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When he saw and heard the confusion and uproar on the beach later that night when Captain Kellar turned Tulagi upside-down in his search for Michael, the old one-legged one remained discreetly silent. Who was he to seek trouble with the strange ones, the white masters who came and went and roved and ruled? In this the ancient was in nowise unlike the rest of his dark-skinned Melanesian race.
'I mean that when some one said, "Do you really mean to place those savage Melanesians among the immaculate Pitcairners?" the natural answer seemed to me to be, "I am not aware that you ever saw either a Pitcairner or a Melanesian." I thought it rather impertinent.
I have, I suppose, a considerable amount of knowledge of Melanesian tongues, unknown by name to anyone else perhaps; I quite feel that this ought not to die with me, if anything should suddenly happen to me. I hoped this summer to put together something; but now there is this Maori war, and an utterly unsettled state of things. I may have to leave New Zealand with my Melanesians almost any day.
The myths are still prevailingly cosmologic and sociologic, but the beginning of biographical sketches of supernatural Powers is visible. The Melanesian Qat and the Polynesian Maui are on the border line between culture-heroes and gods, but they are real persons, and their adventures, while they describe origins, are also descriptions of character.
Once among the dead, Wainamoinen refuses being wiser than Psyche or Persephone to taste of drink. This 'taboo' is found in Japanese, Melanesian, and Red Indian accounts of the homes of the dead. Thus the hero is able to return and behold the stars.
We may compare with these the Melanesian and Samoan supernatural beings who are incarnate in animal forms and are at the same time originators of civilization. These zoömorphic beings are not necessarily totems, as in Australia; outside of the Arunta it does not appear that totems as such are ever regarded as creators they are ancestors, but at that point their function appears to cease.
Hawaii and Borneo have departmental gods and a body of stories about them. Certain tribes of Redmen have not only divine genealogical systems but also narratives resembling the Melanesian in character, the line between myth proper and folk-lore being often hard to trace.
'Mind, I am not disposed to act in a hasty way. Only I don't mean to let conventional notions about an English clergyman hinder my providing Melanesian islands with a Melanesian ministry. These scholars of ours know very much more, and I imagine possess qualifications of all kinds for their work in Melanesia, greater than the majority of the missionaries in the old missionary times.
The scalp-talking Indian and the head-hunting Melanesian have been either destroyed or converted to a belief in the superior efficacy of civil suits and criminal prosecutions. The planet is being subdued. The wild and the hurtful are either tamed or eliminated.
The population is quite different from that in the north, and one would call it Polynesian, were it not for the curly hair which shows Melanesian admixture. Light-coloured, tall, strong, with the fleshy body that is often a feature of the Polynesian, the people have, not infrequently, fine open features, small noses and intelligent faces of oval outline.
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