OUR LITERARY CORNER.

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

OUR LITERARY CORNER.

TRAVEL NOTES. III -THE ORIGINS OF THE GILBERTESE. (SPECIALLY WRITTEN FOR "THE PRESS.") By Professor J. Macmillan Brown, LL.D.) Whence man came into long-isolated islands is always an interesting problem because it is wrapped as a rule in mystery. Whence tho Gilbertese came has the additional stimulus of exceptional difficulty. As has been indicated they are strongly reminiscent of the Polynesians in physique. So are they in culture. Like them they are patrilineal and count ancestry through the father, as we do. and base the whole fabric of society and faith on this, whilst the Marshall Islanders and the Caroline Islanders, their immediate neighbours to the north and the northwest, are matrilineal, and count ancestry through the mother. It is a difficulty which those who bring the Polynesians from or through the Malay Archipelago havo never faced, that all the islanders that occupy the six or seven thousand miles of ocean between the west border of Polynesia and the east coast of India count descent through the mother. How immigrants coming through this greatest series of archipelagoes in tho world, in the teeth of the trade winds, could have landed in the Central Pacific without becoming matrilineal, has to be answered, besides many other as difficult questions of practicability, before their theory can be 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 Marshalls, only two days' canoevoyage to north, strongly confirms the evidence of physique for the Polynesian affinity of their people. The same affinity is seen in other and less vital features of their culture; the umu or earth-oven, the use of tho fireplough in making fire alongside of a mechanical drill, which would have reduced tho labour of the process to a minimum, tattooing, the absence of the loom, of the spindle 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 the 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 came from an island to the south-east called, Amoi, containing immigrants lighter in colour and betterlooking than their predecessors, and speaking a different language; after a generation or two the men were killed and the women appropriated the other race. The Wilkes report inclines to think that Amoi was Samoa. But there are difficulties in the phonology; the Gilbortese never used the "s" or "I" of the Samoans, and never omit the "k" as the Samoans universally do; whilst they use "b" for "p" like the Tongans, and turn "ti" and "te" into "chi" and "che," like the Tongans. and the Moriori of the Chatham Islands. And tradition is highly untrustworthy unless confirmed by evidence from physique and culture and language, especially where warlike intruders have become the aristocracy; for they wipe out all preceding traditions, and start the beginning of the race, if not creation, with themselves. GILBERTESE CULTURE DIFFERS FROM POLYNESIAN. And there is a considerable gap in the Polynesianism of the Gilberts. Their taboo system is elementary; their tattooing is stiff, consisting or short, straight, parallel lines like the mokokuri, the ancient tattooing of the Maoris, giving no hint of the spiral ornamentation of New Zealand or the floral ornamentation of Eastern Polynesia ; their oceanic navigation was confined to their own or the neighbouring groups; in spite of their having no forest timber, and having to rely solely on driftwood, they had large canoes, sixty 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 stretched some twenty feet from the gunwale; the last survivor of these 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 and seaworthy double canoe of Polynesia; they lacked some of the more important food-plants of Polynesia, the banana, the sugarcane, the yam, the arrowroot, and the sweet potato; the breadfruit, brought in according to tradition by the two canoes from Amoi, is not to be seen in the 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 some ten feet deep to take advantage of the rain that has soaked through the soil and looser coral, and been stopped by the more compact coralline 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 the 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. The greatest gap is the absence of the Polynesian bark-cloth (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 introduced into Ponape to the 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 the 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 Pacific Ocean Peoples. But nothing shows so clearly how elementary and primitive their Polynesianism was as their gods and their mythology. The Polynesian mythology and cosmology are amongst the richest in the world, worthy to be placed beside the Greek, the Vedic, the Scandinavian, and the Celtic. In the Gilberts there were its bases, ancestor-worship, and the deification of nature powers; every family had a god, to whom offerings were made, and he was evidently a long-dead ancestor. 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 the weather and the giver of the rains that were the essential condition of their existence. The analysis of his name, Tabu-eriki, which means the 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 the right of close intercourse with him. When a voyage is to be undertaken he has to be consulted, and for a fee he falls into a trance and gets into touch with his ancestor; he 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 one 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 were 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 land from which these great trees drift before the wild westerlies is to the north-west, and is called Nabanaba. Now, the source of the 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 the south-west; Ocean Island, west by south of Kuria, where Kirby, the 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 we remember that there axe peculiar features of culture common to the Gilberts and the Carolines, as for example the poncho and the conical hat like the Chinese and Japanese rain hat. According to tho Wilkes report the Gilbertese elysium is called Kainakaki and is away to the west; thither the spirit, when a man dies, after it ascends into the air, is carried by the winds; but 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 Merik, 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 he pecked out the eyes of those who arrived without the proper tattoo marks of recognition so that they should wander blindly about and lose their way. The other world is supposed, to be situated in Gilbert's Island, which is usually identified with Maiana to the northwest, but is called Tavaira in the Wilkes report. I could get no information about' this Kainakaki from either the natives or the oldest settlers. But Merik told me that none of their spirits go up to heaven; some go to Mone (perhaps to be explained by the 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, the 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 the direction of the land of their origin.

GILBERTESE CULTURE LOOKS NORTH-WEST. It looks as if tho Gilbertese came from the north-west, probably as part of a primeval Polynesian migration into the Central Pacific; for they are fundamentally Polynesians "with a difference," and their Polynesianism i s not the full culture such as it was after it was completely evolved in the 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 Ponape and patrilineal descent into the chiefs' households of that island. The language points to the same conclusion. Some thirty per cent, of the words are pure Polynesian; of the 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 the use of a pronominal suffix and of special words to define the application of the numerals to certain classes of things point westward, and not to Polynesia. The phonology has also a westward trend, though it has much in common with Tongan. THE LAND DISTRIBUTION OF THE NORTH-WEST PACIFIC WAS DIFFERENT WHEN 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 the peoples of the Marshalls and the Carolines and the Mariannes intruded upon the primeval Caucasianism of Micronesia. So was it long before Polynesian culture attained its full development in the Central Pacific, or was thrust out in all directions by the subsidence of its lands. That subsidence was probably part of the 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, "The Unpacific Pacific," a series of easy stepping stones for man; even palaeolithic man would find his way in his dug-outs across the north-east trades in the lee of what must have been high, if not mountainous islands, so little distant from each other as to be seen on the horizon. In the existing state or the Pacific one can sail for days, 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 Bligh when set 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-intervalled 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 beyond

what he knew to be solid land. That woman found her way with him right into the 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 south-west or the Gilberts there is not an islet, not even a coral islet, to be found for thousands of miles; to the north-west the 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 be 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 habits; but this seems unlikely in the Pacific islands, where there is 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 "abi" 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 the 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.