Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/198

186 difficult to know which of the two is intended. Equally obscure is the early history of the island. The Chinese would seem to have discovered it at the beginning of the seventh century, but the curtain, falls again for over six hundred years. From the beginning of trustworthy records, the spectacle presented to us is that of a mountainous, forest-clad interior inhabited by head hunting savages of Malay race, and a flat western seaboard overrun by buccaneers from various lands. A peculiar tribe of Chinamen, called Hakka, permanently settled this western coast during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the Spaniards, all of whom, about A.D. 1600, were striving together for colonial supremacy, endeavoured with partial temporary success to gain a foothold. The Japanese did likewise, both as peaceable traders and as pirates. Takasago, one of their names for Formosa, dates from that time, having been first applied to a sandy stretch which was thought to resemble the celebrated pine-clad beach of that name near the present town of Kōbe. The other Japanese, or rather Chinese, appellation—Taiwan ("terraced bay")—was at first confined to one of the trading stations on the coast,—to which is not quite certain. Our European name comes from the Portuguese navigators, who, with somewhat exaggerated enthusiasm, called what they saw of the place Ylha Formosa, that is, the "Beautiful Island."

Dutch rule asserted itself as paramount over a large portion of Formosa from 1624 to 1661, and to Dutch missionaries we owe the first serious attempts at a study of the aborigines and their multifarious dialects. Several young Formosans were even sent to Holland to study theology, a circumstance which gave rise to one of the most audacious literary frauds ever perpetrated. A Frenchman, pretending to be a native convert, published, under the pseudonym of George Psalmanazar, "An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa,"—every line of which, including an elaborate grammar, an alphabet, and a whole religious system, was pure invention, but which deceived the learned world almost down to our own day. The Dutch were ousted from