Note (return) — LECTURE XVIII

So much for the belief in immortality as it is reported to exist among the Northern Melanesians of New Britain and the Bismarck Archipelago. We now pass to the consideration of a similar belief among another people of the same stock, who have been longer known to Europe, the Fijians. The archipelago which they occupy lies to the east of the New Hebrides and forms in fact the most easterly outpost of the black Melanesian race in the Pacific. Beyond it to the eastward are situated the smaller archipelagoes of Samoa and Tonga, inhabited by branches of the brown Polynesian race, whose members are scattered over the islands of the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south. Of all the branches of the Melanesian stock the Fijians at the date of their discovery by Europeans appear to have made the greatest advance in culture, material, social, and political. "The Fijian," says one who knew him long and intimately, "takes no mean place among savages in the social scale. Long before the white man visited his shores he had made very considerable progress towards civilisation. His intersexual code had advanced to the 'patriarchal stage': he was a skilful and diligent husbandman, who carried out extensive and laborious agricultural operations: he built good houses, whose interior he ornamented with no little taste, carved his weapons in graceful and intricate forms, manufactured excellent pottery, beat out from the inner bark of a tree a serviceable papyrus-cloth, upon which he printed, from blocks either carved or ingeniously pieced together, elegant and elaborate patterns in fast colours; and, with tools no better than a stone hatchet, a pointed shell, and a firestick, he constructed large canoes capable of carrying more than a hundred warriors across the open sea."647