Problems of the Pacific Part 4

In the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate and fertile peninsula which by right of lat.i.tude should have had the temperature of Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a climate singularly mild and promotive of fecundity. When the separation from the mainland came because of the North Sea cutting the English Channel, the Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their gracious environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism and a comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once very proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its sh.o.r.es.

With the Roman invasion there came to the future British race a benefit from both those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power, holding as it did the mastery of the seas, freed the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous winners and good colonists. Once their power was established firmly, they treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say, northern Africa or Spain.

Thus from the very dawn of known history natural position and climate marked out Britain as the vat for the brewing of a strenuous blood. The sea served her "in the office of a wall or of a moat defensive to a house" to keep away all but the most vigorous of invaders. The charm and fertility of the land made it certain that a bold and vigorous invader would be tempted to become a colonist and not be satisfied with robbing and pa.s.sing on.

With the decay of the Roman Empire, and the withdrawal of the Roman legions to the defence of Rome, the Romanised Britons were left helpless. Civilisation and the growth of riches had made them at once more desirable objects of prey, and less able to resist attack. The province which Rome abandoned was worried on all sides by the incursion of the fierce clans of the north and the west. A decision, ultimately wise, judged by its happy results, but at the moment disastrous, induced some of the harried Britons to call in to their aid the Nors.e.m.e.n pirates, who at the time, taking advantage of the failing authority of Rome, were swarming out from Scandinavia and from the sh.o.r.es of the Baltic in search of booty. The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, were willing enough to come to Britain as mercenaries, even more willing to stay as colonists. An Anglo-Saxon wave swept over the greater part of England, and was stopped only by the mountains of Wales or of Scotland.

That was the end of the Britons as the chief power in Britain, but they mingled with their conquerors to modify the Anglo-Saxon type with an infusion of Celtic blood. In the mountainous districts the Celtic blood continued to predominate, and does to this day.

The Anglo-Saxons would have been very content to settle down peacefully on the fat lands which had fallen to them, but the piratical nests from which they themselves had issued still sent forth broods of hungry adventurers, and the invasions of the Danes taught the Anglo-Saxons that what steel had won must be guarded by steel. They learned, too, that any race holding England must rely upon sea-power for peaceful existence.

After the Danish, the last great element in the making of the present British race, was the Norman. The Normans were not so much foreigners as might be supposed. The Anglo-Saxons of the day were descendants of sea-pirates who had settled in Britain and mingled their blood with the British. The Normans were descendants of kindred sea-pirates who had settled in Gaul, and mingled their blood with that of the Gauls and Franks. The two races, Anglo-Saxon and Normans, after a while combined amicably enough, the Anglo-Saxon blood predominating, and the British type was evolved, in part Celtic, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman--a hard-fighting, stubborn adventurous race, which in its making from such varied elements had learned the value of compromise, and of the common-sense principle of give-and-take. One can see that it was just the race for the work of exploration and colonisation.

When this British people, thus const.i.tuted, were driven back to a sea-frontier by the French nation, it was natural that they should turn their energies overseas. To this their Anglo-Saxon blood, their Danish blood, their Norman blood prompted. The Elizabethan era, which was the era of the foundation of the British Empire overseas, was marked by a form of patriotism which was hard to distinguish in some of its manifestations from plain robbery. The fact calls for no particular condemnation. It was according to the habit of thought of the time. But it is necessary to bear in mind that the hunt for loot and not the desire for territory was the chief motive of the flashing glories of the Elizabethan era of seamanship; for that is the explanation why there was left as the fruit of many victories few permanent settlements.

Drake was the first English naval leader to penetrate to the Pacific.

His famous circ.u.mnavigation of the world is one of the boldest exploits of history. Drake's log entry on entering the Pacific stirs the blood:

"Now, as we were fallen to the uttermost parts of these islands on October 28, 1578, our troubles did make an end, the storm ceased, and all our calamities (only the absence of our friends excepted) were removed, as if G.o.d all this while by His secret Providence had led us to make this discovery, which being had according to His will, He stayed His hand."

On this voyage Drake put in at San Francisco, which he named New Albion.

He went back to Europe through the East Indies and around Africa. But Drake made no attempt at colonisation. Looting of the Spanish treasure ships was the first and last object of his cruise. What was, according to our present lights, a more honourable descent upon the Pacific was that of Admiral Anson in the eighteenth century. He, in 1740, took a Fleet round the stormy Horn to subdue the Philippines and break the power of Spain in the Pacific. The force thought fitting for such an enterprise in those days was 961 men! Anson did not subdue the Philippines; but they were guarded by the scurvy, which attacked the English Fleet, rather than by the Spanish might, and the little disease-racked English squadron was able to cripple the Spanish power in the Pacific by the mere dread of its presence. Anson took prizes and made them masquerade before the enemy's coast as hostile warships, and paralysed the Spanish commerce in those seas. He returned to England with only 335 men out of his original complement of 961. Practically all the deaths had been from disease. But again the idea of the Pacific expedition was not to colonise but to strike a blow at a rival European Power. It was not until the nineteenth century that Great Britain established herself on the western flank of the North Pacific.

So far as the South Pacific was concerned British indifference was complete, and it was shared by other nations. In the days when the fabled wealth of the Indies was the magnet to draw men of courage and worth to perilous undertakings by sea and land, there was nothing in the South Pacific to attract their greed, and nothing, therefore, to stimulate their enterprise. The Spaniard, blundering on America in his quest for a western sea-pa.s.sage to the ivory, the gold, and the spices of India, found there a land with more possibilities of plunder than that which he had originally sought. He was content to remain, looting the treasuries of the Mexicans and of the Peruvians for metals, and laying the forests of Central America under contribution for precious woods. He ventured but little westward, and the Hawaiian Islands represented for a time the extreme western limit of his adventures.

Following him for plunder came the English, and they too were content to sweep along the western coast of South America without venturing further towards the unknown west.

From another direction the sea-route to India was sought by Portuguese, and Dutch, and English and French. Groping round the African coast, they came in time to the land of their desires, and found besides India and Cathay, Java, the Spice Islands, and other rich groups of the Malay Archipelago. But they, just as the Spaniards, did not venture west from South America; and neither Portuguese, Dutch, French nor English set the course of their vessels south from the East Indies.

It was thus Australia remained for many years an unknown continent. And when at last navigators, more bold or less bound to an immediate greed, touched upon the sh.o.r.es of Australia, or called at the South Sea Islands, they found little that was attractive. In no case had the simple natives won to a greed for gold and silver, and so they had no acc.u.mulations of wealth to tempt cupidity. In the case of Australia the coast-line was dour and forbidding, and promised nothing but sterility.

The exploring period in which the desire for plunder was the chief motive pa.s.sed away, having spared the South Pacific. It was therefore the fate of Australia, of New Zealand, and of most of the islands of Polynesia and Melanesia, to be settled under happier conditions, and to be spared the excesses of cruelty which marked the European invasion of the West Indies and the Americas. The Newest World began its acquaintance with civilisation under fairly happy auspices.

It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that a scientific expedition brought the South Pacific before the attention of Britain. A transit of Venus across the sun promised to yield valuable knowledge as to the nature of solar phenomena. To observe the transit under the best conditions, astronomers knew that a station in the South Seas was necessary, and Lieutenant Cook, R.N., an officer who had already distinguished himself in the work of exploration, was promoted to be Captain and entrusted to lead a scientific expedition to Otaheite. Added to his commission was an injunction to explore the South Seas if time and opportunity offered. Captain Cook was of the type which makes time and opportunity. Certainly there was little in the equipment of his expedition to justify an extension of its duties after the transit of Venus had been duly observed. But he took it that his duty was to explore the South Seas, and explore them he did, incidentally annexing for the British Empire the Continent of Australia.

That was in 1770. But still there was so little inviting in the prospect of settlement in the South Seas that it was some eighteen years before any effort was made to follow up by colonisation this annexation by Captain Cook. When the effort was made it was not on very dignified lines. The American colonies had at one time served as an outlet for the overflow of the British prisons. The War of Independence had closed that channel. The overcrowding of the British prisons became desperate, and, because it was necessary to find some relief for this--not because it was considered advantageous to populate the new possession--the First Fleet sailed for the foundation of Australia in 1788.

We shall see in subsequent chapters how the reluctance of the governing Power of the British race in the Home Country to establish an Empire in the South Pacific found a curious response in the stubborn resoluteness of the colonists who settled in Australia and New Zealand to be more English than the English themselves, to be as aggressively Imperialistic almost as the men of the Elizabethan era. (What might almost be called the "Jingoism" of the British nations in the South Pacific must have a very important effect in settling the mastery of that ocean.) In the present chapter the establishment of the British Power in the North Pacific chiefly will be considered.

Singapore is to-day the capital of the three Straits Settlements-- Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, but it is the youngest of the three settlements. Malacca is the oldest. It was taken possession of by the Portuguese under Albuquerque in 1511, and held by them until 1641, when the Dutch were successful in driving them out. The settlement remained under the Government of the Dutch till 1795, when it was captured by the English, and held by them till 1818, at which date it was restored to the Dutch, and finally pa.s.sed into British hands in pursuance of the treaty with Holland of 1824. By that treaty it was arranged that the Dutch should leave the Malay Peninsula, the British Government agreeing at the same time to leave Sumatra to the Dutch. When Malacca was taken possession of by the Portuguese in 1511, it was one of the great centres for the commerce of the East; but under Dutch rule it dwindled, and Penang acquired a monopoly of the trade of the Malayan Peninsula and Sumatra, together with a large traffic with China, Siam, Borneo, the Celebes, and other places in the Archipelago. When Singapore was established Penang in its turn had to yield the first place to the new city.

Singapore was acquired for Britain by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, by virtue of a treaty with the Joh.o.r.e princes. It was at first subordinate to Bencoolen in Sumatra, but in 1823 it was placed under the Government of Bengal; it was afterwards incorporated in 1826, with Penang and Malacca, and placed under the Governor and Council of the Incorporated Settlements. Singapore is now one of the great shipping ports of the world, served by some fifty lines of steamers, and with a trade of over 20,000,000 tons a year. The harbour of Singapore is fortified, and the port is indicated by one advanced school of British Imperialists as the future chief base of a Fleet, contributed to by India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, and kept to a standard of strength equal to that available to any other two Powers in the Pacific. Captain Macaulay, in a strategical scheme for Imperial Defence which has been received with deep attention in Great Britain, suggests:--

"The influence which an Indian Ocean Fleet, based on Colombo and Singapore, would have on Imperial Defence can hardly be exaggerated. The Indian Ocean--a British Mediterranean to the Pacific--with its openings east and west in our hands, is a position of readiness for naval action in the Western Pacific, the South Atlantic, or the Mediterranean. In the first case it influences the defence of Canada and the Australasian States; in the second, that of South Africa. An Indian Ocean Fleet can reinforce, or be reinforced by the Fleets in European waters, if the storm centre be confined to Europe or to the Pacific. As regards the direct naval defence of the Australasian Provinces, no better position could be chosen than that of a Fleet based on Singapore, with an advanced base at Hong Kong, because it flanks all possible attack on them. An advanced flank defence is better than any direct defence of so large a coast-line as that of Australia from any point within it.

Moreover, Singapore and Hong Kong are much nearer to the naval bases of any Powers in the Western Pacific than those countries are to Australia or to Canada. Hence, in operations for the defence of any Province, they favour offensive-defensive action on our part. And offensive-defensive is the great characteristic of naval power. Any East Asian Power contemplating aggression against Australasian or North American territory must evidently first deal with the Indian Ocean Fleet.

"It is impossible to ignore the strategical and political significance of the Imperial triangle of India based on South Africa and the Australasian States, and its influence in the solution of the new problems of Imperial Defence. The effective naval defence of the self-governing Provinces is best secured by a Fleet maintained in the North Indian Ocean; and the reinforcement of the British garrison in India is best secured by units of the Imperial Army maintained in the self-governing Provinces. If these two conditions are satisfied, the problem of the defence of the Mother Country is capable of easy solution."

Hong Kong is of less strategical importance than Singapore. But it is marked out as the advanced base of British naval power in the North Pacific. It has one of the most magnificent harbours in the world, with an area of ten square miles. The granite hills which surround it rise between 2000 and 3000 feet high. The city of Victoria extends for four miles at the base of the hills which protect the south side of the harbour, and contains, with its suburbs, 326,961 inhabitants. It is the present base of the China squadron, and is fortified and garrisoned.

As already stated, the conditions which some years ago made the mastery of the Pacific unimportant to India no longer exist, and the safety of the Indian Empire depends almost as closely on the position in the Pacific as the safety of England does on the position in the Atlantic.

But, except by making some references in future chapters on strategy and on trade to her resources and possibilities, I do not propose to attempt any consideration of India in this volume. That would unduly enlarge its scope. In these days of quick communication, both power and trade are very fluid, and there is really not any country of the earth which has not in some way an influence on the Pacific. But so far as possible I have sought to deal only with the direct factors.

Having noted the British possessions in the North Pacific, it is necessary to turn south and study the young "nations of the blood" below the Equator before estimating British Power in the Pacific.

CHAPTER VII

THE BRITISH CONTINENT IN THE PACIFIC

Those who seek to find in history the evidence of an all-wise purpose might gather from the fantastic history of Australasia facts to confirm their faith. Far back in prehistoric ages, this great island was cut adrift from the rest of the world and left lonely and apart in the Southern Pacific. A few prehistoric marsupials wandered over its territory and were hunted by poor nomads of men, without art or architecture, condemned by the conditions of their life to step aside from the great onward current of human evolution.

Over this land the winds swept and the rains fell, and, volcanic action having ceased, the mountains were denuded and their deep stores of minerals bared until gold lay about on the surface. Coal, copper, silver, tin, and iron too, were made plentifully accessible. At the same time enormous agricultural plains were formed in the interior, but under climatic conditions which allowed no development of vegetable or animal types without organised culture by a civilised people.

Nature thus seemed to work consciously for the making of a country uniquely fitted for civilisation by a White Race, whilst at the same time ensuring that its aboriginal inhabitants should not be able to profit by its betterment, and thus raise themselves to a degree of social organisation which would allow them to resist an invading White Race. In the year when Captain Cook acquired the Continent of Australia for Great Britain, it was ripe for development by civilised effort in a way which no other territory of the earth then was; and yet was so hopelessly sterile to man without machinery and the other apparatus of human science, that its aboriginal inhabitants were the most forlorn of the world's peoples, living a starveling life dependent on poor hunting, scanty fisheries and a few roots for existence.

It needs no great stretch of fancy to see a mysterious design in the world-history of Australia. Here was a great area of land stuffed with precious and useful minerals, hidden away from the advancing civilisation of man as effectually as if it had been in the planet Mars.

In other parts of the globe great civilisations rose and fell--the a.s.syrian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Greek, the Roman,--all drawing from the bowels of the earth her hidden treasures, and drawing on her surface riches with successive harvests. In America, the Mexican, Peruvian and other civilisations learned to gather from the great stocks of Nature, and built up fabrics of greatness from her rifled treasures.

In Australia alone, amid dim, mysterious forests, the same prehistoric animals roamed, the same poor nomads of men lived and died, neither tilling nor mining the earth--tenants in occupation, content with a bare and accidental livelihood in the midst of mighty riches.

Australia too was not discovered by the White Man until the moment when a young nation could be founded on the discovered principles of Justice.

To complete the marvel, as it would seem, Providence ordained that its occupation and development should be by the one people most eminently fitted for the founding of a new nation on the virgin soil.

The fostering care of Nature did not end there. The early settlers coming to Australia not only found that nothing had been drawn from the soil or reef, that an absolutely virgin country was theirs to exploit, but also were greeted by a singularly happy climate, free of all the diseases which afflicted older lands. Prolific Australia, with all its marvellous potentialities, lay open to them, with no warlike tribes to enforce a b.l.o.o.d.y beginning to history, no epidemics to war against, no savage beasts to encounter. And they were greeted by an energising climate which seemed to encourage the best faculties of man, just as it gave to harvests a wonderful richness and to herds a marvellous fecundity.

How it came to be that such a vast area of the earth's surface, so near to the great Indian and Chinese civilisations, should have so long remained unknown, it is difficult to understand. There is faint evidence that the existence of the great Southern continent was guessed at in very early days, but no attempt at exploration or settlement was made by the Hindoos or the Chinese. When the Greeks, who had penetrated to India under Alexander the Great, returned to their homes, they brought back some talk of a continent south from India, and the later Greek literature and some Latin writers have allusions to the tale. Marco Polo (thirteenth century), during his voyages to the East Indies, seems to have heard of a Southern continent, for he speaks of a Java Major, a land much greater than the isle of Java (which he knew), and which was probably either New Guinea or Australia. On a fifteenth-century map of the world now in the British Museum there are indications of a knowledge of the existence of Australia; and it is undoubtedly included in a map of the world of the sixteenth century.

But there was evidently no curiosity as to the suspected new continent.

Australia to-day contains not the slightest trace of contact with ancient or Middle Ages civilisation. Exploration was attracted to the East Indies and to Cathay by the tales of spices, scents, gold, silver, and ivory. No such tales came from Australia. It was to prove the greatest gold-producing country of the world, but its natives had no hunger for the precious metal, though it was strewn about the ground in great lumps in some places. Nor did sugar, spice, and ivory come from the land; nor, indeed, any product of man's industry or Nature's bounty. Wrapped in its mysterious grey-green forests, protected by a coast-line which appeared always barren and inhospitable, Australia remained unknown until comparatively modern times.

In 1581 the Spaniards, under Magalhaes, reached the Philippine Islands by sailing west from the South American coast. In the nature of things their ships would have touched the coast of Australia. In 1606 De Quiros and De Torres reached some of the Oceanian islands, and named one _Terra Austrialia del Espiritu Santo_ (the Southern Land of the Holy Spirit).

As was the case with Columbus in his voyage of discovery to America, De Quiros had not touched the mainland, but his voyage gave the name "Australia" to the new continent.

The English were late in the work of exploring the coast of Australia, though as far back as 1624 there is a record of Sir William Courteen pet.i.tioning King James I. for leave to plant colonies in "Terra Australis." In 1688, William Dampier, in the _Cygnet_, touched at the north-western coast of Australia. The next year, in H.M.S. _Roebuck_, he paid a visit to the new land, and, on returning to England, put on record his impressions of its fauna and flora. It was in 1770 that Captain Cook made the first landing at Botany Bay.

The British nation at the time could find no use for Australia. Annexed in 1770 it was not colonised until 1787, when the idea was adopted of using the apparently sterile and miserable Southern continent as a depot for enforced exiles. It was a happy chance that sent a "racketty"

element of British social life to be the first basis of the new Australian population. The poachers, English Chartists, Irish Fenians, Scottish land rebels (who formed the majority of the convicts sent to Australia) were good as nation-building material.

There was work to do there in the Pacific, there is further work in the future, which calls for elements of audacity, of contempt for convention, which are being worked out of the average British type.

There could be no greater contrast between, say, a London suburbanite, whose life travels along an endless maze of little gravel paths between fences and trimly-kept hedges, and the Australian of the "back country,"

who any day may ride out solitary on a week's journey into a great sun-baked wilderness, his life and that of his dog and his two horses dependent on the accurate finding of a series of water-holes: his joy in existence coming from the solitude and the desert, the companionship of his three animals, his tobacco, and the thought of his "mate" somewhere, whom he would meet after six months' absence with a handshake and a monosyllable by way of greeting, and yet with the love of a fond brother.

That London suburbanite gives the key to his kindly and softly sentimental character in his subscription to a society which devotes itself to seeing that the suburban house cat is not left shut up without food when a family goes away on holidays. That Australian shows how far he has reverted to the older human type of relentless purpose when, in the pursuit of his calling, he puts ten thousand sheep to the chance of death from thirst. It is not that he is needlessly cruel, but that he is sternly resolute. The same man would share his last water with his dog in the desert to give both an equal chance of life. He feels the misery of beasts but says nothing, and allows it to interfere nothing with his purpose.

There is a story of a clergyman coming to a back-country station in Australia during the agony of a great drought. He asked of the squatter permission to hold prayers for rain in the woolshed. The squatter turned on him, fiercely gripping him by the arm.

"Listen!" he cried.

From all around came the hoa.r.s.e, pitiful lowing and bleating of thousands of animals dying of thirst and hunger.