OUR LITERARY CORNER.

Press, Volume LII, Issue 15769, 9 December 1916, Page 7

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

TRAVEL NOTES. • • m -THE ORIGINS OF THE GILBERTESE. (UrCULLT WRITTEN FOR "iHE PRESS.") , R _ professor J. Macuiixax Brow*, (BtA LL.D.) Whence man came into long-isolated islands is always an intcrcst.ng probm because it is wrapped as a rule in i vsterv Whence tho Gilbertese came £. the' additional stimulus of exceptional difficulty. As has been "Seated Xv are strongly reminiscent of the Persians in physique. So are they - . ■ lturo Like them they arc patrilineal and count ancestry through the fethrr as wo do. and base the whole alric of society and faith on this, , v |,il,r the Marshall Islander* and tho r-roline Islanders, their immediate nc Vhbours to the north and the north"cT: are matrilineal, and count through the mother. _Tt is a difficulty which thoso who bring the Polvnesians from or through the Malay Vrchipclago havo never faced, that all the inlanders that occupy the six or ceven thousand miles of ocean between tho west border of Polynesia and tho cast coast of India count descent through the mother. How immigrants com in-r through this greatest series of archipelagoes in tho world, in the teeth of tho trade winds, could havo landed in the Central Pacific without becoming matrilineal, has to be answered, besides manv other as difficult questions of practicability, before their theory can bo solidly based. None have attempted to answer as yet. GILBERTESE CULTURE FUNDAMENTALLY POLYNESIAN. The' patrilineal structure of society, with its chiefships and ancestor worship, enters so intimately into the life of a people that it cannot be ignored on questions of racial affinities and origins. Its existence in the Gilberts in contrast to the' 31 arskalls, only two days' canoevoyage to north, strongly confirms tho evidence of physique for the Polynesian affinity of their people. Tho same affinity is 6ecn in other and less vital features of their culture; tho umu or earth-oven, the use of tho fireplough in making fire alongside of a mechanical drill, which would havo reduced tho labour of the process to a minimum, tattooing, tho absence of the loom, of tho spindlo and of pottery, the art of oceanic navigation, and a system of taboo, though less elaborate and less dominant over life, are all of great, but not vital, importance as revealing tho affinity. And the Wilkes Expedition got through the Irishman Kirby whom they, picked up at Kuria, the tradition that two canoes in the early days of settlement camo from, an. island to tho south-east called, Amoi, containing immigrants lighter in colour and betterlooking than their predecessors, and speaking a different languago; after a generation or two tho men were killed and the women appropriated the other race. Tho Wilkes report inclines to think that Amoi was Samoa.- But thero are difficulties in the phonology; the Gilborteso nover used the "s" or. "1" of the Samoans, and never omit the "k" as tho Samoans universally do; whilst they uso "b" for "p" like tho Tongans, and turn "ti" and "to" into "chi" and "che," like the Tongans. and tho Moriori of tho Chatham Islands. And tradition is highly untrustworthy unless confirmed by evidence from physique and culture and language, especially whero warlike intruders have becomer tho aristocracy; for they wipo out all preceding traditions, and start tho beginning of tho race, if not creation, with themselves. GILBERTESE CULTURE DIFFERS FRQLM POLYNESIAN. And thero is a considerable gap in tho Polyncsianism of tho Guborts. Their taboo system is elementary; their tattooing is stiff, consisting or short, straight, parallel lines like the mokokuri, tho ancient tattooing of the Maoris, giving no hint of the spiral ornamentation of New Zetland or tho floral ornamentation ;of Eastern Polynesia ; their oceanic navigation was confined to their own or tho neighbouring groups; in spito of their having no forest timber, and having to rely solely on driftwood, they had largo canoes, Jsixty feet long, ten feet broad, and eight feet deep, all constructed of short planks of various sizes sewn together; but these were steadied by a huge outrigger beam strotched somo twenty feet from the gunwale; the last survivor of theso clumsy craft is under cover at Apemama; I took a photograph of it with King Paul standing by it; they never had the much more commodious anil seaworthy double canoo of Polynesia; they lacked somo of the more important food-plants of Polynesia, tho banana, the sugarcane, the yam, the arrowroot, and the sweet potato; tho breadfruit, brought in according to tradition by the two canoes from Amoi, is not to be seen in tho South, and is but slightly cultivated in the rainy "North; "and their taro is an extremely coarse kind", used in Polynesia only as a last resort; it is still grown in pits somo ten feet deep to take advantage of the rain that has soaked through tho soil and looser coral, and been stopped by tho more compact corallino limestone; their mainstay, as in the Marshalls, .was the fruit of the pandanus, which, scraped and pounded and baked and rammed into cylinders of braided pan-danus-leaf would keep for years; they never used the fermented breadfruit and taro. which kept so long, and was the standby in times of scarcity in Polynesia to the south-west and in the Carolines to tho north-west, although the name they used for their taro, babai, seems to be the same as the Polynesian name for that fermented paste, popoi. TJhe : .greatest gap is the absence of the Polynesian (tappa), and the absence of the Polynesian intoxicant (kava). though the plants for both would have nourished in their taro-pits, and .both had been N introduced into Ponape to tho north-east. Instead of kava they have, alone of all the islands of the Pacific east of the _ Malay Archipelago, an intoxicating drink or toddy made by fermentation of tho liquor that drips from the cut flowerstem of the cocoanut. And this, with their shark's tooth spear and its complement, cocoanut fibre, armour, places them in a category by themselves amongst 5 Pacific Ocean Peoples. .But nothing shows so clearly how elementary and primitive their .Polvnesianism was-as their ' godj and their mythology. The Polynesian mythology and cosmology are amongst the richest'.- in the" world, N worthy to be nlaced.beside the Greeks the'.Vedic the Scandinavian, and the Celtic. In the Gilberts there were its .. bases, ancestor-worship, and the deification of nature powers; every"' family bad a god, to whom offerings were made, and he was evidently a long-dead •acestor. But there was a god com-;

ORIGINAL AND SELECTED MATTER.

NOTES ON BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

mon to the group called Taburik; he was the god of thunder and thunderstorms, and generally the clerk of tho weather and the giver of the rains that were the essential condition of their existence. The analysis of his name, Tabu-eriki, which means tho holy ruler or aristocrat, reveals his origin as a war-lord and ancestor. An old native in Maiana. an island still mainly pagan, in spite of the efforts of various Christian creeds, claims descent from him and tho risht of close intercourse with him. When a voyage is to be undertaken he has to bo consulted, and for a fee ho falls into a trance and gets into touch with his ancestor; ho arranges tho weather with him, and wakening, announces whether it s sale or not to set out. Another little item of information from his relative he often wakens with is that a tree or log is drifting towards the Gilberts and that it is to be his. Though it should be half a dozen years before any driftwood arrives, he claims it as his by virtue of the authority of his divine ancestor. No ono can realise the value of this divine gift who has not visited the Gilberts and seen how few and poor their trees are : for their great canoes and all the great timbers of their maniap or council house they vcro wholly dependent on those drift trees; from them also they often got volcanic stones which were of so great value in islands all coral for heating the steam ovens and for making axes and weapons; and gum they sometimes got from this treasure trove, an essential for caulking and pitching the seams of their canoes. THE OTHER-WORLD OF THE GILBERTS. The lond from which these great trees drift before the wild westerlies is to tlio north-west, and is called Nabanaba. Now, the source of tho other racial element, according to the tradition of its settlement collected by the Wilkes expedition, was Baneba; two canoes came.from that island with fugitives from a civil war in their home; but Baneba lay to tho south-west; Ocean Island, west by south of Kuria, where Kirby, tho narrator of the tradition, had lived, is called Banaba or Panapa; but Ocean Island could never have grown the taro which these two canoes brought to the Gilberts, for it is incapable of having taro-pits; and the great taro of the Gilberts is the taro of the Carolines and its commonest food-plant, and on the Ruk archipelago on Kusaie, and on Ponape there are old forests growing. It seems more than likely that Baneba of the tradition and Nabanaba of the drift-trees is Ponape, or. as it would be pronounced by the Gilbertese, Banaba, especially when wo remember that thero axe peculiar features of culture common to the Gilberts and the Carolines, as for example the poncho and the conical hat like the Chineso and Japanese rain hat. According to tho Wilkes report the trilbertese elysium is called Kainakaki and is away to the west; thither the spirit, when a man dies, after it ascends into tho air, is carried by the winds,; hut only those who are tattooed expect to reach it, and these generally persons of rank; a giantess, called Baine (the Polynesian wahine, a woman) intercepts all others. From Mprik, a native of Nukunau, in the south. I gathered that this guardian of the portal of the other world was a bird-headed god called Rutiperu, and that ho pecked out the eyes of thoso who arrived without the proper tattoo marks of. recognition so that they should wander blindly about and lose their way. Tho other world is supposed, to be situated in Gilberts Island, which is usually identified with Maiana to the northwest, but' is called Tavaira in tho Wilkes report. I could get no information about' this Kainakaki from either the natives or the oldest settlers. But Merik told mo that none of their spirits go up to heaven; some go to Mone (perhaps to bo explained by tho Polynesian moni, to swallow or consume or annihilate), which is a land below the sea, whilst others go by way of Tarawa aud Makin to Naka or Kainakaki, which is also called Nabanaba, tho country whence drift-logs come. This seems to place their elysium in the Carolines, and by preference in Ponape. And the elysiums of ancestorworshippers are generally in tho direction of the land of their origin.

GILBERTESE CULTURE LOOKS NORTH-WEST. It looks -as if tho Gilbertese camo from tho north-west, probably as part of a primeval Polynesian migration into tho Central Pacific; for they are fundamentally Polynesians "with a difference," and their Polyncsianism i s not the full culture such as it was after it was completely evolved in tho Pacific; its fragmentary and inchoate character makes it impossible that it could have arisen from a reflux out of Polynesia such as carried kava into Ponapo and patrilineal descent into tho chiefs' households of that island. The language points to the same conclusion. Some thirty per cent, of tho words are pure Polynesian; of tho rest about a. third is Polynesian mutilated almost past recognition; the residuum is difficult to orient; but has more affinity to the languages of the Carolines than to either Polynesian or the language of the Marshall group. There as little or no formal.grammar, though tho use of a pronominal suffix and, of special words to defino the application of the numerals to certain classes of things point westward, and not to Polynesia. The phonology has also a westward trencL though it has much in common with, Tongan. THE LANT> DISTRIBUTION OF THE NORTH-WEST PACIFIC WAS DIFFERENT WJtLEN THE GILBERTS- WERE FIRST PEOPLED. Language and culture and development of physique both point to a very ancient settlement, before the negroid (element or the mongoloid that is apparent in the physique of tho. peoples of the Marshalls tho Carolines and tho Mariannes intruded upon tho primeval Caucasianism of Micronesia. So was it long before Polynesian culture attained its full development in tho Central Pacific, or was thrust out in all directions by the subsidence of its lands. That subsidence was probably part of tho great movement which, in human times, filled up the primeval volcanic fissure of the Western Pacific stretching from the coast of Japan to Easter Island. And the subsidence of the Gilbert area must have been part of the same movement. From Japan to the Gilberts and onwards must have had in early human times, as I showed in a previous article, "Tho Unpacific Pacific," a series of easy stepping stones for man; oven palaeolithic man would find his way in his dug-outs across the north-east trades in the lee of what must havo been high, if not mountainous islands, so little • distant from each other as to bo sees on tho horizon. In the existing state or the Pacific one can sail for and in some parts for weeks, without seeing the sign of land. Mendanya, the Spanish navigator in the sixteenth century, sailed right across from Peru till he struck the Solomons without seeing any land but two islets. And Blign when sot adrift in his long-boat away in the Eastern Pacific by the mutineers of his ship the Bounty, sailed right across the great ocean without seeing a single island. Such wide-interyalled land was not .likely to be populated from any shore; early man, with his unsteady dug-outs and his dread of the.unknown, and what lay beyond the horizon, especially on the restless, devouring ocean, would shrink from venturing • l - ITona

what he knew to "be solid land. That woman found her way with him right into tho Pacific is proof enough that there were once closer stepping-stones than there are now; for -woman was as a rule excluded from fishing excursions, tho usual occasions for drift; fishing throughout tho great ocean is tabu to her. To the -west and eouth-west or tho Gilberts there is not an islet, not even a coral islet, to be found for thousands of miles; to the north-west tho whole ocean is stippled -with volcanic as well as coral islands, right up to Japan. Along this line, when the fissure in the subcrust of the earth was still unfilled, the -whole curve must have been lit with vulcanism. and closely paved with volcanic projections; the vegetation must have been rich, and tho forests and seas full of food for man ; then it would be the most natural thing in the world for him to push across straits with his family to new islands in pursuit of sustenance. And with him went in his canoe, the pig and the dog. as they go with Pacific Ocean man still. SUBSIDENCE EXPLAINS MOST OF THE ANOMALIES. One of the anomalies of the Gilberts is that neither of these animals lived in the group till the -whalers came, although the language has two names for the dog, the Polynesian, kuri, and a word, kamea. which is said to bo the native transformation of the whalers' "Come here." Kirby, the marooned Irishman, whom the Wilkes Expedition found on Kuria in 1841, explained the absence of the pig by the objection of the natives to its filthy habi.ts; but this seems unlikely in tho Pacific islands, where there (s a wide range for their grubbing, and where in so many regions women suckle the little pigs at the breast. The same anomaly attaches to Easter Island. And its only feasible explanation seems to be the same in both cases; the subsidence of the old volcanic lands and their forests would destroy both animals. The frequency of tho word "mVi" or "api" in the names of islands in the Gilbert Group points also to ancient vulcanism; it is said in Gilbertese to mean "land" ; but in its identity with the name of so many actively volcanic islands in the Malay Archipelago, it reveals its relationship to tho commonest word for fire in the Pacific Ocean, the Polynesian form of which is '"ahi." It is not unscientific to imagine the Gilbert and Ellice Groups in earlier human times aflame with mountainous torches -that lit a greater area of islands than now breaks at long intervals the monotony and loneliness of the great ocean.