Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/23

20 The Islanders of the Islands of the Coral Sea are superior beings to the Australian Caliban. Many have a strong strain of European blood, with an occasional Oriental and Anglo-Indian outline of face. They speak a language which is at once musical and familiar, in which you find a fair sprinkling of Spanish and Arabic names and words. Palacios Papà, Gomes, Baul, Rodrigues, Pasián, and Fandango were among some of the names I took down from Islanders' lips. They resemble the people with whom I have lived in the Gulf of Paria, in the Valley of the Cauca, on the mountain plateaus of Cundinamarca, and on the borders of the Gran Chaco. They go stark naked, and are all the shades you can make out of black and white. They are a highly moral people, [I am not surprised at the laugh which greets this remark, because I know that when we are brought in close contact with a stranger and more brutal nature than our own, we succumb at once, and probably with pleasure.] They are possessed in a large degree of the industrial and fine arts. They are hard-working, ingenious, imitative, docile, cleanly—if you don't make them wear clothing; fond of music and dancing, laughter, making love, intriguing and theiving [sic]. The women are singularly affectionate, grateful, humourous and vain. The married women appear to be absolutely loyal, and certainly I never saw or heard a married woman sneer at her husband or speak ill of him except behind his back. Some are very beautiful, others are merely pretty, a few are as plump as partridges, and because they are natural, I did not see a single ugly woman amongst them.

I have now on two different occasions in twenty years, made two different journeys from England to Australia in ships carrying on each several hundred immigrants, such as serving maids from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England; tradesmen, deluded clerks, agricultural labourers, drapers' assistants, grocers, lawyers, and other useless and mischievous people with their wives and daughters; and I have now just returned from a voyage of 138 days in a vessel of 170 tons carrying eighty-nine naked men and women; and I beg to say, that in sobriety and cleanliness, the ability to amuse themselves in industry and cheerful content and gratitude, in sweetness and human dignity, the unchristian heathen of the Coral Sea, to use a phrase, licked the baptised Britishers hollow.

They cultivated in their own beautiful islands sugar cane, tobacco, yams, cocoanuts, bananas, nutmegs, arrowroot, harricot beans, bread fruit, the sweet potato or caucán, and many other fruits, and flowers and precious things. We came on illimitable beds of delicious oysters, and large virgin reefs within which you find the beche-de-mer in strange and marvellous abundance.

The Islands themselves on which these people dwell are of singular and fantastic beauty. They are all volcanic, and spring from platforms of coral rock a thousand fathoms deep, and rise to the sky in outlines like unto stratified music. When the sea which surrounds them is like liquid opal and the sun tips their peaks with gold, or bathes their valleys in purple, or paints their slopes in emerald green, you need the best words of the best poet to describe them.