THE ISLAND WORLD

OF THE

PACIFIC.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY AND GENERAL VIEW OF POLYNESIA.

The soil untill'd

Pour'd forth spontaneous and abundant harvests
The forests cast their fruits, in husks or rind,
Yielding sweet kernels or delicious pulp,
Smooth oil, cool milk, and unfermented wine,
In rich and exquisite variety:

On these the indolent inhabitants

Fed without care or forethought.—Anon.

He sat and talk'd

With winged messengers, who daily brought
To his small island in the ethereal deep,
Tidings of joy and love.-WORDSWORTH.

EVER since the revival of commerce that preceded the discovery of America, when Columbus was sent, according to his dream, "to unchain the ocean," the oceanic world of islands east and west has been acting like a magnet upon men's curiosity. To the mind of

eager youth and sober manhood almost alike, there is an imaginative charm in the very word island; and when you add South Sea or Pacific, the fascination is complete and irresistible. Implying, as it does,

remoteness, isolation, solitude, separateness, and linked as it is with romance and fable, adventure and song, it takes a powerful hold on the human imagination.

Island, in the Hebrew Scriptures, is any distant country approached by water. In what is called the Bishops' Bible, we find it always written iland or yland, from the Danish Eiland and Saxon Iegland, composed of ie, water, and land. Our present word island, according to Webster, is an absurd compound of the French isle and land, which signifies land-inwater land, or rather ieland-land; and it would be more accordant with etymology if it were always written ieland, that is, land made up out of and surrounded by water. This is, properly speaking, true of all land; both according to the cosmogony of Genesis and to the aqueous theory of geology, it is always land-in-water land, or earth standing in the water and out of the water. The great globe itself is but one of the islands in the vast ethereal deep of space comprchended within the limits of our solar system; and the far-reaching instruments of modern astronomy bring to light island-universes in the depths of immensity, whose outskirts the lightning could not reach in a million years.

God's glorious universe, therefore, may be contemplated as an infinitude of island-worlds-say rather an unexplored bay of islands in the vast ocean of His own infinity and eternity. Pervading all alike, both the vast and the minute, in an island-universe, and in the smallest islet of an earthly isle, is the radiant glory of the Creator, always visible, yet never fully revealed. Even as the Russian poet, Derzhavin, has sublimely written,

EXTENT OF OCEANICA.

Being above all being! Mighty One!

Whom none can comprehend and none explore;.
Who fill'st existence with Thyself alone:
Embracing all-supporting-ruling o'er-
Being whom we call God, and know no more!
In its sublime research, philosophy

May measure out the ocean-deep-may count
The sands or the sun's rays; but God! for Thee
There is no weight nor measure: none can mount
Up to thy mysteries. Reason's brightest spark,
Though kindled by thy light, in vain would try
To trace thy counsels, infinite and dark;
And thought is lost ere thought can soar so high,
Even like past moments in eternity.

What are ten thousand worlds compared to thee?
And what am I, then? Heaven's unnumber'd host,
Though multiplied by myriads, and array'd
In all the glory of sublimest thought,
Is but an atom in the balance-weigh'd
Against thy greatness, is a cipher brought

Against infinity! O, what am I, then? Naught

15

The ISLAND-WORLD of the Pacific is presented to our contemplation in a great variety of interesting aspects and relations. The vast ocean in which it is imbosomed, sweeping in latitude from pole to pole, and rolling in longitude over a whole hemisphere, exceeds the area of all the continents and islands of the globe by ten millions of miles. Dotting it here and there, like stars in the air-ocean above, there are about six hundred and eighty islands of Oceanica, exclusive of New Holland, New Zealand, New Caledonia, New Ireland, and the Salomons. Yet such is the relative disproportion to the continental world of these small islands of the deep, to which the winged messengers of Commerce and Christianity are now eagerly flying on every breeze, that they are estimated to contain

but forty thousand square miles, or less than the single State of New York; and their population, by latest estimates, is but little over five hundred thousand.

Within ten millions of square miles the whole surface exposed above the water, exclusive of New Zealand, does not exceed eighty thousand square miles. Latest French geographers, and the authors of the learned quartos on the Ethnography and Geology of Oceanica, attached to the United States Exploring Squadron, divide this vast realm of ocean and island into five portions.

First. Australia, including the Continent of New Holland and Van Diemen's Land.

Second. Melanesia, comprising all that part of Oceanica inhabited by a dark-skinned race, with woolly or frizzled hair. It includes New Guinea and adjacent islands; New Britain, New Ireland, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, the Feejees and Salomon Islands.

Third. Malaisia; the name applied to the islands of the East Indian Seas, occupied by the yellow Malay race, including Sumatra, Borneo, Java, Celebes, Philippine Isles, and Sooloo Group.

Fourth. Micronesia; the name given to the long range of little groups and strips of coral rock and sand, scattered over the Pacific to the north of the equator and east of the Philippines, including the Pelew and Kingmill Groups.

Fifth. Polynesia; this designates the islands of Oceanica nearest to America, inhabited by light-colored tribes allied to the Malaisan, and all speaking in dialects of one general language. It is with this division

GROUPS OF POLYNESIA.

17

of Oceanica only that we have to do in the present volume.

Polynesia proper includes,

1. The Navigator's Islands, otherwise called Samoa, having a population of fifty-six thousand.

2. Friendly Islands, or Tonga Group, with a population of eighteen thousand.

3. New Zealand, with a population of one hundred and eighty thousand.

4. Society Islands, or Tahitian Group, having a population of eighteen or twenty thousand.

5. Hervey Islands. The population estimated by Mr. Williams at fourteen thousand.

6. Austral Islands, named Rimatara, Rurutu, Tubuai, Raivavai, and Rapa, once populous, now supposed to contain but one thousand. The first of these islands I visited and explored in a whale-ship, and have estimated its population at four hundred.

7. Gambier Group. Population two thousand. 8. Paumotu Group, having eight thousand.

9. Marquesas, or Washington Group, estimated to contain twenty thousand, being the least Christianized or weaned from cannibalism and barbarity of all Polynesia.

10. Sandwich or Hawaiian Group. Estimated population before the late decimation by measles, one hundred thousand; now reduced, as by census of 1849, to eighty thousand six hundred and forty-one.

The total present population of Polynesia is therefore less than half a million, of which about eighty thousand have been gathered into the Christian Church by English and American missionaries.