ISLES OF ROMANCE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21473, 22 April 1933, Page 1 (Supplement)

ISLES OF ROMANCE

DREAMING AND AROUSAL

BY MATANCA

Within tho vast rim of the Pacific are uncounted islands, many of them aureoled with romance. Truth to toll, their history holds not a few tales as C rim as: any told about lands fringing this old ocean; but fashions of thought, particularly novelists' thought, have invested them with more glamour than doom. Maybe the habit is good, though it can bo carried too far; and if attention be devoted to pleasant things —a more commendable custom than its obverse —there is always enough, somewhere in this region, to repay tho mental investor with high profit. But tune wrecks many dreams, and the languorous, luxurious Pacific passes even out of fiction into tho realm of austere fact. Omens long seen on its fringe touch the island fastnesses of beauty with invasions of caro. China, Japan, India, Britain, France /ind tho United States have encroached more and more, and a web of conflicting activities is being spun entanglingly about them. Interest still lingers, however, on the peoples that belong, by far earlier migration and settlement, closely to their soil. All told, these peoples are not a great host, not nearly so numerous as fancy usually pictures them: a mere two millions, or thereabouts, at the most. " Child races" we call them, not without reason, but tho description should not suggest puerility. That assumption, often the cardinal political and missionary blunder, is ill based. Adolescents, if you will, these dusky peoples of the Pacific, but not babes and sucklings born in a near yesterday. Even were they so infantile, we should still have to reckon with their lineage and inheritance. Caucasian blood is in the veins of many of them. Words from the Old World peep out of their native speech. Long centuries lurk in their legends. And youth has its own nimbleness and capability. In the arts and pastimes or these peoples is a skill that we, machine-ridden and sedate, may envy. It betokens more than physical aptitudes; there is mental alertness in it. Nor should we forget their finished apprenticeship in many things. Is it of no significance that, when our British ancestry was paddling coracles timidly along Europe's shores,. the forefathers of these peoples were cruising under the stars through long leagues of landless sea? Children, yes; but what children ! Their will may be the wind's will, but most of tbem have long, long thoughts, and some of them are shrewd with ideas that are not easily displaced. Incursion of the Old World They cannot be children, any _of them, much longer. As it is, the impact of Western civilisation has already pushed, some of them out upon the road where our own feet felt strange a handful of centuries ago. Their development cannot be stopped any more than ours, once the impulse has come. To some of them it has come with a vengeance. Some have scarcely sensed it yet, but in a quickly shrinking world nothing is more certain than its coming to them all. Children some of them may almost literally be, but they must grow up with the rest. The only question is " How?" The incursion of our Old W 7 orld into their New is a mingled story of benevolence and brutality. It was no orderly invasion; there was more madness than method. The irruption has less disorder to-day, but it is still far from being a campaign, much less a crusade. Some of these people still rub their eyes and deeply question in their hearts. Five men began it —the navigator, the pirate, the trader, tho official, the missionary; and they went their own ways. The navigator's occupation is not wholly gone, for, though the romance of discovery is nearly all written, the chart-rnaking work is far from done. The pirate —at least the vainglorious variety of him that openly ran up the Jolly Boger—has had his day. The trader, the official, and the missionary are still abroad, no longer in unrelated eagerness to win their several ends, but still often at cross purposes. The trader must be on terms with the official, the official must see the need of the missionary's aid, and the missionary himself, for his work's sake, must be here and there a trader. On the perfecting of co-operation among these three activities the future's safety depends. . m Eddies of Trouble

Thanks to the Great War and the consequent League of Nations, attempts are being made to resolve these somewhat conflicting influences into orderly impact, and to enable these adolescent peoples; to stand on their own feet, ere long, against the perils brought by even the unwitting invader. Yet eddies of trouble ar.2 never absent, and recent happenings on the ocean fringe are bringing fresh clouds from afar, lo know at least the outlines of fact about these islands and their people is incumbent on all wishful to read aright the signs of the times. This knowledge begins with mere geography, but passes to matters of more human concern. Most of the islands cluster in tho south-west. A glance at the map suggests that they are lofty remains ot a continuous tract of land now almost wholly submerged. Research strengthens tho casual impression, lhe highly probable fact has implications not to be neglected. Out from this cluster stand other bits of terra firmaj not over-firm, some of them, but tho "cneral description stands. " The Sandwich Islands of older story—now Hawaii, after a chief member of the group —belong to the United States, as do another considerable group northward of the equator, the Philippines, near China. With them, as knowing the same master, must he counted a part of the Samoan group, and Guam, a naval coign of vantage on the east of the equatorial islands in the hands of Japan. Already tho implications of geography are seen as I such elemental facts are scanned. Japan has Formosa, in tho China boa, as well; so tho plot thickens. The Outlook What may be the outcome of present quarrels —Japan's with China, and possiblv Russia, is only more overt and urgent than the former s attitude to the United States—none can tell, bin there is more likelihood of friction than of fraternity. Japan's withdrawal from the League, with obvious feelings ot distrust and whisperings of defiance to any attempt to dispossess her or iiei mandate in the equatorial Pacific', adds a touch of gravity to the outlook. Jno trouble may pass, but its arising is om in us. If there be nc* gro vi.li or friendship, aloofness will tend to hostility, and a clash bo inevitable. Behind the determination of Japan are the driving necessities of economic conditions —a multiplying population for whom agricultural sustenance cannot be found at home, and whose industrial means of livelihood depends on free and profitable access to sources of raw material elsewhere for domestic manufactures. The outlook is ha r dly serene.