seamen from the ships trumpeted back to them in reply, but when it was dark the native canoes paddled back to the shore. Early the next morning a canoe manned by fifteen natives approached to within a short distance of the ships and called out several times. But the Dutchmen could not understand their language, as it bore no resemblance to the vocabulary of words used in the Solomon Islands, which had been collected through the industry of Anthonij Van Diemen and supplied to Tasman with his other instructions.[49] As far as they could observe, these New Zealanders were of ordinary height, with rough voices and strong bones, the colour of their skin being between brown and yellow. They wore tufts of black hair right on the tops of their heads, tied fast in the manner of the Japanese, but somewhat longer and thicker, each topknot of hair being surmounted by a large white feather. Each of their boats consisted of two long, narrow canoes fastened side by side. Over these twin canoes were placed planks on which the paddlers sat. The New Zealanders, though naked from the shoulders to the waist, wore some kind of clothing (in contrast to the nearly always naked Melanesians). This seemed to be made of a stuff something like woven cotton, or else matting.

In spite of offered presents and friendly greetings these two boats would not come alongside the ship. Later on, seven more canoes came off from the shore, one of which was high and pointed in front. With these nine canoes paddling round and round the two ships, and manned by a number of able-bodied armed men, the Dutchmen became a little uneasy, and the skipper of the Zeehaen sent out his quartermaster in a small boat with six seamen to advise the officers of the Heemskerk not to allow too many natives to come on board, if they wished to do so. But suddenly the little boat of the Zeehaen was violently attacked by one of the New Zealand canoes, with the result that one Dutch seamen was knocked overboard, four were killed, while the remainder, thrown into the sea, swam back to their ship. The natives then started for the shore, taking one of the dead bodies with them (which they no doubt afterwards ate in a cannibal feast). None of the shots fired from the Zeehaen or Heemskerk took effect. The small boat of the Zeehaen was recovered, and the two Dutch ships then set sail, despairing of entering into any friendly relations with these people, or getting fresh water at this place. As they sailed out of the bay they saw twenty-two canoes near the shore, of which eleven, swarming with people, were making for the ships. They kept quiet until some of the foremost canoes were within reach of the guns, and then fired one or two shots without doing much damage, though the natives at once turned their canoes back, hoisted a kind of sail, and made with all speed for the shore. "To this murderous spot we have accordingly given the name of Moordenaers Bay."[50]

TASMAN'S MEN ATTACKED BY NATIVES OFF THE COAST OF NEW ZEALAND

On this same day, 19 December, 1642, Tasman bestowed on this new country the name of Staten Landt, "in honour of their high mightinesses the States-General of Holland". This name seems really to have been bestowed on account of the much earlier discovery by the Dutch navigator, le Maire, of an island off the south-easternmost extremity of South America (Tierra del Fuego), which Tasman seems to have thought to be the beginning of an Antarctic continent, of which New Zealand was the north-westernmost extremity. But after Tasman's return to Java the Governor-General considered that the two regions were too far separated and distinct to be parts of the same land surface; so he changed the named to Nieuw Zeeland (New Zealand), in honour of the Zeeland (Sealand) province of south-west Holland.

On 5 January, 1643, they attempted to land on one of the Three Kings' Islands to fill their water casks before directing their course once more across a wide stretch of unknown ocean, but the heavy surf and the rocks made such an attempt too dangerous. The natives, moreover, were very threatening, standing about on the high land armed with long sticks shaped like pikes, and shouting every now and again what seemed to be hostile utterances. So it was decided to do without the fresh water, in the hope that they might reach other islands farther north where it could be obtained. Accordingly, on 6 January the two ships once more set sail across the Pacific Ocean, directing their course as nearly as possible for the Solomon Islands. On 19 and 20 January they sighted Tropic Bird Island, and two other small islands, which they named Amsterdam and Middelburgh. These were the southernmost islands of the Tonga or Friendly group, probably those which are now known by the names of Tongatabu (Amsterdam, "because of the abundance of refreshments we got there"), Eua (Middelburgh), and Cattow.

"About noon", wrote Tasman on 21 January, "a small canoe with three men in it put off from land and came near our ship. These men were naked, of a brown colour, and slightly above the ordinary stature; two of them had long, thick hair on their heads." The Dutchmen showed white linen to these Polynesians, throwing overboard a piece of 2½ yards. Seeing this, the natives paddled towards it; but as it had sunk to a considerable depth under the water the foremost man in the canoe jumped out and dived for it. He remained under water for a very long time, but at last reappeared with the linen, and when back in the canoe put this several times on the top of his head in sign of gratitude. The natives then came nearer and received from the ships' crews a few more presents, amongst which was a small looking-glass. The Dutchmen then showed them an old coconut and a fowl, and attempted to make enquiries about water, pigs, &c. At last they understood, to a certain extent, and after returning on shore a canoe came back with a white flag, the occupants of which were painted black from the waist to the thighs, and wore necklaces of large leaves. A white flag was fastened to the stern of one of the Dutch boats. The Dutchmen filled a rummer with wine, of which they first drank a little themselves, to show that it was not poison. The Polynesians, however, drank the wine without hesitation, and took the cask back with them on shore. Soon afterwards a great number of canoes came alongside with coconuts, which they bartered for old nails. Other natives swam the whole way from the land to the ships with coconuts for trade. At last an old man came on board one of the Dutch ships who was thought to be a chief. He paid reverence to the Dutchmen by bowing his head down to their feet. They showed him a cup containing fresh water; the native chief implied by signs that plenty of water could be obtained on shore. Meantime other natives had come on board the ship, and exhibited the same shameless thievishness as had angered Magellan. Among other things they stole a pistol and a pair of slippers. The Dutchmen wisely took these articles away from their dishonest visitors without any display of anger. Towards evening twenty canoes came up to the ship, making a great deal of noise and crying out repeatedly: "Wu, wu, wu!" They had brought a present from the king consisting of a pig, a number of coconuts, and some yams. The Dutchmen gave as a return present a common dish and a piece of copper wire.

The next day a quantity of canoes came off with coconuts, yams, bananas, plantains, pigs, and fowls. There also came on board a leper and a bearded woman. The natives were at first frightened by the discharge of the big guns, but soon reassured when they saw that no harm came from this noise. They were entertained with Dutch and German music, at which they were greatly astonished. At last the Dutchmen decided to send a party on shore to get fresh water, and, although the natives seemed to be so friendly, they took the precaution of adding a number of musketeers to defend the watering party. Nothing disagreeable happened, however. Wells were pointed out to them, and they were most hospitably entertained in what seemed to be pleasure houses, where they were invited to sit down on handsome mats. However, the amount of water supplied was perfectly trivial. The next day the chiefs set their men to work to dig larger wells, and the Dutchmen got all the water they wanted. Tasman noted in his journal that the natives here had no knowledge of tobacco or smoking of any kind. Neither men nor women went completely naked (a characteristic feature of the Melanesians), but wore clothing round the waist, which in the case of the women extended to the knees, and was made of the leaves of trees. The women wore their hair shorter than the men, and the latter, as a rule, grew beards about 4 inches long, with very short moustaches, the hair of which was kept clipped. No arms were worn by these people, and all seemed peace and amity in their lives (the "Friendly Isles"). Starting away again on 24 January the two ships passed through the rest of the Tonga Islands, one of which, Nanuka, was named by Tasman the Island of Rotterdam. On one of the islands of the Haapai group the Dutchmen again landed to get fresh water. The party sent to the beach reported on landing that they had seen about seventy persons, apparently the entire male population of the island; they had no arms, and seemed kind and peaceable, and there were many women and children. Nevertheless, these people were very thievish, for they stole everything they could lay hands on—men and women alike. This was a characteristic of nearly all the Pacific islanders when these lands were first discovered, and was a trait which gave rise to many troubles between them and the European explorers, who did not view this practice—not regarded by the natives as being very wrong—with sufficient patience.

At the watering place they saw numbers of wild duck swimming, not at all shy or afraid of men. On this island were noticed many enclosures or gardens, with plots elegantly squared and planted with all sorts of fruits and vegetables. There were groves of bananas and other fruit trees, most of them growing so straight that they were a pleasure to look on (to a Dutch eye enamoured of tidiness), while they gave forth a most agreeable odour and fragrance. Though the natives of these Friendly Islands did not seem to have any well-defined religion, they were very superstitious. Tasman noticed one of them take up a water snake which came floating alongside his canoe, lay it on his head with reverence, and put it back on the water. Above all, they had a great dislike to killing flies, though they were so abundant here as to cause considerable trouble. Whilst the Dutchmen were at anchor one of them had the misfortune to kill a fly in the presence of a native chief, who showed himself greatly angered and upset.

On 2 February the voyage was continued, the ships being now well supplied with fresh water and fresh provisions. A period of rough winds followed, and although the outlying islands of the north-eastern part of the Fiji group (which Tasman named after Prince Willem of Orange) were sighted, the weather was too dangerous for any attempt at landing or investigation. Desirous of reaching New Guinea, the course of the vessels was directed to the north-west. It was not until 15 March that they sailed into smooth water and sunshine, after many days of rain, fog, and rough, south-westerly wind. On 22 March they saw land straight ahead of them at four miles distance—about thirty small islands surrounded by reefs. These, and others farther west, were little archipelagos of minute islands to the north of the Solomon group and near the great island of Bougainville. Probably owing to the very stormy, thick, rainy, and misty weather, Tasman's expedition saw nothing of the islands or islets of the Santa Cruz and New Hebrides groups, or the Solomon Islands, very near to which he must have passed.

On 25 March, 1643, the two vessels anchored off one of these islands of Oceanic Negroes. A canoe came alongside with a number of men whose skins were nearly black and who went quite naked. Some of them had their hair cut short, or wore feathers arranged like horns on the top of their heads. One had a ring through his nose. They carried bows and arrows. From another island on the following day came off more of these black people, "with curly hair like that of the Kafirs", but not so woolly, nor were their noses quite so flat as those of true Negroes. They wore white bracelets, probably of pigs' tusks. Their faces were daubed with lime, and a small piece of tree bark was worn on the forehead. For arms they had bows, arrows, and javelins or stabbing spears. At last Tasman got one of the words of his Melanesian vocabularies recognized; it was the word for coconut (lamas).

By 1 April the Dutchmen were sailing along the coast of New Mecklenburg (then thought to be part of New Guinea). Already Tasman had recognized islands and capes seen and named by his predecessor, le Maire. Every now and again they anchored to buy coconuts. The people who came off from the shore were black skinned and naked. They seemed already somewhat acquainted with Europeans and their ways and to be afraid of guns. They had little or nothing to sell except the pith of the sago palm. Some of these people at a later date (from the island which we now know as New Hanover) came on board and were rendered very dizzy—"intoxicated"—by the motion of the ships, though they never suffered from seasickness in their own canoes. They brought with them a shark and some small fish.

Turning southwards after rounding New Hanover the expedition sighted the real north coast of New Guinea, ignorant, of course, of the fact that hitherto they had only been following large and small islands now known as the Bismarck Archipelago. Off the north coast of what is now German New Guinea they noted a volcanic island with an active volcano, round which there were clouds of smoke. As they coasted along New Guinea, touching at the islands for fresh water and provisions, they observed that the black Papuan natives could imitate whatever words they heard the Dutchmen pronounce, and were remarkable themselves for the number of "r's" which their own speech contained.

Tasman overlooked the deep indentation of Geelvink Bay, which makes a jagged peninsula of nearly half Dutch New Guinea; and rounding the Island of Waigiu his ships passed through the Spice Islands to the Island of Buru, where he found himself once more within the limits of Dutch influence. The two vessels safely regained Batavia, where their crews were received with much honour and rejoicing. "God be praised and thanked for this happy voyage. Amen", wrote Tasman at the end of his journal on 15 June, 1643.

In the opinion of the Dutch East India Company Tasman's wonderful voyage was too imperfect in its results to merit their complete approbation, though he and his companions received a reward in money for their achievements as "Southland Navigators". But it was realized by the Council of the Dutch East Indies that the actual configuration and extent of the Southland was very little known on the eastern side, though there remained above all things the important fact that a passage well within the South Temperate Zone existed between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. In 1644 Tasman and Visscher started on another great voyage of discovery for the special purpose of surveying the regions between what was known of New Guinea and what was already placed on the map as Nieuw Holland, or Nieuw Nederland. This region (New Holland) was only what we now call Western Australia, and was thought perhaps to be an independent island. Eastern Australia, which terminated in Tasmania, was called Zuidland or Southland. If there was a still more easterly Australia it was thought to be united with New Zealand under the name of Nieuw Zeeland, and it was conjectured there might also be a separate island to the south, which in that case would be called Nuytsland. Tasman's first expedition had thrown no light on the products of the countries behind these strips of coast line. All these lands in the south might be of great value, or they might be valueless, consequently much more detailed exploration was necessary. The vessels told off for this expedition "for the true and complete discovery of the Southland" consisted of two large schooners or yachts, the Limmen and the Zeemeeuw (Mew or Seagull), and a much smaller boat, Bracq, called a galliot. On 29 January, 1644, these vessels started, "in the name of God" and under the command of Tasman, assisted by Visscher and other officers, including a draughtsman to make maps of the coast and drawings of any remarkable objects or peoples. Directing his course to the little Banda Islands south of the big island of Ceram, so as to commence his new venture from the westernmost limits of New Guinea, Tasman skirted pretty closely the southern coast of that enormous island, sailing eastwards with the express purpose of finding if it was separated from the mainland of New Holland by a strait of water. In fact—knowing nothing of the previous voyage of Torres—he was in search of the celebrated Torres' Straits, and yet, amazing to relate, though he pushed his ships into the beginning of Torres' Straits he allowed himself to be deceived, by the somewhat numerous islands and islets which dot the waters of this not particularly narrow passage, into believing that the gulf before him was land-locked and not worth further investigations. The strait is in reality about 140 miles wide at its narrowest. Nor is it so thickly covered with islands as to be devoid here and there of far sea horizons, suggesting the existence of wider waters beyond. It is therefore very difficult to understand how Tasman can have allowed himself to be so easly misled. It recalls the similar blunder which so long impeded access to Canada, when Jacques Cartier and others overlooked the Cabot Straits between Cape Breton and Newfoundland, and laboriously sailed all the way north of the last-named territory in order to get into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Double Canoe of the Polynesians Simple Outrigger Canoe
THE TWO DUTCH SHIPS UNDER TASMAN'S COMMAND (THE HEEMSKERK AND THE ZEEHAEN) AT ANCHOR IN THE TONGA ISLANDS, PACIFIC NATIVES BRINGING OFF SUPPLIES OF BANANAS
(From a drawing by Tasman)

The rest of Tasman's voyage, consequently, is not of very great interest to us as regards his pioneering work in Australasia. He made a fairly accurate survey of the Gulf of Carpentaria and of the northern coast of Australia (Arnhem Land), and passing to the west connected this up with the West Australian coast, whence he sailed due north to Java.

The rest of his active life was spent in voyages to the Philippine Islands and Indo-China. He got into disgrace on one of these expeditions by losing his temper and trying to hang several of the seamen who had disobeyed orders. For this he was punished in various ways, amongst others by being obliged to resign his position as one of the elders of the Church. Eventually, however, his affairs righted themselves, and he retained the respect of his fellow countrymen in Java till the time of his death, which occurred probably in the year 1659, at Batavia. In his will he remembered the poor people of his native village, Lutjegast, in Friesland, and left them out of his property a sum equivalent to about £10 each.

Why the Dutch should have discontinued their explorations of Australasia after the return of Tasman in 1644 is not easily understood, since their appetite for a colonial empire was enormous. But, so far as records go, no further ships were sent for a considerable time in that direction, and the Dutch interested themselves a good deal more either in the settlement of South Africa or attempts to secure a monopoly of the trade with China and Japan. It should be mentioned, however, that in 1696 an expedition was sent to search for a missing East India Company's ship which had sailed twelve years previously from the Cape of Good Hope for Java, and this expedition, under Commander Willem de Vlamingh, in examining the West Australian coast for traces of the ship, made a far more thorough survey of that region than had been effected by the chance visits of Dutchmen in the early part of the seventeenth century. It penetrated as far south as the Swan River (on which the West Australian capital of Perth now stands); and de Vlamingh thus named the river because on it he saw wonderful black swans, thought until then to be such an impossibility that amongst Latin writers a black swan was regarded as a symbol of improbability.

Previous to de Vlamingh's voyage, however, the West Australian coast had been visited by an English ship in 1688, the Cygnet, a vessel practically manned by pirates, though they bore the more polite designation of buccaneers, and hailed from the coasts of Tropical America, where they had been plundering the Spaniards. On board this ship was a remarkable pioneer, William Dampier, who held the post of supercargo, and who spent all his spare time in examining the natural history and native races of the regions he visited as an associate of the pirates.

[CHAPTER V]

Dampier's Voyages

William Dampier—the surname, like so many in England, is of French origin—was born, the son of a farmer, at East Coker, near Yeovil, in the south of Somersetshire. His attention no doubt was directed to a seafaring life by the constant intercourse which at that time went on between Yeovil and Weymouth; and when Dampier was about seventeen years old, at his own desire he was apprenticed to the master of a ship at Weymouth, with whom he made a voyage to Newfoundland. But the cold experienced in this voyage so disgusted him that he managed to get his indentures cancelled, and in 1671 engaged himself as an able seaman on a great vessel of the East India Company which was leaving England for Java. He soon returned from the Malay Archipelago, however, and enlisted on board a ship of the British navy, in which he took a small part in the naval war with Holland. Then he was sent out to Jamaica as a plantation manager by the lord of the manor of East Coker (the village in which he was born). Except for a brief visit to England in 1678, when his marriage took place, he lived chiefly in the West Indies and on the coast of Central America. He had soon left the work on a plantation to join the buccaneers, or English, French, and Dutch pirates, who were attempting to break down the supremacy of Spain in the waters of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. With a party of these buccaneers he established himself on the coast of Yucatan to cut log-wood, and after his return to and residence in England between 1675-9 he came back to the neighbourhood of what is now British Honduras. Together with a party of buccaneers he crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and, reaching the Pacific littoral, embarked in Indian canoes. And in these they ranged up and down the coast of Central and South America, attacking Spanish towns and shipping. Apparently they must have captured from the Spaniards something more serviceable for ocean traffic than Indian dug-out canoes, because in 1680 they voyaged across the Pacific as far as the lonely island of Juan Fernandez, on which Alexander Selkirk was afterwards stranded by an English buccaneering captain. Some of his adventures in this direction will be described in another volume of the present series dealing with that region. The success of these bold pirates in capturing Spanish treasure ships and seizing Spanish towns on the coasts of Mexico and Peru, and holding them to ransom, was so great that they decided to return in force and renew their operations to the west coast of South America. Thus with bigger ships they passed through the Straits of Magellan and navigated the Pacific Ocean unopposed.

It is interesting to note that on these truly remarkable voyages, which few living seamen would be heroic enough to undertake, their chief means of sustenance were flour (probably from maize) and chocolate mixed with sugar, besides the fish obtained for them by their Indian companions. The buccaneers afterwards recrossed Central America, and rested for a time in the English colony of Virginia. From this region Dampier accompanied a captain, John Cook, in the Revenge (a privateer or buccaneering ship), on a voyage to the Pacific. They sailed first to the Cape Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic.

On one of the easternmost of this still-little-known archipelago Dampier made some most interesting and truthful observations regarding the nesting of flamingoes, though he jumped to a wrong conclusion as to the attitude in which the female flamingo hatches her eggs; but he observes that a dish of flamingoes' tongues is fit for a prince's table, the tongue of this bird being very large and fat. From the Cape Verde Islands they passed on to the Sherboro River (near Sierra Leone), even in those days an English trading settlement. Then, boldly leaving the West African coast, they steered right across the Atlantic to the extremity of South America, helped by a succession of tornadoes to cross the region of equatorial calms till the trade winds blew them over to the Falkland Islands and round Cape Horn. Soon after entering the Pacific Ocean they fell in with other English ships, quite a number of which were now being dispatched round the extremity of South America to the Pacific Ocean, not so much to make discoveries in that direction as to trade with or to plunder the west coast of South America. To all such the Islands of Juan Fernandez[51] were a favourite and safe rendevous for repairs and for obtaining supplies of fresh water. But that the Spaniards became during the seventeenth century perfectly inept in the matter of defending their monopolist pretensions in seas which they attempted to forbid to the rest of the world, they would have occupied and garrisoned at an early date the principal island of the Juan Fernandez group.[52] On this island—Mas-a-tierra—goats and pigs had been landed by the Spanish pilot, Juan Fernandez himself, in the sixteenth century. They had increased and multiplied, and furnished excellent mutton and pork for ships that called there. There were only two bays in Mas-a-tierra Island (which was about 36 miles in circumference and of very broad, diversified surface, "high hills and small pleasant valleys") wherein ships might anchor. In the vicinity of each harbour there were rivulets of good fresh water. In course of time the goats multiplied to such an extent that they began to destroy the forests, which still in Dampier's time were a prominent feature in the landscapes, and which included not only good timber trees but an Areca cabbage-palm, the head of which formed an excellent vegetable for seafaring people, badly in need of such an addition to their diet. The sea round about Mas-a-tierra swarmed with fish, and was thronged by seals and sea-lions, which came ashore to breed or to bask in the sun. Dampier states that there were possibly "millions of seals", "either sitting on the shore of the bays or going and coming in the sea round the island". Both seals and sea-lions provided the ships with quantities of train-oil, but the flesh of these aquatic mammals was not liked. [Dampier notes with correctness the abundance of seals along the coasts of North and South America, but their relative absence from the seas washing the East Indies, where indeed they only reappear in the far south along the coasts of Australia and New Zealand.]

From the Juan Fernandez Islands Dampier's ship made its way to the Galapagos archipelago, where Dampier duly noted the large, fat, and tame land-lizards—a species of iguana—and, above all, the enormous tortoises "extraordinarily large and fat; so sweet that no pullet eats more pleasantly". A very large tortoise might weigh as much as 200 pounds. He also observed the abundance of turtle of four kinds in the sea round the coasts of this archipelago.[53]

After their stay at the Galapagos Islands Captain John Cook died, and his place was taken by a commander named Davis. Two other English buccaneering ships had joined Dampier's vessel at the Galapagos, and the adventurers spent months which became years in various piratical adventures up and down the west coast of Central and South America from California to Peru. At last a Captain Swan, to whose ship the Cygnet Dampier had transferred himself on 25 August, 1685, decided, probably on Dampier's advice, to return to England by way of the East Indies. Accordingly they steered right across the Pacific from Cape Corrientes on the coast of Mexico to Guam in the Ladrone Islands, a passage in which they had been preceded by Francis Drake in 1580 and Sir Thomas Cavendish in 1588. Of course the terrors of this voyage across some seven thousand miles of sea was diminished by this time owing to the frequent passages made by the Spanish ships between Mexico and the Philippine Islands. Apparently this somewhat northern track across the tropical regions of the Pacific Ocean was relatively free from violent tempests, and at the right season of the year provided with continuously favourable winds in one direction or the other. At any rate, the two ships of the expedition, under Captain Swan and Captain Teat (Dampier being with Swan), set out from Cape Corrientes on 31 March, 1686, and reached Guam on 21 May with only three days' provisions left for the ships' crews. The somewhat strict allowance of food and drink on which all were placed was thought by Dampier to have cured him of a dropsy from which he was suffering at the time of his departure from Cape Corrientes. Their sustenance consisted of ten spoonfuls of boiled Indian corn a day, together with a little water for those who were thirsty; but Dampier noticed that some of the seamen did not drink for nine or ten days at a time, and one man went without any liquid for seventeen days, declaring he was not thirsty. For such as these the moisture in the boiled maize seems to have sufficed. But the men had grimly resolved that they would not long grow hungry if Captain Swan's estimate was at fault. It had been decided that, as soon as victuals failed, Captain Swan should be killed and eaten!