Читать книгу Pioneers in Australasia - Harry Johnston - Страница 9

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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.]