Worlds Apart: A History of the Pacific Islands

ORTHOGRAPHY AND PRONUNCIATION

Vowels

In the writing of all Pacific island languages, each vowel is pronounced separately, and each has only one sound, unlike in English, where a single vowel, either by itself or in combination, has a variety of possible sounds. There are, however, diphthongs that most English-speakers find difficult to reproduce exactly. These are the approximate equivalents as well as they can be expressed by orthodox English spellings:

Consonants

All consonants are as in English, although g is always hard. Fijian and Samoan have some spelling peculiarities: in Samoan g is always pronounced as ng; and in Fijian the following substitutions apply:

The glottal stop (as in ali‘i) is an unvoiced consonant made by a momentary stopping of the breath in the throat.

PREFACE

T

HE PACIFIC ISLANDS

were first colonised by people moving out of Southeast and East Asia and eventually occupying every habitable island and archipelago except the Galapagos in the far east of the Pacific Ocean. Considering that the ocean is a vast expanse of water covering one-third of the earth’s surface, and that archipelagos are separated from each other by hundreds of kilometres, this feat was the most extraordinary accomplishment of colonisation performed by the human race in its entire history. A famous New Zealand anthropologist, Sir Peter Buck, called the farthest-flung of these people the ‘Vikings of the Sunrise’. The term is flattering to the Vikings, who never performed maritime feats in any way comparable, nor were their craft as capable. Moreover, the Vikings were an iron-age people, whereas the first explorers of the Pacific did not have any knowledge of metals, a lack that makes their achievements all the more remarkable.

The histories of these scattered peoples before the coming of Europeans are obscured by the lack of written evidence. It is being filled in by archaeological research, though this will never be able to tell the stories of individual endeavour, or of the intellectual aspects of the long story. For the last several hundred years, a shadowy history becomes visible for some islands through myth, legend, genealogies and other forms of oral tradition. The histories of the Pacific peoples do not become known or told in detail until the coming of Europeans, who not only brought the art and habit of literacy to enable history to be written, but also set the history of Pacific islanders into a new trajectory.

For the last two to three hundred years the history of the Pacific islands has been shaped by and known through the activities of a succession of foreigners: scientifically minded explorers, missionaries, traders and patrolling naval officers. They were followed by settlers, plantation developers and colonial officials. Since the end of the colonial empires, Pacific history continues to wear the imprint of outsiders, including politicians, investors, development advisers, educators and tourists.

The prominence of non-indigenous people in the history of the last two centuries has made some historians pause to ask whether there was no continuing historical role for the Pacific islanders, and whether it was possible to emancipate Pacific history from its historiographical parentage in the history of European expansion and imperialism. Assuming that Pacific islanders were active agents in their own history, and that Pacific history should be seen as the record of what happened in the islands without reference to European history, a generation of academics in the age of decolonisation set out to write what they called ‘island oriented’ history, or history from the perspective of the islands. The work of this school provides the bulk of modern scholarship on the islands today.

The novelty in this approach was more a matter of self-declaration than substance. There was already a considerable body of scholarship on the Pacific that was not written as a branch of imperial history. Likewise there was a good deal of it, especially mission histories, that was fully alive to ‘indigenous agency’. Nor was much of it framed in the assumption of the ‘fatal impact’ that excited the scorn of the new historians. However, the phrase ‘fatal impact’, taken from the title of a work of ‘popular’ history by Alan Moorehead, came to be a slogan for dismissing the work of earlier historians.

Pacific history therefore came to be conceptually and artificially polarised into two camps: first, the so-called old-fashioned imperialist works that took Pacific islanders to be passive victims of history while history was made by active, masterful Europeans. The second, and newer, camp supposed itself to be progressive in outlook and rigorous in method, giving Pacific islanders due recognition of their role in history. If there was one thing more that the new school wanted, and could not entirely claim for itself, it was that Pacific islanders should be writing the history. The new historians therefore declared their own work to be provisional, serving only until Pacific islanders should emerge to do the job properly.

The present book owes a major debt to the writers of the new histories for the wealth of information that they have uncovered and the careful professionalism of their work. It seems to me, however, that what distinguishes the new historians most was their access to finance and to historical sources on a scale unknown to their predecessors. They were thus able to get more of the story and tell it in greater detail. They were not, I think, more successful at uncovering lost Pacific island voices. The difference between the old and the new schools was not moral or intellectual, but material.

Moreover, I do not accept that the so-called ‘fatal impact’ theory was used in the way that it was often alleged to be, nor for that matter that it was necessarily wrong. It is a mistake to suppose that ‘fatal impact’ equates with either indigenous passivity or scholarly arrogance. The impact of Europe on the Pacific islands and their peoples was indeed often fatal. The effect of introduced diseases, firearms, alcohol, land alienation and labour recruitment could hardly be anything else in a great many cases; nor does it give a truer picture to say that failing to assert Pacific islander agency is bad history. ‘Agency’ in history is often a matter of power, and that in turn is a matter of numbers, material resources and confidence. The balance swung from time to time in different directions.

Today, Pacific islanders still make their own history; there are other people not native to the region who are also making Pacific islanders’ history. The relationship with the wider world gives Pacific islanders new opportunities, just as it did two centuries ago, and the modern relationship also has its fatal components. The effects of nuclear contamination, the proliferation of the AIDS epidemic, bad diet and consumerism, global warming and the threat of rising sea levels gives a grimmer prospect of the ‘fatal impact’, but hardly more nightmarish than the encounter with personal, community and racial extinction confronted by many Pacific islanders in the past.

Pacific islanders live in a world that they are continually remaking, but they are also vulnerable to decisions made elsewhere and by other people, just as they have been in the past.

Preface to the second edition

Almost 24 years have passed since I wrote the original History of the Pacific Islands on which the present book is based, and 10 years since Worlds Apart was written. Inevitably scholarship proceeds, and makes modifications to previous certainties, while historians’ preoccupations move to different aspects of the past. Topics that were the subject of intense research 30 or 50 years ago are largely neglected now, and the light of inquiry has moved on to other periods and other themes. The most profound changes in our knowledge of the Pacific past in the past 20 years or so have taken place in the early indigenous settlement period, and in the recent past. Moreover, the past 20 years have seen significant and in some cases dramatic changes in the Pacific. What was once a future about which observers could be optimistic has now become the past, with its revelations of human and social frailties and failures. Accordingly, the main revisions for this edition have been at the beginning and the end: information in Chapter 2 has been updated and expanded, and the previous last chapter has been replaced with two new ones. I hope therefore that the book’s shelf-life might be extended for a time.

Finally, in the course of normal working life one learns from encounters with many people: teachers, mentors, colleagues, students, conference participants, librarians, archivists, critics, readers, editors, publishers and book reviewers; but most of all from the history-makers of many times and places. My appreciation and grateful thanks to them all.

Ian C. Campbell

CHAPTER ONE

The People of Oceania

T

HE PACIFIC OCEAN

occupies almost an entire hemisphere, a world of water, rimmed on the east by the continuous coast of the Americas, and on the west by the coasts of east Asia as far as the equator, with Australia blocking the southwestern corner. The view from space is one of empty blueness. The islands scattered across its tropical zones are so small as to be only faintly visible. Human beings are land creatures, and European explorers were surprised to find these tiny, scattered, remote islands of the Pacific inhabited.

When Europeans first began to explore the oceans in the 15th century, their experience was that remote islands were unoccupied; occupied islands were a sign that an inhabited mainland was not far away. This was no longer so in the Pacific by the time Europeans arrived. People occupied islands that were hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest land, usually another island and not a continental mass. These were the most isolated people on earth. The fact of occupation posed the double question, ‘Who were these people, and how did they come to be on these isolated places?’

As the map was filled in by exploration, other puzzles became apparent. The islands seemed to be occupied by three distinct populations, or races. The most isolated peoples on the farthest-flung islands were remarkably similar to each other, whereas the peoples of the islands nearest to Australia and Southeast Asia were a good deal more diverse. It seemed to European explorers that this was the opposite to what might be expected. Because the islands nearest to the great continents could receive new populations throughout their history, it was reasoned that the most distant Pacific island populations represented the oldest settlements, were the most isolated and therefore, because of the greater passage of time, their appearances and cultures should be more various; conversely, islands that were nearest the continents were presumed to have been settled more recently and should therefore exhibit less human and cultural variation.

This puzzled the early European voyagers and scholarly investigators who later became known as anthropologists. Why should the peoples of New Zealand, some of whom lived closer to the South Pole than to the equator, and Hawai‘i, straddling the Tropic of Cancer in the northern hemisphere, speak languages that were so closely related as to be almost understood by each other? Why should the people of distant Easter Island, several thousand kilometres to the east, also speak a variant of the same language? On the other hand, why did people in the western Pacific islands – New Guinea, for example, or Solomon Islands – have so many languages that people in adjacent bays and valleys, separated by only a few miles, spoke languages unintelligible to each other? Answering these, and related questions, proved to be a major preoccupation of 20th-century anthropology, beginning with attempts to systematically describe and classify the multiplicity of cultures and human physical types.

As early as the 1830s the peoples of the Pacific islands were known to outsiders by the names ‘Melanesian’, ‘Polynesian’ and ‘Micronesian’, terms commonly attributed to the French explorer Dumont d’Urville, who used them in 1832 to describe the obvious but blurred differences between the various archipelagos. The words were simply descriptive: Polynesia meaning ‘many islands’; Melanesia meaning ‘the black islands’ but referring to the darker complexion of its inhabitants; and Micronesia meaning ‘the small islands’.

The differences between these populations are by no means as significant as first appeared, but the terms remain useful as a way of describing the patterns of culture that link some of the people and distinguish others. Of the three groups, the Polynesians became well known to Europeans first, and early anthropology concentrated on them.

The Polynesians

The Polynesians occupied the eastern half of the ocean: Hawai’i in the north; Easter Island, the Marquesas Islands, Society Islands, Tuamotu and Austral Islands in the east; New Zealand in the south; the Cook Islands in the centre; Tonga and Samoa in the west; Tokelau and Tuvalu (formerly the Ellice Islands) in the northwest (see Map 1). Farther to the west were scattered small communities of Polynesians, called the Polynesian outliers, including Ontong Java, Tikopia, Rennell and Bellona, Nukumanu, and Kapingamarangi among others.

The languages spoken by the peoples of these islands were closely related. Those of the eastern Polynesian cultural area, from Hawai‘i to New Zealand, had sufficient common vocabulary, consistent phonetic characteristics and grammar for native speakers of one language to become conversant in another very rapidly. The early explorer Captain James Cook, for instance, was able to use a Tahitian as an interpreter in New Zealand. The western Polynesian languages presented more difficulties for an eastern Polynesian and diverged between themselves to a greater degree, but even non-linguists were able to see that they all belonged to the same family of languages. Table 1 indicates some of the family likenesses among the Polynesian languages.

All these languages form one group within the vast and complex Austronesian language family, which also includes many of the languages of Melanesia, the Micronesian languages, and several of Southeast Asia, including Malay, Indonesian and, far to the west, Malagasy, the language of Madagascar off the Indian Ocean coast of Africa.

In the same way as their languages were similar but with systematic variations, so were other aspects of their cultures. In political organisation, all Polynesian peoples had the idea of inherited rank. Generally speaking, the more populous and resource-rich a community was, the more elaborate and complicated were its notions of social and political gradation. All societies had chiefs who ruled communities that had a fairly stable territory.

In some communities people believed that all their members traced descent from a common ancestor, so that there was a sense of kinship between ruler and ruled to reinforce the idea of mutual obligations. Among other societies, especially the larger ones and those of western Polynesia, the different classes were looked on as having different origins: chiefs were descended from gods, but ordinary people merely came from the earth. In these societies, the gulf between ranks was profound.

Rank and status depended first and foremost on inheritance. The standing of both parents was important (generally one inherited political power from the father but rank and social status from the mother), but to inherit a particular position such as a title or position of leadership, the hereditary principle was modified by an assessment of suitability. At the time of inheritance the possible candidates and their peers (these might include the sons, brothers, nephews, cousins and uncles of the previous title-holder) would confer and choose a successor. The eldest brother and eldest son might have an advantage but not an automatic right to inherit. Succession might be, and frequently was, decided ultimately by war between contending factions. The authority exercised by such a chief was generally absolute: he commanded unquestioning obedience, was the source of law and justice, and decided matters of life and death; but if he ignored the advice of his peers and the interests of his subjects, he ran the risk of assassination or civil war. In short, Polynesian political systems may be described as warrior aristocracies.

In this scheme the role of women could be very important. In many Polynesian societies women were considered to have higher personal rank than their brothers, so that a woman would be a person of great influence or even authority in her brother’s family. If the brother happened to be a high chief, then a sister could exert enormous influence. Women had much less influence with their husbands than with their brothers, and were not holders of titles or positions in their own right. Nevertheless, the fact that women could influence affairs was conspicuous in Tonga, Tahiti and Hawai‘i around the time of European discovery.

The political units over which these aristocrats ruled varied enormously in size and power. On a small atoll like Tongareva in the northern Cook Islands, a chief might be little distinguished from his people, command a few dozen warriors, a few hundred people and perhaps a square kilometre of sandy soil. At the other extreme were the complex kingdoms of Hawai‘i and Tonga, their paramount chiefs commanding thousands of warriors, their own accessibility and freedom limited by an elaborate system of sacred prohibitions and rituals that gave them a god-like status and remoteness from their people. These kingdoms were too complex and stable to be considered mere tribal chiefdoms: they had a strength and solidity that came from a highly disciplined hierarchy of chiefs exercising delegated authority over peoples with defined territorial boundaries. The resemblance to European feudalism was striking. Within these large kingdoms the right to exercise power was no longer open to question. Between the extremes of these simple chiefdoms and elaborate kingdoms, fell a third political type, where tribes of intermediate size regularly engaged in bloody contests with their neighbours for access to resources or the assertion of hegemony. These included the large islands of New Zealand, the relatively large ones of Tahiti, Marquesas and Samoa, as well as smaller islands like those of the southern Cook group. In these cases clearly defined tribes dwelt in territories that might change with their military fortunes, but no tribe was ever able to establish and maintain a lasting authority over its neighbours.

In all these Polynesian societies the fortunes of the common people usually compared well with the general lot of humanity at that time. Warfare, overpopulation, or famine caused by hurricane, tidal wave or drought might bring starvation and social breakdown, but in normal conditions on most islands the people’s physical needs of food and shelter were well provided for. In other respects the environment was benign, with few insect pests, no infectious diseases and no dangerous animals. However, far from being a careless idyll of relaxation and indulgence, Polynesian life was in most places closely regulated by both chiefs and priests. Their exactions were commonly arduous, so that life involved hard labour, experienced perhaps as building, maintaining and utilising the irrigated agricultural systems of Hawai’i, or working the intensively cultivated gardens of Tonga. It might have seemed leisured to the outsider, but life was rarely idle, and it was arduous to the extent that both men and women aged prematurely, old at 40 according to studies of prehistoric skeletons. The industrious lower classes of Polynesia were kept occupied with food production, canoe-building, house-building and maintenance, tool-making and ceremonies. At times warfare made heavy demands on the time and labour of the people.

Religion was the instrument and partner of political authority in maintaining order. Priests were drawn from the chiefly classes, were usually hereditary and are best thought of as one of a variety of specialists. They were highly trained in sacred lore and ceremony, and provided the link between human society and the supernatural. As a group of specialists they had to be supported materially by the efforts of the people, just as other chiefs were. Moreover, the ceremonial life over which they presided required substantial quantities of material goods and food. The purpose of religion was not so much to provide personal comfort and reassurance as to validate the political structure, support the chiefs and reinforce the subordination of the ordinary people. A good relationship with the gods was the prerequisite for a prosperous and well-ordered society.

The eastern Polynesians had a multiplicity of gods who dwelt in the sky and sometimes came to Earth, performed deeds among men and procreated with mortal women. Some of these gods were ‘departmental’, each having his or her own ‘portfolio’ or special association with some aspect of human affairs or nature. Of these gods there were some that were common to most of eastern Polynesia: Tangaroa was the god of the sea; Lono, or Rongo, was the god of peace and agriculture; Ku, or Tu, the god of war; Tane, or Kane, the god of the forest. Western Polynesians did not have this formal pantheon, although they knew Tangaroa. The Tongans and Samoans had fewer great gods and more spirits, many of them unnamed, who were attached to persons or families rather than to roles as in eastern Polynesia. In both areas stories were told of demi-gods, the great culture heroes, of whom Maui was pre-eminent: he was the doer of great deeds, fisher from the ocean depths of the islands the people inhabited.

The religious ideas that accompanied these beliefs emphasised power rather than ethics, effectiveness rather than goodness, success rather than rectitude. A religion of pragmatism, its observances were intended to influence the gods to affect events among the people, or to placate the gods to avert misfortune or punishment. The two key concepts in Polynesian religious life were mana and tapu. Mana in essence meant efficacy – it was the sacred power a god possessed and by which he was able to act: some gods had greater mana than others. Mana was something men could have as well: a powerful and effective chief had great mana; a chief who did not command authority, or successfully wage war, or keep his people prosperous, healthy and numerous obviously had little mana, and was apt to be superseded by one who had more. It was thus a concept that not only helped to explain the way the world was, but that also channelled divine power. The ordinary secular qualities of dignity, respect, authority, even strength, health and vigour, were manifestations of mana and therefore easily confused with it. Tapu (tabu or kapu in some languages) has passed into English as taboo but means more than just ‘forbidden’. It was a sacred force, an attribute of gods and, to a slightly lesser extent, of chiefs, which is another way of saying that chiefs were sacred, or even semi-divine. Something that was tapu could be sacred or accursed, or both together, and would be out of bounds to all who did not have a dispensation. Tapu could thus function as a means of social control: a person might be made tapu to keep him isolated; a place or thing might be declared tapu to protect it or preserve it. People or things frequently became tapu after certain specified events. For example, someone who prepared a corpse for burial was tapu for several months, during which time he could not feed himself or handle food. In the more hierarchical societies of Tonga, Tahiti and Hawai‘i, high chiefs had so many tapu associated with them that they became burdensome. For example, the highest chiefs in those places were so tapu (sacred) that to enter a house or a canoe made it so tapu (holy and thus forbidden) that no ordinary person could ever again enter or use it. A paramount chief, therefore, if he had any consideration for his people, had to be very careful where he went and what he touched.

The authorities on matters of tapu and mana were the tohunga (kahuna), or priests (although the word also means wise men, experts, possessors of arcane skills of all kinds and not exclusively divine matters, but including horticulture, navigation, medicine, tool-making and so on). They officiated at ceremonies, interpreted the will of the gods, channelled a god’s mana into various earthly projects and sometimes possessed considerable temporal power either in their own right or through their influence over the chiefs. They were not shepherds of their flocks but a medium of power and authority.

In material culture the Polynesian achievement was distinguished by the care and quest for perfection, yielding objects that combined beauty and utility, reflecting both environmental constraints and individual ingenuity. Stone, shell, wood and plant fibre were all utilised to supply human needs, often at the cost of considerable labour and the exercise of great skill. Tools for gardening were made of wood; tools for woodworking were made of stone; housing of timber and thatch, for which both coconut or pandanus leaves were used; clothing was either matting hand-woven from the soft fibres of plants or tapa (kapa), cloth made by pulping, beating, drying and gluing bark fibres. No Polynesian society had knowledge of metals, or of the loom for weaving, or the wheel. Pottery was known to their ancestors and continued to be supplied by Fijians to Tongans and Samoans until recent times, so the absence of Polynesian pottery is an unexplained mystery. Domesticated animals were not used as labour, and included pigs, dogs and fowl, though not all of these existed on all islands at the time of European discovery. They were used merely for food, and then usually only on festive occasions.

In the material dimension as well as the non-material a clear east–west division is seen (see Table 2, pp. 24–25). Eastern Polynesian adzes were tanged (shaped to provide a grip for a handle); those from the west were not. In the east fishing was done mainly with hook and line; in the west mainly with nets. Coiled basketry was used in the west; not in the east. Canoe construction differed between east and west in a variety of ways, including the fastening of planks, the attachment of outriggers, rigging, ornamentation and paddle shapes. Artistic designs also varied: in the west styles tended to employ straight-line geometrical patterns with an absence of human forms; in the east carvings were curvilinear and human forms were commonly represented.

Distinctive though their cultures were, the Polynesians shared many features with their distant oceanic neighbours, the Melanesians and Micronesians.

The Melanesians

Melanesia was as remarkable for its diversity as Polynesia was for homogeneity. Its peoples ranged in stature from tall to short, in skin colour from light brown to deep black, in social control from near anarchy to hereditary chieftainships. The variety of social organisations is immense, including both matrilineal and patrilineal systems, uxorilocal, virilocal and other residence patterns, and a great many different ways of classifying kinship, including moiety systems and totemic systems. Within these systems there was often great complexity. Few of these patterns consistently correlate with each other. Indeed, the patterning seems mostly random. In addition, the number of languages is prodigious. Estimates vary, but reliable opinion is that there are about 1200 languages, or one-fifth of the world’s estimated total, but spoken by no more than several million people altogether. Some generalisations about Melanesian society are possible, but none of them is universally applicable.

One of the safest generalisations is that the cultural fragmentation of Melanesia was reflected in the size of social units. They were mostly small, based on villages that housed perhaps a few dozen to a few hundred people. Why this should be so is a matter of speculation. There seems to be no way of knowing whether smallness explains fragmentation, or the other way around. Both, however, seem to be the long-term pattern of Melanesian history. Even where there were hereditary chieftainships, populations were not consolidated into larger units as happened in Polynesia. Consequently, because populations were not large, there was generally not a great surplus of food or goods to support a large class of specialists, whether craftspeople, warriors, priests or chiefs. The difference is reflected in the elaboration of public forms of culture, such as monuments, public architecture and settlement size. At the same time there were parts of Melanesia, notably in the New Guinea highlands and the inland of New Caledonia, where vast agricultural terraces and irrigation systems were built, obviously the work of large, co-ordinated workforces and capable of supporting dense populations. The co-existence of these systems without correspondingly large political units is another mystery of Melanesia.

Whereas Polynesians and Micronesians almost always lived close to the sea and depended on its resources for much of their food, Melanesians generally live on much larger islands, so that a cultural distinction can often be made between ‘saltwater’ people and ‘bush’ people. Suspicion or traditional enmity often prevailed between the two, but there were other cleavages and affinities as well, so it is not a general rule. ‘Saltwater’ and ‘bush’ people had complementary needs and resources, so trade between them was as common as raiding. Nevertheless, many Melanesians lived by the sea and some of these had strong maritime traditions, either involving sailing across wide ocean spaces or paddling comparatively enclosed waters. But many coastal Melanesians were not seafarers, so the level of maritime exposure and expertise was generally lower in Melanesia than in either Polynesia or Micronesia. For most Melanesians, horizons were limited to the modest territories claimed by a village community, and few travelled more than a few miles by either land or sea. It was congruent with this immobility that, compared with the proverbially hospitable Polynesians, Melanesian society was intensely xenophobic. Strangers generally were held in deep suspicion, so much so that anyone who travelled far from home went at the risk of life.

The extensive trade networks nevertheless distributed goods over long distances. These were either maintained as the linking of innumerable short-distance contacts between neighbours, or by the few communities comprising travellers and seafarers. These included the Trobriand Islanders, famous for the Kula ring network of exchange, or, even more remarkable, the people of Motu, who specialised in pottery manufacture and once a year took their produce on a long voyage of hundreds of kilometres to the Gulf of Papua to exchange for sago flour.

Each community was supported mainly by its own horticulture, usually with just one staple supplemented by a variety of subsidiary crops. Shifting swidden (‘slash and burn’) cultivation was widespread, but many communities had permanent gardens, especially those in the New Guinea highlands, which were specialised production systems for sweet potato, and New Caledonia, where swamp species like taro were cultivated in artificial irrigation systems.

In societies that produced little that could be accumulated, the possibility of great differences of wealth, and of differences of status built on wealth, was slender. Rich and powerful men were those who by hard work, strategic marriages and shrewd use of patronage could command a larger than usual capacity to produce food or construct buildings for public use. Their surplus food production was used to provide public feasting and to secure the social and political support of lesser men. Such a man has been called by anthropologists a ‘Big Man’, from the term used by many Melanesians themselves in their respective languages. The ‘Big Man’ political form was not universal throughout Melanesia, but it was common and distinguishes Melanesian social organisation from Polynesian and Micronesian. Big Men acquired their status: they did not inherit it and were not elected to it. Instead, they had to scramble by fierce and anxious competition to a position they had constantly to defend until they retired, died or were eclipsed by another, more vigorous social climber. Although his position was not inherited, a son or nephew of a Big Man would have an advantage over less fortunate competitors in the next generation. The Big Man’s authority was based on social status: he had influence rather than power, and the sway that he built up for himself could not usually be transformed into regular political power or institutions that would survive his death or retirement. A campaign of conquest of neighbours and expansion of territory could not be built on such authority. If an exceptionally able man were able to extend the network of his influence beyond what was normal, it would seldom survive his death. His achievement was purely personal.

People lived in small communities composed of kinsfolk. Exogamy – marriage outside the group – was more common than endogamy, and in this way kinship links extended to neighbouring communities, thereby reducing the risk of warfare between such groups. This was not invariably the case because kinship classifications did not necessarily embrace all people with common ancestry. Quarrels and raiding involving whole villages and near neighbours certainly occurred, and with the deep suspicion Melanesians had for each other, and their almost universal dread and expectation of sorcery, such conflicts were not uncommon. But unlike in Polynesian warfare, casualties were generally light and territory was not usually at stake, although there are cases known of whole communities being exterminated or driven entirely from their lands. On the whole, skirmishes were fought more frequently for the restitution of real or imagined grievances than for conquest.

In religion the Melanesians were again different from the Polynesians. Melanesians had no counterparts to the great ‘departmental’ gods of eastern Polynesia: their religion was a complicated business involving a multitude of powerful, capricious and usually malevolent spirits, demons and ghosts, among which ancestors were prominent. But as in Polynesia, religious belief and practice were largely pragmatic and focused on acquiring power and warding off danger. The supernatural was feared mainly for the danger associated with it, so religious practice involved ceremonies and rituals to deflect evil or to constrain the spirits to allow or promote certain undertakings. The latter might include some personal enterprise like lovemaking, or an economic interest such as growing yams or the abundance of fish. The idea of personal devotion to a god in the Christian sense was not a characteristic of Melanesian religion. Being thus a system of beliefs and rituals for controlling human and natural affairs by manipulating the spirits, Melanesian religion has sometimes been described as a technology. Worship in the Christian sense was not part of this system. As in Polynesia, natural and supernatural were not distinguished. It did not make sense to describe someone as ‘religious’ or ‘irreligious’, and knowledge of spirits and ghosts was part of the general knowledge of the natural order.

Closely related to religion were magic, sorcery and witchcraft. These were ways of controlling natural events without working through an intermediate spirit. Men and women suspected of sorcery were very much feared, and any unwelcome event such as a death or hurricane might be attributed to the agency of a sorcerer. Sorcerers did not practise publicly: although individuals were suspected of sorcery, it was not usually an acknowledged role. There was indeed little religious or magical specialisation, and no one could live solely by the practice of mysterious arts. Another distinguishing feature of Melanesian societies was the existence of separate cults for men and women. The sexes had separate life-cycle ceremonies and possessed different secret lore. The social life of men was often quite separate from that of women and children, and in many societies focused on a ‘men’s house’, membership of which was governed by successive rituals and grades of rank.

With little specialisation generally, labour division was based on age or gender. Pig-raising was often the work of women, but forest-clearing and garden preparation were the work of men, although most routine garden work was commonly undertaken by women. Work was mostly organised at the household level, but there was also a lot of co-operative effort.

All in all, Melanesian society was extremely complicated, not just in the variety across the region, but the conceptual bases and organisation within each society were often very complex, belying the superficial impression that people with primitive living conditions are simple or rudimentary in other ways. Abstract life was often very rich and artistic expression varied, intricate and creative. The standard of execution of much Melanesian art and decoration was fine and precise. Yet to the Europeans who first saw them, the Melanesians seemed a wretched, barbarous race. This reaction was partly due to the overt violence of the Melanesians of their first acquaintance, but also had much to do with their environment. Unlike the Polynesians, whose environment was insulated by successive ocean passages hundreds of kilometres wide, the Melanesians occupied a chain of islands that stretched all the way to the shores of Asia and Australia, with no great geographical barriers to the passage of a rich variety of life forms. The Melanesian islands were home to more various populations of plant, animal and insect life, and offered a wider range of ecological types than the islands of Polynesia. The negative aspect of this variety was the presence of pests, parasites and diseases that plagued the life of the people and from which the Polynesians were blessedly free; foremost among the curses suffered by the Melanesians was malaria. Life was accordingly short and hard, especially for those inhabiting the hot, humid coastal regions.

The absence of large political units, the fear of sorcery, a high degree of xenophobia, and the effects of endemic illnesses on temperament all probably contributed to the diversity of Melanesia, but the long isolation of small groups is probably more responsible than any other single factor for the enormous range of physical, cultural and linguistic types, and of the erratic correlation in the distribution of different characteristics. Each community developed its own idiosyncrasies until, at length, clear patterns became lost. Early anthropologists supposed that the variations were due to successions of different populations filtering into and through the area. Current thinking is that such waves of immigration (as distinct from multiple movements of populations within Melanesia) are improbable and on their own could not account for the enormous range of differences.

Amid all this cultural chaos one thing has been established – that most coastal Melanesian languages belong to the one large language group: the Austronesian language family, of which the Polynesian languages all constitute one subgroup. The non-A ustronesian languages of Melanesia (formerly called Papuan) are mostly found on the island of New Guinea, with some in Solomon Islands. So far no one has been able to detect any affiliation for Papuan languages with languages from outside the region, and they are only distantly related to each other.

The Micronesians

Micronesia, superficially at least, resembles Polynesian patterns rather than Melanesian (see Table 3, pp. 32–33). This resemblance led some earlier scholars to suggest that Micronesia was a blend of Polynesian and Asian influences. Despite their proximity to Asia, however, Micronesians have more in common with the Pacific peoples. Generally darker and not as tall as the average Polynesian, they seem to fit more within the range of variations found in Melanesia, where indeed they have close cultural similarities. In material culture the two areas show some striking similarities, such as shell adzes and in fishing gear. Culturally, however, Micronesia was more heterogeneous than Polynesia, and generalisations about Micronesian society gloss over many exceptions and variations.

The islands of Micronesia are mostly small. The Gilbert and Marshall Islands are chains of atolls; Ocean Island (Banaba) and Nauru are small isolated islands, the latter being a mere 20 square kilometres, and the former somewhat less. The Caroline Islands are a scatter of widely separated atoll clusters, with four fairly substantial islands, large by oceanic standards but not comparable to the expansive islands of Melanesia. The Mariana chain is a string of small islands, of which Guam (about 500 square kilometres) is larger than the rest combined. Palau is about the same size as the Marianas without Guam. Thus, while the islands of Micronesia are scattered over a large area, they are not so dispersed as Polynesia, and a small-scale map gives a false impression of coherence. The reality of Micronesia, however, is the omnipresent ocean, and although most Micronesians lived on fairly large islands, atoll life and long-distance sailing was more characteristic in the region than in Melanesia or Polynesia. Indeed, Micronesians were probably the greatest navigators of the Pacific – not for epic transoceanic migrations but for the depth and refinement of their navigational lore, and the highly developed sailing technology that went with it.

As with the other two cultures, a subsistence economy with technological resources of only plant materials, stone, bone and shell does not permit a great variety of wealth or ease. Social differentiation in Micronesia depended on inherited rank, but the Micronesian ranking system was so complicated that, as in western Polynesia, no two people would be exactly on the same level. Some communities had members of such exalted rank that they had an almost kingly status and authority; elsewhere, government was in the hands of a council of high-ranking men.

Notwithstanding the complexity of the ranking system, most communities had two or three social classes or, more correctly, grades. Cutting across these grades was a principle of dualism: two lines of titles both ranging in rank from high to low, sometimes residentially segregated. Every member of a community was thus classified by descent into one of two groups. For this purpose, as well as for inheriting property, matrilineal descent is usually regarded as typical of Micronesia, although patrilineal and mixed groups are also found. With this type of social and political organisation, rivalry within communities and competition between them was intense, and warfare – at least at the time of European contact – was common. This did not usually involve conquest so much as the satisfaction of honour, and casualties were not normally heavy. Nevertheless, warfare could sometimes be a formidable and costly undertaking, especially on larger islands where the resources supported larger-scale conflict and where perhaps there were greater prizes to be won.

The material culture of Micronesia shows the influence of contact with the adjacent regions of Asia in pottery and in looms for weaving, both of which crafts were present in well-developed forms. Seagoing vessels were probably the most superior in all Oceania, with large dual-hulled, plank-built canoes, and an elaborate knowledge of sea- and star-lore that made the Micronesians more accomplished seafarers than any of their neighbours. Their elaborate fishing assemblage provided for the harvesting of both reef and ocean, whereas in Polynesia and Melanesia the pattern was generally inclined towards one more than the other. There were distinctive features of Micronesian material culture: in western Micronesia large houses, possibly for communal purposes, were built on stone pillars that still dot the landscape; the people of Yap used large stone discs, some the height of a man in diameter, as an indicator of wealth. These were quarried elsewhere and brought across the sea. In the eastern Carolines there were massive stone structures, covering many acres in extent, quite unlike any other architecture in Oceania.