Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/269

 THE NATIVES OF NEW CALEDONIA.

[The following notes are selected from the papers of the late Mr. J. J. Atkinson, my cousin. Educated at Loretto School, he went, very early in life, to some stations which he had inherited in New Caledonia. He visited the New Hebrides and other groups, and, though then quite without anthropological training, made himself familiar with the habits of the natives, to whom he vas always a friend. In later life he acquired such books of anthropology as were accessible, and at his regretted death, two years ago, he left a manuscript on Primitive Marriage and the Origins of Society, recently published as Primal Law in my Social Origins (Longmans, 1903). The notes which follow have the merits as well as the defects of observations untouched by knowledge of theories, and they were made before French law had entirely overcome native custom. While condensing and omitting for lack of space, I have, as far as possible, preserved Mr. Atkinson's own words, modifying nothing in his facts.

Almost the only anthropological account which I can find of the natives of New Caledonia is that by M. Léon Moncelon, in Bulletin de la Societe d'Anthropologie, Series III., vol. ix., pp. 345-380. In many places it corroborates Mr. Atkinson's account, and his contains many facts not recorded by M. Moncelon.—.]

New Caledonia (17°—23° lat., 163°—167° long.) is a French Colony, and a penal French colony; it is therefore little known to Englishmen, and English works of travel say little about the natives. Their island, like the elder Caledonia, is "stern and wild," being but a spine of mountains, running from north to south; the whole extent is some 300 miles in length by 30 in breadth. On the east side, the cliffs in many places fall sheer to the sea, scored