Volume 14 Australasia - dana ward's homepage

INHABITANTS OF THE OCEANIC REGIONS. 39At present the preponderating influence has passed to the peoples of WesternEurope.All these lands inhabited by Malays, Negritos, Papuans, ^laoris, and otherPolj'nesians, belong poKtically to one or another European power, or are alreadyregarded as coming within their legitimate sphere of action or that of the UnitedStates.Thus like Africa, the oceanic world is almost entirely parcelled out amongstthe Western nations. Commanding a thousand marine highways, including thatthrough the Isthmus of Suez created by themselves, these nations have far outstrippedtheir Hindu, Arab, and Chinese forerunners in rapidity of action, materialstrength, and dominant civilising influences, while still increasing their hold ofthese regions at the ver)- antipodes of the European world.In this political, commercial, and ethnical expansion of the cultured peoples ofthe West, the foremost place belongs unquestionably to the Anglo-Saxon race, theBritish and American branches of which seem destined jointly to absoi-b the wholeof the Pacific insular lands. The yoimg but vigorous colonies of Australia andNew Zealand may be said already to constitute an oceanic Britain, forming a sortof equilibrium with that of the Northern hemisphere, and serving as a sure foundationfor the futui-e spread of the English language, social and political institutions,throughout the Eastern seas, from Auckland Island to the Sandwich Archipelago,from Torres Strait to Easter Island.The great ethnical divisions of the people occupying the oceanic regioncorrespond in a general way with the geographical distribution of the insulargroups themselves. Madagascar forms a little world of its own, where the Malayimm i grants, and the aborigines of African descent have already been merged in asingle nationality with absolute uniformity of speech. The Eastern Archipelago andthe Philipjnnes are mainly inhabited by the Malays, closely related to those of theAsiatic peninsula to which they give their name. But amongst them still sui'viveisolated communities of different origin, dark and dwarfish peoples by manysupposed to be of Dravidian or Kolarian stock. The Pelew, Marianne, Caroline,and Marshall groujis stretching north of the equator and of the Melanesian lands,and to which the collective term Micronesia has been fittingly applied, offer amixture of races constituting an ethnical transition between the Malays, the Papuans,and the natives of the smaller insular dependencies of Japan, Farther south theexpression Melanesia, indicating the black complexion of the great bulk of theinhabitants, has been similarly ajjplied to Papuasia, or New Guinea, ^vith the adjoininggroups of New Britain, Now Ireland, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, andthe New Hebrides.Till recently the Australian continent also belonged to an aboriginal dark raceof homogeneous type, with scarcely a trace of Malay blood except here and there onthe north and north-west coastlands.Lastly all the eastern islands, from Hawaiito New Zealand, constitute the watery domain of the large brown Polijnesian race,which also preserves a remarkable imiformity of type, except in Fiji and a fewother places, where it has been modified by intermixture with the aboriginalMelanesian element.