Influences of Geographic Environment Part 48

[Sidenote: Melanesian agriculture.]

In the minute land fragments which const.i.tute Micronesia, fishing is the chief source of subsistence; agriculture, especially for the all important taro, is limited to the larger islands like the Pelews. In the vast islands of western Melanesia, agriculture is on the whole less advanced. New Guinea, where the chase yields support to many villages, has large sections still a wilderness, though some parts are cultivated like a garden. In the smaller Melanesian islands, such as New Hebrides, New Britain and the Solomon group, we find extensive plantations laid out on irrigated terraces, In New Hebrides and the Banks Islands every single village has its flowers and aromatic herbs.[971] But it is in Fiji that native island agriculture seems to culminate. Here a race of dark, frizzly haired savages, addicted to cannibalism, have in the art of tillage taken a spurt forward in civilization, till in this respect they stand abreast of the average European. The German asparagus bed is not cultivated more carefully than the yam plants of Fiji; these also are grown in mounds made of soil which has been previously pulverized by hand. The variety and excellence of their vegetable products are amazing, and find their reflection in an elaborate national cuisine, strangely at variance with the otherwise savage life.[972]

West of Melanesia, the Malay Archipelago shows a high average of tillage. The inhabitants of Java, Madura, Bali, Lombok and Sumbawa are skilled agriculturists and employ an elaborate system of irrigation,[973] but the natives of Timor, on the other hand, have made little progress. In the Philippines a rich and varied agriculture has been the chief source of wealth since the Spanish conquest early in the sixteenth century, proving a native apt.i.tude which began to develop long before.[974]

[Sidenote: Intensive tillage.]

The dense population of the Mediterranean islands is the concomitant of an advanced agriculture. The connection between elaborate tillage and scant insular area is indicated in the earliest history of cla.s.sic Aegina. The inhabitants of this island were called Myrmidons, Strabo tells us, because by digging like ants they covered the rocks with earth to cultivate all the ground; and in order to economize the soil for this purpose, lived in excavations under ground and abstained from the use of bricks.[975] To-day, terraced slopes, irrigation, hand-made soils, hoe and spade tillage, rotation of crops, and a rich variety of field and garden products characterize the economic history of most Mediterranean islands, whether Elba, the Lipari, Ponza, Procida, Capri, Ischia, Pantellaria, Lampedusa,[976] or the Aegean groups. The sterile rock of Malta has been converted for two-thirds of its area into fertile gardens, fields and orchards. The upper stratum of rock has been pulverized and enriched by manure; the surface has been terraced and walled to protect it against high winds. In consequence, the Maltese gardens are famous throughout the Mediterranean.[977] In the Cyclades every patch of tillable ground is cultivated by the industrious inhabitants. Terraced slopes are green with orchards of various southern fruits, and between the trees are planted melons and vegetables. Fallow land and uncultivated hillsides, as well as the limestone islands fit only for pastures, are used for flocks of sheep and goats.[978]

[Sidenote: j.a.panese agriculture.]

It is in j.a.pan that agriculture has attained a national and aesthetic importance reached nowhere else. Of the 150,000 square miles const.i.tuting j.a.pan proper, two-thirds are mountains; large tracts of lowlands are useless rock wastes, owing to the detritus carried down by inundating mountain torrents.[979] Hence to-day arable land forms only 15.7 per cent. of the whole area. During the two hundred and fifty years of exclusion when emigration and foreign trade were forbidden, a large and growing population had to be supplied from a small insular area, further restricted by reason of the configuration of the surface. Here the geographical effects of a small, naturally defined area worked out to their logical conclusion, Consequently agriculture progressed rapidly and gave the farmer a rank in the social scale such as he attained nowhere else.[980] His methods of tillage are much the same as in overcrowded China, but his national importance and hence his ranking in society is much higher. In j.a.pan to-day farming absorbs 60 per cent. of the population. The system of tillage, in many respects primitive, is yet very thorough, and by means of skilful manuring makes one plot of ground yield two or three crops per annum.[981] Every inch of arable land is cultivated in grain, vegetables and fruits. Mountains and hills are terraced and tilled far up their slopes. Meadows are conspicuously absent, as are also fallow fields. Land is too valuable to lie idle.

Labor is chiefly manual and is shared by the women and children; mattock and hoe are more common than the plow.[982] Such elaborate cultivation and such pressure of population eventuate in small holdings. In j.a.pan one hectar (2 1-2 acres) is the average farm per family.

[Sidenote: The case of England.]

While j.a.pan's agriculture reflected the small area of an island environment, and under its influence reached a high development, England's from the beginning of the fifteenth century declined before the compet.i.tion of English commerce, which gained ascendency owing to the easy accessibility of Great Britain to the markets of Europe. The ravages of the Black Death in the latter half of the fourteenth century produced a scarcity of agricultural laborers and hence a prohibitive increase of wages. To economize labor, the great proprietors resorted to sheep farming and the raising of wool, which, either in the raw state or manufactured into cloth, became the basis of English foreign trade. A distinct deterioration in agriculture followed this reversion to a pastoral basis of economic life, supplemented by a growing commerce which absorbed all the enterprise of the country. The steady contraction of the area under tillage threw out of employment the great ma.s.s of agricultural laborers, made them paupers and vagrants.[983] Hence England entered the period of maritime discoveries with a redundant population. This furnished the raw material for her colonies, and made her territorial expansion a.s.sume a solid, permanent character, unknown to the flimsy trading stations which mark the mere extension of a field of commerce.

[Sidenote: Emigration and colonization from islands.]

Even when agriculture, fisheries and commerce have done their utmost, in the various stages of civilization, to increase the food supply, yet insular populations tend to outgrow the means of subsistence procurable from their narrow base. Hence islanders, like peninsula peoples, are p.r.o.ne to emigrate and colonize. This tendency is encouraged by their mobility, born of their nautical skill and maritime location. King Minos of Crete, according to Thucydides and Aristotle, colonized the Cyclades.[984] Greece, from its redundant population, peopled various Aegean and Ionian islands, which in turn threw off spores of settlements to other isles and sh.o.r.es. Corcyra, which was colonized from the Peloponnesus, sent out a daughter colony to Epid.a.m.nos on the Illyrian coast. Andros, one of the Cyclades, as early as 654 B.C., colonized Acanthus and Stagirus in Chalcidice.[985] Paros, settled first by Cretans and then by Ionians, at a very early date sent colonies to Thasos and to Parium on the Propontis, while Samos was a perennial fountain emitting streams of settlement to Thrace, Cilicia, Crete, Italy and Sicily. [Map page 251.]

This moving picture of Greek emigration is duplicated in the Malay Archipelago, especially in the smaller eastern islands. Almost every Malay tribe has traditions based upon migrations. The southern Philippines derived the considerable Mohammedan element of their populations from the Samal Laut, who came from Sumatra and the islands of the Strait of Malacca.[986] A Malayan strain can be traced through Polynesia to far-off Easter Isle. Sometimes the emigration is a voluntary exile from home for a short period and a definite purpose. The inhabitants of Bouton, Binungku, and the neighboring islets, all of them located southeast of Celebes, have for the past twenty-five years come in great numbers to the larger islands of Ceram, Buru, Amboina and Banda, where they have laid out and carefully cultivated plantations of maize, tobacco, bananas and coco-palms. Generally only the men come, work two years, save their profits and then return home. These ambitious tillers look like savages, are shy as wild things of the woods, and work naked to the waist.[987]

Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, where every condition of land and sea tends to develop the migratory spirit, form a region of extensive colonization.[988] Settlements of one race are scattered among the island groups of another, making the ethnic boundaries wide penumbras.

In some smaller islands of Melanesia the Polynesian colonists have exterminated or expelled the original inhabitants, and are found there now with all their distinctive race characteristics; but in the larger islands, they have been merged in the resident population, and their presence is only to be surmised from the existence of Polynesian customs, such as father-right in New Hebrides and Solomon Island side by side with the prevailing Melanesian mother-right.[989] In small islands, like Tongatabu, Samoa and Fiji, emigration becomes habitual, a gradual spilling over of the redundant population and hence not a formidable inundation. In all this insular region of the Pacific, the impulse to emigration is so persistent, that the resulting inter-insular colonization obliterates sharp distinctions of race; it annuls the segregation of an island environment, and makes everywhere for amalgamation and unification, rather than differentiation.[990]

[Sidenote: Modern emigration from islands.]

Among highly civilized peoples, where better economic methods bring greater density of population and set at the same time a higher standard of living, emigration from islands is especially marked. j.a.pan has seen a formidable exodus since an end was put to its long period of compression. This has taken the form of widespread emigration to various foreign lands, notably the Hawaiian Islands and the United States, and also of internal colonization in its recently acquired territory in Formosa and Korea.[991] The Maltese have spread from their congested island, and are found to-day as gardeners, sailors and traders along all the Mediterranean coasts.[992] Majorca and the more barren Cyclades[993]

tell the same story. The men of Capri go in considerable numbers to South America, but generally return home again. The Icelanders often pull themselves out of the stagnation of their lonely, ungenerous island to become thrifty citizens of western Canada.

[Sidenote: Maritime enterprise as outlet.]

Emigration from islands readily throws itself into the channel of navigation and foreign trade. The northern Sporades, especially Skiathos and Skopelos, are the home of sailors who can be found over all the world.[994] In this appetency for a nautical career, small insh.o.r.e islets are often distinguished from the nearby mainland. Nearly all the masculine population of the Frisian Islands were seamen prior to 1807.

In the eighteenth century a third of the Hamburg vessels were commanded by captains from the little island of Sylte, and a third of the Greenland fleet of the Netherlands by natives of Fohr.[995]

In England the exodus took the form of trading expeditions and the foundation of commercial colonies long before the food resources of the island had been even considerably developed. The accessible sea offered lines of least resistance, while the monopoly of the land by a privileged aristocracy and the fiercely defended corn laws made the limitations of a small area more oppressive. In Ireland, a landless peasantry in a grainless land, dulled by deprivation of opportunity, found in emigration an escape from insupportable evils.

[Sidenote: Artificial checks to population.]

While emigration draws off the surplus population, there tend to develop in islands, as also in barren highlands where population early reaches the point of saturation, various devices to restrict natural increase.

The evils of congestion are foreseen and guarded against. Abbe Raynal, writing of islanders in general, remarked as far back as 1795, "It is among these people that we trace the origin of that mult.i.tude of singular inst.i.tutions which r.e.t.a.r.ds the progress of population.

Anthropophagy, the castration of males, the infibulation of females, late marriages, the consecration of virginity, the approbation of celibacy, the punishments exercised against girls who become mothers at too early an age," he enumerates as such checks. Malthus, in his Essay on Population, commenting on this statement, notes that the bounds to the number of inhabitants on islands, especially small ones, are so narrow and so obvious that no one can ignore them.[996]

The checks to population practiced on islands are either preventive or positive. The extreme measure to restrict marriage is found among the wretched Budumas who inhabit the small, marshy islands of Lake Chad.

Tribal custom allows only the chiefs and headmen to have wives. A bra.s.s crescent inserted in the ear of a boy indicates the favored one among a chief's sons destined to carry on his race. For his brothers this is made physically impossible; they become big, dull, timid creatures contributing by their fishing to the support of the thinly populated villages. The natives of the Shari River delta on the southern sh.o.r.e of Lake Chad use Buduma as a term of contempt for a man.[997]

[Sidenote: Polyandry.]

In islands, as in unproductive highlands where hunger stalks abroad, marriage readily takes the form of polyandry. On the Canary Islands, at the time of their conquest in 1402, polyandry existed in Lancerote and possibly in Fuerteventura, often a.s.signing one woman to three husbands; but in the other islands of the group monogamy was strictly maintained.[998] In Oceanica polygamy, monogamy or polyandry prevails according to a man's means, the poverty of the islands, and the supply of women. A plurality of wives is always the privilege of the chiefs and the wealthy, but all three forms of marriage may be found on the same island. Scarcity of women gives rise to polyandry in Tahiti,[999] and consigns one woman to four or five men. In old Hawaii, where there were four or five men to one woman a kind of incipient polyandry arose by the addition of a countenanced paramour to the married couple's establishment.[1000] Robert Louis Stevenson found the same complaisant arrangement a common one in the Marquesas, where the husband's deputy was designated by the term of _pikio_ in the native vocabulary.[1001]

Polyandry existed in Easter Isle, among whose stunted and dest.i.tute population the men far exceeded the women, and children were few, according to reports of the early visitors.[1002] Numerous other instances make this connection between island habitat, deficiency of women, need of checking increase, and polyandrous marriages an obvious one.[1003]

[Sidenote: Infanticide.]

This disproportion of the s.e.xes in Oceanica is due to the murder of female infants, too early child-bearing, overwork, privation, licentiousness, and the violence of the men.[1004] The imminence of famine dictates certain positive checks to population, among which infanticide and abortion are widespread in Oceanica. In some parts of the New Hebrides and the Solomon groups it is so habitual, that in some families all children are killed, and subst.i.tutes purchased at will.[1005] In the well-tilled Fiji Islands, a pregnant girl is strangled and her seducer slain. The women make a practice of drinking medicated waters to produce sterility. Failing in this, the majority kill their children either before or after birth. In the island of Vanua Levu infanticide reaches from one-half to two-thirds of all children conceived; here it is reduced to a system and gives employment to professional murderers of babies, who hover like vultures over every child-bed. All destroyed after birth are females.[1006] And yet here, as on many other islands of Melanesia and Polynesia, such offspring as are spared are treated with foolish fondness and indulgence.[1007] The two facts are not incompatible.

[Sidenote: Approved by the state.]

Geographic conditions made infanticide a state measure in these crowded communities. On the small coral atolls, where the food supply was scantest, it was enforced by law. On Vaitupu, in the Ellice group, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufelau, only one. Any violation of this unique sumptuary law was punished by a fine.[1008] On the congested Gilbert atolls, a woman rarely had more than two children, never more than three. Abortion, produced by a regular midwife, disposed of any subsequent offspring. Affection for children was very strong here, and infanticide of the living was unknown.[1009] In Samoa, also, Turner found the practice restricted to the period before birth; but in Tahiti and elsewhere it was enforced by the tribal village authorities on the born and unborn.[1010] In pre-Christian Hawaii, two-thirds of all children, and especially girls, were killed by their parents either before or after birth. The result was a decay of the maternal instinct and the custom of farming out children to strangers. This contributed to the excess of infant mortality, the degeneration of morals and the instability of the family.[1011] So in j.a.pan the pressure of population led to infanticide and the sale of daughters to a life of ignominy, which took them out of the child-bearing cla.s.s.[1012] Nor was either custom under the ban.

The result is a deterioration of morals, an invasion of the family bond, and a decay of the finer sentiments therewith connected. Captain Cook in 1770 found in Tahiti _Eareeoie_ or _Arreoys_ societies, which were free-love a.s.sociations including in their number "over half of the better sort of the inhabitants." The children begotten of these promiscuous unions were smothered at birth. Obscene conversations, indecent dances and frank unchast.i.ty on the part of girls and women were the attendant evils of these loose morals.[1013] Cook was sure that "these societies greatly prevent the increase of the superior cla.s.ses of people of which they are composed." Malthus reports a similar a.s.sociation in the Marianne Islands, distinguished by a similar name, devoted to race suicide.[1014] Everywhere in Oceanica marriage is unstable, and with few exceptions unchast.i.ty prevails. Stevenson thinks it chiefly accountable for the decline of population in the islands.[1015] However, in the detailed _taboos_ laid upon women in Fiji, Marquesas, and other Polynesian islands we have the survival of an early measure to increase reserve between the s.e.xes, long after regard for chast.i.ty has vanished.[1016]

[Sidenote: Low valuation of human life.]

The constant pressure of population upon the limits of subsistence throughout Oceanica has occasioned a low valuation of human life. Among natural peoples the helpless suffer first. The native Hawaiians, though a good-natured folk, were relentless towards the aged, weak, sick, and insane. These were frequently stoned to death or allowed to perish of hunger.[1017] In Fiji, the aged are treated with such contempt, that when decrepitude or illness threatens them, they beg their children to strangle them, unless the children antic.i.p.ate the request.[1018] In Vate (or Efate) of the New Hebrides, old people are buried alive, and their pa.s.sage to another world duly celebrated by a feast.[1019] However, in the Tonga Islands and in New Zealand, great respect and consideration are shown the aged as embodying experience.[1020] The harsher custom recalls an ancient law of Aegean Ceos, which, ordained that all persons over sixty years of age should be compelled to drink hemlock, in order that there might be sufficient food for the rest.[1021]

[Sidenote: Cannibalism in islands.]

Many customs of Oceanica can be understood only in the light of the small value attached to human life in this island world. The overpopulation which lies back of their colonization explains the human sacrifices in their religious orgies and funeral rites, as also the widespread practice of cannibalism. This can be traced in vestigial forms, or as an occasional or habitual custom from one end of the Pacific to the other, from the Marquesas to New Guinea and from New Zealand to Hawaii. All Melanesia is tainted with it, and Micronesia is not above suspicion. The cause of this extensive practice, Stevenson attributes to the imminence of famine and the craving for flesh as food in these small islands, which are dest.i.tute of animals except fowls, dogs and hogs. In times of scarcity cannibalism threatens all; it strikes from within or without the clan.[1022] Ratzel leans to the same opinion.[1023] Captain Cook thought the motive of a good full meal of human flesh was often back of the constant warfare in New Zealand, and was sometimes the only alternative of death by hunger. Cannibalism was not habitual in the Tonga Islands, but became conspicuous during periods of famine.[1024] In far-away Tierra del Fuego, where a peculiarly harsh climate and the low cultural status of the natives combine to produce a frightful infant mortality and therefore to repress population, cannibalism within the clan is indulged in only at the imperious dictate of mid-winter hunger. The same thing is true in the nearby Chonos Archipelago.[1025]

These are the darker effects of an island habitat, the vices of its virtues. That same excessive pressure of population which gives rise to infanticide also stimulates agriculture, industry and trade; it develops ingenuity in making the most of local resources, and finally leads to that widespread emigration and colonization which has made islanders the great distributors of culture, from Easter Isle to Java and from ancient Crete to modern England.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XIII

[803] Table of areas of peninsulas and islands, Justus Perthes, _Taschen Atlas_, p. 9. Gotha, 1905.

[804] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 105-108. London, 1904.

[805] W. Deecke, Italy, p. 45. London, 1904.

[806] Journey of William de Rubruquis, pp. 187, 204, Hakluyt Society Publication, London, 1903.

[807] Archibald Little, The Far East, pp. 35, 45. Oxford, 1905.

[808] Strabo, Book X, chap. II, 19.

[809] Ratzel, _Die Erde und das Leben_, Vol. I. pp. 312-313. Leipzig, 1901.

[810] Charles H. Hawes, In the Uttermost East, p. 103. New York, 1904.

[811] W.E. Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Vol. I, pp. 26-27. New York, 1904.

[812] Darwin, Origin of Species, Vol. II, chap. XIII, p, 178. New York, 1895.

[813] A.R. Wallace, Geographical Distribution of Animals, Vol. II, p.

61. London, 1876.