The Pacific Islands Press: A Directory 9780824887018

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The Pacific Islands

The

Pacific Islands THIRD EDITION

DOUGLAS L. OLIVER Illustrations by Sheila Mitchell Oliver

University of Hawaii Press Honolulu

Maps 1 - 4 originally appeared in Oceania: The Native Cultures of Australia and the Pacific Islands (1989, 2 vols., Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press), by Douglas L. Oliver.

© 1951, 1961, 1989 by Douglas L. Oliver All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03

6 5 4 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Oliver, Douglas L. The Pacific Islands / Douglas L. Oliver ; with illustrations by Sheila Mitchell Oliver. — 3rd ed. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8248-1233-6 1. Islands of the Pacific. I. Title. 88-38668 DU17.056 1989 CIP 990—dcl9

University of Hawai'i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

www.uhpress.hawaii.edu

To Philip Phillips and Harry Maude

Contents

Illustrations and Maps Preface

ix xi

The Islanders CHAPTER I.

The Islands and the Islanders in Pre-colonial Times

3

The Invaders CHAPTER

Z.

CHAPTER 3. CHAPTER 4. C H A P T E R 5.

Explorers: 1521-1792 Whalers, Traders, and Missionaries: 1780-1850 Planters, Labor Recruiters, and Merchants: 1850-1914 Miners and Administrators: 1914-1939

35 46 60 76

Transformations CHAPTER

6.

The Dimensions of Change Lives 8. Land 9. Souls 1 0 . Coconuts 11. Sugar 12.. Sea Harvest 13. Mines 1 4 . Bases 15. Losses and Gains

CHAPTER 7. CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER

87 89 103 112 130 174 204 212 229 246 VII

VIII

CONTENTS

Cataclysm CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER

16. World War II 17. After the Battles 18. Epilogue

Bibliography Index

255 268 279 281 297

Illustrations and A/laps

Unless otherwise indicated, the illustrations of native artifacts were sketched by Sheila Mitchell Oliver from objects in collections at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University.

Maps of Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia with native navigational chart and art motifs

1

Pandanus palm

3

Head of club, Marquesas Islands

33

Map of Terra Australis; freely adapted from 1578 map in E. D. Fite and Archibald Freeman, A Book of Old Maps (Harvard University Press, 1926); original in John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island

35

Carved bowl, megapode and fish, New Britain (author's collection)

46

Figure from Siuai area, Bougainville (author's collection)

60

Bougainville club blade

76

Carved figure for protection of graves, New Caledonia

85

Tapa board, Western Samoa

87

Carved wooden figures, New Hebrides

89

Canoe prow, New Zealand

103

Carved figures (Peabody and author's collection)

112

Coconut

130

Pineapple and sugarcane

174

Fish design, Torres Strait

204 IX

X

I L L U S T R A T I O N S AND M A P S

Seabirds

212

Clubhouse, Palau Islands

229

Decoration for bow of canoe, Humboldt Bay area-, New Guinea

246

Ceremonial mask, Hawaii

253

War clubs, Fiji

255

Kit for betel chewing: lime container and spoon, mortar and pestle

268

National god from Rarotonga, Cook Islands

279

Map 1. Sunda and Sahul

4

Map 2. Tectonic plates of the Pacific region

6

Map 3. Ocean currents and surface winds of the Pacific region

7

Map 4. Rainfall patterns of the Pacific region

9

Map 5. Ethnic divisions in the Pacific Islands

14

Map 6. Political divisions in the Pacific Islands in 1939

247

Map 7. Japan's farthest advances into the Pacific during World War II

257

Preface

The first edition of this book was published by Harvard University Press in 1951. A second edition, copublished by Harvard University Press and the American Museum of Natural History/Doubleday & Co. in 1961 (and reprinted by the University of Hawaii Press in 1975 and subsequent years), constituted a revision only to the extent that it provided a chronicle of events up to 1960. The present edition, like the first, terminates the book's narrative at 1950 but contains extensive revisions and additions, based on the large and continually increasing number of historical and anthropological writings about the Pacific Islands published since 1960. In fact, the quantity of such writings has become so dauntingly large that I was reluctant to attempt another revision and was persuaded to do so only at the urging of some colleagues who continue to make use of the 1961 edition in their teaching despite its many obsolescences. Thus it is to them, and especially to Thomas Harding, that I owe principal acknowledgement for the appearance of this third (and definitely final!) edition. (Acknowledgements for assistance in preparing the earlier editions are listed therein.) Help of other kinds has been provided by this edition's dedicatees: to Harry Maude, for his inspiring, generous, and unpretentious deanship of Pacific Islands history; and to Philip Phillips, for his perdurable friendship.

XI

THE ISLANDERS

CHAPTER ONE

The Islands and the Islanders in Pre-colonial Times

There are more than ten thousand Pacific Islands, ranging from tiny coral islets to vast New Guinea, which is as large as Texas and contains mountains fourteen thousand to fifteen thousand feet high. Just before the first contact with Westerners, the Pacific Islands were inhabited by about three and a quarter million people whose ancestors had migrated from Southeast Asia, some of them forty thousand to fifty thousand years ago. At that earliest stage of settlement, the ocean gaps between Southeast Asia and New Guinea (the westernmost Pacific Island) were somewhat narrower than they are today, as a result of a lowering of sea levels brought about by the freezing and impounding of much of the earth's waters during that most recent Ice Age. As a result of that same worldwide lowering of ocean levels, the shallow sea bottoms between New Guinea and Australia were exposed off and on for thousands of years so that the lands were united into a single continent, which geologists have named Sahul (see Map 1). Archaeology has demonstrated that Australia was first settled at least as early as New Guinea and likely from This chapter is a brief summary of the author's Native Cultures of the Pacific Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989.

Islands,

4

THE

ISLANDERS

Map 1. Sunda and Sahul (shaded areas now submerged) (drawn by Lois Johnson) some of the same sources in what is now eastern Indonesia. But during the following millennia the peoples of the two land masses, which were only periodically united, diverged from one another both physically (i.e., genetically) and culturally and were almost totally separated about ten thousand years ago when that final Ice Age ended and sea levels rose to

IN PRE-COLONIAL

TIMES

5

their present heights. (Since then the only contacts, and those few and transient, between the native peoples of New Guinea and Australia have been by New Guineans living in the islands of the Torres Strait.) The pioneer settlers in New Guinea found a climate cooler than today's and hence somewhat different types and locations of vegetation and animals. About ten thousand years ago, however, those natural elements began to become as they were when Western colonization commenced, which leads to the question of what those elements were, not only in New Guinea but in all the other environments into which the Islanders eventually settled. The question is relevant because although physical environments do not directly, necessarily, shape mankind's cultures, they do provide limits to what humans can do, especially in the case of the Pacific Islanders, with their Stone Age technologies. Understanding of the numerous kinds of natural environments found in the Pacific Islands must begin with some knowledge of their underlying bases, which consist of portions of three tectonic plates, the huge sheets of rock sixty or so miles thick on which the earth's lands and seas are based, and which float on a thicker layer of magma. The numerous separate plates that make up those sheets move about continuously over the magma. When adjoining plates move apart, the magma flows up through the gaps to build mountains. When they collide one of them pushes under (subducts) the other, creating great ridges and troughs. And when they grind past each other the resulting friction produces cracks, and hence earthquakes, in the adjoining plates. The Pacific Islands are based on three adjoining plates: the vast Pacific Plate in the east, which consists mainly of basalt, and the Philippine and Indo-Australian plates in the west, which consist of continental-type rocks such as granite and slate (see Map 2). At its western edge the westward-moving Pacific Plate subducts the other two, thereby forming mountainous ridges and deep ocean trenches, accompanied by continuing vulcanism and earthquakes. Meanwhile, the magma underlying the Pacific Plate continues to flow up through its weak spots (faults), thereby adding to the existing archipelagoes. Another great rock-forming element in the tropical Pacific (excluding New Zealand, which is outside the tropics) is coral, a hard calcareous substance made up of the skeletons of certain marine animals and plants that attach themselves to rocks or to the shells of dead predecessors, thereby building up solid structures of varied shapes. The animals (the polyps) involved in this process can survive only in warm, clear, sunlit waters. Thus, as the sea level rises and falls in relation to a coralencrusted shoreline, so does the zone of coral formation. And as a result of the many changes in shoreline level, dead coral reefs are to be found on the slopes of the islands, in some cases as much as four thousand feet above or below present sea level.

6

THE 180

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