Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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This moving picture of Greek emigration is duplicated in the Malay Archipelago, especially in the smaller eastern islands. Almost every Malay tribe has traditions based upon migrations. The southern Philippines derived the considerable Mohammedan element of their populations from the Samal Laut, who came from Sumatra and the islands of the Strait of Malacca.986 A Malayan strain can be traced through Polynesia to far-off Easter Isle. Sometimes the emigration is a voluntary exile from home for a short period and a definite purpose. The inhabitants of Bouton, Binungku, and the neighboring islets, all of them located southeast of Celebes, have for the past twenty-five years come in great numbers to the larger islands of Ceram, Buru, Amboina and Banda, where they have laid out and carefully cultivated plantations of maize, tobacco, bananas and coco-palms. Generally only the men come, work two years, save their profits and then return home. These ambitious tillers look like savages, are shy as wild things of the woods, and work naked to the waist.987
Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, where every condition of land and sea tends to develop the migratory spirit, form a region of extensive colonization.988 Settlements of one race are scattered among the island groups of another, making the ethnic boundaries wide penumbras. In some smaller islands of Melanesia the Polynesian colonists have exterminated or expelled the original inhabitants, and are found there now with all their distinctive race characteristics; but in the larger islands, they have been merged in the resident population, and their presence is only to be surmised from the existence of Polynesian customs, such as father-right in New Hebrides and Solomon Island side by side with the prevailing Melanesian mother-right.989 In small islands, like Tongatabu, Samoa and Fiji, emigration becomes habitual, a gradual spilling over of the redundant population and hence not a formidable inundation. In all this insular region of the Pacific, the impulse to emigration is so persistent, that the resulting inter-insular colonization obliterates sharp distinctions of race; it annuls the segregation of an island environment, and makes everywhere for amalgamation and unification, rather than differentiation.990
Among highly civilized peoples, where better economic methods bring greater density of population and set at the same time a higher standard of living, emigration from islands is especially marked. Japan has seen a formidable exodus since an end was put to its long period of compression. This has taken the form of widespread emigration to various foreign lands, notably the Hawaiian Islands and the United States, and also of internal colonization in its recently acquired territory in Formosa and Korea.991 The Maltese have spread from their congested island, and are found to-day as gardeners, sailors and traders along all the Mediterranean coasts.992 Majorca and the more barren Cyclades993 tell the same story. The men of Capri go in considerable numbers to South America, but generally return home again. The Icelanders often pull themselves out of the stagnation of their lonely, ungenerous island to become thrifty citizens of western Canada.
Emigration from islands readily throws itself into the channel of navigation and foreign trade. The northern Sporades, especially Skiathos and Skopelos, are the home of sailors who can be found over all the world.994 In this appetency for a nautical career, small inshore islets are often distinguished from the nearby mainland. Nearly all the masculine population of the Frisian Islands were seamen prior to 1807. In the eighteenth century a third of the Hamburg vessels were commanded by captains from the little island of Sylte, and a third of the Greenland fleet of the Netherlands by natives of Föhr.995
In England the exodus took the form of trading expeditions and the foundation of commercial colonies long before the food resources of the island had been even considerably developed. The accessible sea offered lines of least resistance, while the monopoly of the land by a privileged aristocracy and the fiercely defended corn laws made the limitations of a small area more oppressive. In Ireland, a landless peasantry in a grainless land, dulled by deprivation of opportunity, found in emigration an escape from insupportable evils.
While emigration draws off the surplus population, there tend to develop in islands, as also in barren highlands where population early reaches the point of saturation, various devices to restrict natural increase. The evils of congestion are foreseen and guarded against. Abbé Raynal, writing of islanders in general, remarked as far back as 1795, "It is among these people that we trace the origin of that multitude of singular institutions which retards the progress of population. Anthropophagy, the castration of males, the infibulation of females, late marriages, the consecration of virginity, the approbation of celibacy, the punishments exercised against girls who become mothers at too early an age," he enumerates as such checks. Malthus, in his Essay on Population, commenting on this statement, notes that the bounds to the number of inhabitants on islands, especially small ones, are so narrow and so obvious that no one can ignore them.996
The checks to population practiced on islands are either preventive or positive. The extreme measure to restrict marriage is found among the wretched Budumas who inhabit the small, marshy islands of Lake Chad. Tribal custom allows only the chiefs and headmen to have wives. A brass crescent inserted in the ear of a boy indicates the favored one among a chief's sons destined to carry on his race. For his brothers this is made physically impossible; they become big, dull, timid creatures contributing by their fishing to the support of the thinly populated villages. The natives of the Shari River delta on the southern shore of Lake Chad use Buduma as a term of contempt for a man.997
In islands, as in unproductive highlands where hunger stalks abroad, marriage readily takes the form of polyandry. On the Canary Islands, at the time of their conquest in 1402, polyandry existed in Lancerote and possibly in Fuerteventura, often assigning one woman to three husbands; but in the other islands of the group monogamy was strictly maintained.998 In Oceanica polygamy, monogamy or polyandry prevails according to a man's means, the poverty of the islands, and the supply of women. A plurality of wives is always the privilege of the chiefs and the wealthy, but all three forms of marriage may be found on the same island. Scarcity of women gives rise to polyandry in Tahiti,999 and consigns one woman to four or five men. In old Hawaii, where there were four or five men to one woman a kind of incipient polyandry arose by the addition of a countenanced paramour to the married couple's establishment.1000 Robert Louis Stevenson found the same complaisant arrangement a common one in the Marquesas, where the husband's deputy was designated by the term of pikio in the native vocabulary.1001 Polyandry existed in Easter Isle, among whose stunted and destitute population the men far exceeded the women, and children were few, according to reports of the early visitors.1002 Numerous other instances make this connection between island habitat, deficiency of women, need of checking increase, and polyandrous marriages an obvious one.1003
This disproportion of the sexes in Oceanica is due to the murder of female infants, too early child-bearing, overwork, privation, licentiousness, and the violence of the men.1004 The imminence of famine dictates certain positive checks to population, among which infanticide and abortion are widespread in Oceanica. In some parts of the New Hebrides and the Solomon groups it is so habitual, that in some families all children are killed, and substitutes purchased at will.1005 In the well-tilled Fiji Islands, a pregnant girl is strangled and her seducer slain. The women make a practice of drinking medicated waters to produce sterility. Failing in this, the majority kill their children either before or after birth. In the island of Vanua Levu infanticide reaches from one-half to two-thirds of all children conceived; here it is reduced to a system and gives employment to professional murderers of babies, who hover like vultures over every child-bed. All destroyed after birth are females.1006 And yet here, as on many other islands of Melanesia and Polynesia, such offspring as are spared are treated with foolish fondness and indulgence.1007 The two facts are not incompatible.
Geographic conditions made infanticide a state measure in these crowded communities. On the small coral atolls, where the food supply was scantest, it was enforced by law. On Vaitupu, in the Ellice group, only two children were allowed to a couple; on Nukufelau, only one. Any violation of this unique sumptuary law was punished by a fine.1008 On the congested Gilbert atolls, a woman rarely had more than two children, never more than three. Abortion, produced by a regular midwife, disposed of any subsequent offspring. Affection for children was very strong here, and infanticide of the living was unknown.1009 In Samoa, also, Turner found the practice restricted to the period before birth; but in Tahiti and elsewhere it was enforced by the tribal village authorities on the born and unborn.1010 In pre-Christian Hawaii, two-thirds of all children, and especially girls, were killed by their parents either before or after birth. The result was a decay of the maternal instinct and the custom of farming out children to strangers. This contributed to the excess of infant mortality, the degeneration of morals and the instability of the family.1011 So in Japan the pressure of population led to infanticide and the sale of daughters to a life of ignominy, which took them out of the child-bearing class.1012 Nor was either custom under the ban.
The result is a deterioration of morals, an invasion of the family bond, and a decay of the finer sentiments therewith connected. Captain Cook in 1770 found in Tahiti Eareeoie or Arreoys societies, which were free-love associations including in their number "over half of the better sort of the inhabitants." The children begotten of these promiscuous unions were smothered at birth. Obscene conversations, indecent dances and frank unchastity on the part of girls and women were the attendant evils of these loose morals.1013 Cook was sure that "these societies greatly prevent the increase of the superior classes of people of which they are composed." Malthus reports a similar association in the Marianne Islands, distinguished by a similar name, devoted to race suicide.1014 Everywhere in Oceanica marriage is unstable, and with few exceptions unchastity prevails. Stevenson thinks it chiefly accountable for the decline of
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