Note 550 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

The highest degree of intimacy is developed in that vast island-strewn stretch of the Pacific constituting Oceanica.550 Here where a mild climate enables the boatman race to make a companion of the deep, where every landscape is a seascape, where every diplomatic visit or war campaign, every trading journey or search for new coco-palm plantation means a voyage beyond the narrow confines of the home island, there dwells a race whose splendid chest and arm muscles were developed in the gymnasium of the sea; who, living on a paltry 515,000 square miles (1,320,300 square kilometers) of scattered fragments of land, but roaming over an ocean area of twenty-five million square miles, are not more at home in their palm-wreathed islets than on the encompassing deep. Migrations, voluntary and involuntary, make up their history. Their trained sense of locality, enabling them to make voyages several hundred miles from home, has been mentioned by various explorers in Polynesia. The Marshall Islanders set down their geographical knowledge in maps which are fairly correct as to bearings but not as to distances. The Ralick Islanders of this group make charts which include islands, routes and currents.551 Captain Cook was impressed by the geographical knowledge of the people of the South Seas. A native Tahitian made for him a chart containing seventy-four islands, and gave an account of nearly sixty more.552 Information and directions supplied by natives have aided white explorers to many discoveries in these waters. Quiros, visiting the Duff Islands in 1606, learned the location of Ticopia, one of the New Hebrides group, three hundred miles away. Not only the excellent seamanship and the related pelagic fishing of the Polynesians bear the stamp of their predominant water environment; their mythology, their conception of a future state, the germs of their astronomical science, are all born of the sea.