Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/139

Rh important family should persist in using the English language.

It is one of the great German ideas to force their language on all natives throughout the south seas, and to so kill all British influence. In all the schools reading and writing in German is compulsory, and the Germans are most scornful about the “pidgin-English”—the universal trade-tongue of all natives everywhere. They want the English Wesleyan missionaries on some islands to learn and teach German. The natives, hot only on every different island, but almost in every village, have different dialects, so that they do not understand each other, and must use one language to communicate with each other and with the white people, and that is pidgin-English.

They call a person's head a cocoanut and bestow names on the whites which they deem suitable, but which at times are not too complimentary. Hence they call the Governor, Herr von Bennigsen, “big fellow master cocoanut belong him no top grass,” in reference to His Excellency's baldness.

One of the Stettin officers they call “short man, big belly”! Of course every important man is “big fellow master,” and a woman is always, as in Australia, “Mary.” They speak of one of themselves when clothed as “white fellow black man.” But since they are all to learn and speak German, the poor things must no longer call the Stettin a “big war-canoe,” but a “Dreitausendtonnendampfer,” which will cure cannibalism, as their jaws will soon wear out.

I remember once sitting in the hall of a German hotel where two old English spinsters were busy with their knitting. An American girl with a young man came in they looked at her and sniffed. Suddenly the young lady walked up to the time-