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The dress of the men consists of a large belt, purposely worn very low so as to show the beautiful curve of the loins. About six small mats hang down in front. Formerly, and even at the present day on festival occasions, they wore on the back an ovoid of wood; the purpose is quite unknown, but may originally have been a portable seat, as the Melanesian does not like to sit on the bare ground.
So I do rejoice that he is sorrowing after a godly sort. 'In other respects there is a very hopeful promising appearance just now. We number seven clergymen, including myself. We have a very efficient band of Melanesian teachers, and could at this moment work a school of 150 scholars.
His name was Rul, and he was not only a good seaman and an expert diver, but spoke fluently nearly a score of Melanesian and Micronesian dialects. On the evening of the day that the cutter left Callie Harbour, on Admiralty Island, Yorke called his six men together, and told them that he was very undecided what to do.
Only at Mota is there a resident Christian; and even there, people who don't know what Mota was, and what a Melanesian island, for the most part, alas! still is, would see nothing to indicate a change for the better, except that the people are unarmed, and would be friendly and confiding in their manner to a stranger. 'I hardly know how to bring my Melanesian experience to bear upon Zululand.
This creek encloses a space extending along the whole width of the bay of about eighteen or twenty acres. 'At the east end stand three wooden cottages, occupied by the master, mate, and a married seaman of the "Southern Cross." At the west end stands the Melanesian school.
This cut off all the properly called Polynesian isles, whose inhabitants are of the Malay type, and had been the objects of care to the London Mission, ever since the time of John Williams; also the Fiji Islands; and a few which had been taken in hand by a Scottish Presbyterian Mission; but the groups which seem to form the third fringe round the north-eastern curve of Australia, the New Hebrides, Banks Islands, and Solomon Isles, were almost entirely open ground, with their population called Melanesian or Black Islanders, from their having much of the Negro in their composition and complexion.
'During the first voyage made that year to return our Melanesian party, I think Mr. Patteson was feeling very much out of sorts. I do not remember any time during the years in which I was permitted to see so much of him when he took things so easily.
Our author often returns to the weakness of the evidence of travellers and missionaries. Concerning Missionaries Here is an example of a vivacite in our censor. Yet on this very page Mr. Max Muller has been citing the 'difficulties' which do 'trouble' a 'missionary, Dr. Codrington. And, for my own part, when I want information about Melanesian beliefs, it is to Dr. Codrington's work that I go.
We heard that he had, through want of evidence against him, escaped hanging with a sentence of seven years' imprisonment; and then about a year and a half ago some one in Honolulu told us that a man supposed to be the infamous Billy Chase had turned up in the Carolines with fifteen or twenty 'niggers' as they call the Melanesian natives in these parts and settled down as a trader.
In spite of the fact that the greatest race cleavage in this region lies between the Papuans and the Polynesians, the major linguistic division is of Malayan on the one side, Melanesian and Polynesian on the other. As with race, so with culture.
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