Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/53

 LEGENDS FROM TORRES STRAITS.

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N collecting these myths and legends I could not take down the actual native words, being ignorant of the language, but I have given a faithful rendering of the stones as told to me in broken English. I have nowhere embellished the accounts, and I have given most of the conversations and remarks of people in the very words my informants used; thus preserving, as far as possible, the freshness and quaintness of the original narrative. I believe that in most cases the native idiom was bodily translated into the “Pigeon English”.

As to the age of the legends I can form no idea. One point is noteworthy, that not in a single instance did I ever hear of any reference to a white man nor of anything belonging to white men; for example, a knife was always ‘upi’, the old bamboo knife, never ‘gi’ or ‘gi turik’ (‘knife’; turik also meant ‘iron’). I think I am safe in asserting that thirty years ago there was no intelligent intercourse with white men; this period may practically be reduced to twenty years, and in some islands to even less. I usually checked the genuineness of the legends by inquiry of other men than the original informants; not unfrequently old men were present, who were often referred to. My narrators were, almost without exception, middle-aged men, and I am always careful to impress on them the importance of giving me the story as they had heard it from the old men. Experience showed me that they were as conservative as children of traditional phrases and modes of expression. Therefore I can confidently claim that this collection of legends really represents the