Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/365

Rh the truth were known, it would, perhaps, surprise the sticklers for Caucasian exclusiveness. Travelers are constantly meeting with Europeans of almost every nation in out-of-the-way corners of the world, where they have made themselves homes and taken them wives of the daughters of the land. When in 1836 the late Charles Darwin and Captain (afterward Vice-Admiral) Fitz-Roy visited the Cocos-Keeling group in the Indian Ocean, they were surprised to find that Mr. J. C. Ross, with a familia of Orientals, had taken up his abode in those lonely islets. Yet Mr. Ross himself had been no less surprised to discover that another adventurer, Mr. Alexander Hare, had anticipated him. When Mr. H. O. Forbes visited the islands in 1878, he found Mr. Ross's grandson still in possession and quite happy in his self-imposed exile from civilization. The inhabitants on the last occasion were found to be nearly all of mixed blood, the proprietor himself having married a Cocos-born wife.

If it would not tend to prolong this essay indefinitely, many more instances might be recorded. There is hardly a portion of the East in which abundant evidence is not obtainable of the mixture of race already accomplished or now going on. The Malay Peninsula, Burmah, Siam, Cochin-China, Hong-Kong, the seaport cities of China and Japan, besides the countries already mentioned or alluded to, furnish testimony to the fact enough to satisfy all who seek information on the subject. The following picture of the racial variety to be met with in an Eastern city shows, at least, what opportunities exist for intermixture: "The city is all ablaze with color. I can hardly recall the pallid race which lives in our dim, pale islands, and is costumed in our hideous clothes. Every costume from Arabia to China floats through the streets: robes of silk, satin, broadcloth, and muslin; and Parsees in spotless white, Jews and Arabs in dark, rich colors—Klings (natives of Southern India) in crimson and white, Bombay merchants in turbans of large size—and crimson cummerbunds. Malays in red sarongs, Sikhs in pure white, their great height rendered almost colossal by the classic arrangement of their draperies, and Chinamen from the coolie, in his blue or brown cotton, to the wealthy merchant in his frothy silk crêpe and rich, brocaded silk—made up a medley irresistibly fascinating to the stranger." Such is Singapore, and not far off is Malacca, one of the oldest European towns in the East, originally Portuguese, then Dutch, and now, though nominally under English rule, practically a Chinese colony. Not less striking is Mr. Forbes's sketch of a street-scene in the capital of Portuguese Timor: "Tall, erect indigenes mingle with negroes from the Portuguese possession of Mozambique and the coasts of Africa, most of them here in the capacity of soldiers or condemned criminals; tall, lithe East Indians from Goa and its neighborhood; Chinese and Bugis of Macassar, with