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Updated: May 22, 2025
Had the first rate of progress been maintained, the message would have reached our shores a whole millennium before it actually arrived. But what would have been then its form and content? Had it made its way from island to island, passing through the minds of Malay, Papuan, or Melanesian on its passage, how much of its original purity would have been preserved?
Yet this general green tint sometimes changes into light or deep blue, as in some macaws; into pure yellow or rich orange, as in some of the American macaw-parrots; into purple, grey or dove-colour, as in some American, African, and Indian species; into the purest crimson, as in some of the lories; into rosy-white and pure white, as in the cockatoos; and into a deep purple, ashy or black, as in several Papuan, Australian, and Mascarene species.
It is, however, quite possible, and perhaps probable, that the brown Polynesians were originally the produce of a mixture of Malays, or some lighter coloured Mongol race with the dark Papuans; but if so, the intermingling took place at such a remote epoch, and has been so assisted by the continued influence of physical conditions and of natural selection, leading to the preservation of a special type suited to those conditions, that it has become a fixed and stable race with no signs of mongrelism, and showing such a decided preponderance of Papuan character, that it can best be classified as a modification of the Papuan type.
The nose is invariably represented as small, flattened, or turned up at the apex, whereas the most universal character of the Papuan race is to have the nose prominent and large, with the apex produced downwards, as it is invariably represented in their own rude idols. The hair of these dwarfish races agrees with that of the Papuans, but so it does with that of the negroes of Africa.
The people of Siau and Sanguir much resemble these, and I believe them to be perhaps immigrants from some of the islands of North Polynesia. The Papuan type will represent the remnant of the aborigines, while those of the Bugis character show the extension northward of the superior Malay races.
Latham's analysis of the pronouns,* one of the characteristic parts of the language, and, therefore, least liable to change, yet the occurrence in the Kowrarega of a considerable number of words resembling and often identical with those of the known Papuan languages of Torres Strait, and which I believe to have been derived from the latter, seems to indicate a degree of long-continued intercourse between the two races: for changes in language to so great an extent are not effected in a short space of time any more than the nearly complete fusion of two different races which has evidently taken place at the Prince of Wales Islands.
Here we have a nursery of seamen on a vaster scale than in the Mediterranean; for remember that from this point man spread, by way of the sea, from Easter Island in the Eastern Pacific right away to Madagascar, where we find Javanese immigrants, and negroes who are probably Papuan, whilst the language is of a Malayo-Polynesian type.
Papuan slaves show no inferiority of intellect, compared with Malays, but rather the contrary; and in the Moluccas they are often promoted to places of considerable trust. The Papuan has a greater feeling for art than the Malay. He decorates his canoe, his house, and almost every domestic utensil with elaborate carving, a habit which is rarely found among tribes of the Malay race.
A "changeable" Bird of Paradise is the one remaining eccentricity conceivable to complete the variety in coloring, and this is found in the Epimachus Ellioti, a bird so rare that at the time Gould published his first work the specimen in his collection was unique, and naturalists in their excursions in the Papuan Islands have vainly tried to discover its home and learn its habits.
At present they were cackling in chorus with parakeets of every color, with solemn cockatoos that seemed to be pondering some philosophical problem, while bright red lories passed by like pieces of bunting borne on the breeze, in the midst of kalao parrots raucously on the wing, Papuan lories painted the subtlest shades of azure, and a whole variety of delightful winged creatures, none terribly edible.
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