SOUTH BY EAST-BEING REFLECTIONS ALONG AN OLD LINE OF TRAVEL BY SPENCER TROTTER, M.D., Swarthmore College I Singapore- a name to conjure with-stood out darkly at the farther end of a steamer's wake against the deepening red of a tropical sunset, then suddenly went out of sight. Beyond the port bow a towering column of thunderous cloud that a moment before had loomed above the rim of the equator was as quickly lost to view, its base revealed in an occasional sheet flash of lightning. And still one's sense was steeped in Singapore-the city of the Straitswith all its alluring fantasy of color, its never-to-be-forgotten stinks potent now in their quality of picture painting, its streets thronged with men of alien races-the enduring types of the ancient east-yellow and brown Malays, Chinese coolies and Japanese, black Cingalese from Colombo, Bengalese, men of Goa, Parsees from Bombay, red-capped snake charmers with their baskets of cobras and their strange hypnotizing tricks, bullock carts, automobiles, rickshaws, white-helmeted and white-garmented Europeans, and far out in the roadstead the ships from all the wide world-coming, going, lying at anchor-Singapore like many another port and yet with an atmosphere of its own. All the next day in Banka Strait, with the low jungle-fringed shore of Sumatra on the starboard, we headed south in the cloudy stillness of equatorial calms, and one's thoughts dwelt on that ancient time when strange dark men floated on rafts or in rude dugouts along that same shore, inquisitive like ourselves as to new landfalls. Island after island was reached by those first voyagers who later on launched out across unknown seas and peopled more distant and still more distant islands of the archipelago, driven on perhaps by another horde of wanderers. The history of these migrations is lost in the mists of antiquity, no log of voyages left to tell of their adventures. The original comers to these lands were men no doubt of a low order of culture, possibly descendants of that curious Neanderthal type which seems to have wandered far and wide in the most remote period of known human history, fifty thousand years ago or more, men whose bones are occasionally un earthed here and there and the roughly-flaked flints which they used are still to be found scattered through the soil of many lands. A more modern type of mankind found its way south by east among these islands at a later date, but many centuries before their discovery by Europeans. The peoples of this race seem to have been well advanced in culture and were probably expert canoemen, having learned to navigate wider reaches of sea. The original stock from which they sprang is one of the problems of racial history, but from what is known of their descendants today they appear to have come out of India--a prehistoric India that included not only the present peninsula of that name, but Farther India as well-Burmah, Siam and Malaysia. There is evidence from the distribution of animal life as well as from certain geological features that the archipelago as far as Australia is today the unsubmerged remnant of an old land that foundered sometime in the remote past, ages before man's advent, at a time when southern Asia was a continuous land surface even to Africa. A pre-human type may have existed in this area at the time when Malaysia was slowly breaking up into peninsulas and islands, but the most primitive men probably did not appear upon the scene until a much later date, drifting far and wide to the south across sea-ways that may have been narrower than they are today. Fifty thousand years ago or thereabouts a dark-colored type of man had spread from ancient India into Africa-the forerunner of the negro—and south by east to Australia, New Guinea, and the archipelagos beyond Torres Strait, that region of Oceania known as Melanesia from the prevailingly dark color of its island populations. Everywhere today throughout the entire extent of this broad area-India, Africa, Australia, Malaysia and Melanesia— there is an underlying stratum of population dark-complexioned, primitive and aboriginal. The origin of the later, lighter-colored migrants and their civilization is quite as obscure as that of the earlier and more primitive black men. Without doubt these brown men were the more or less immediate fore-runners of the modern populations and handed on the civilization they had acquired to their descendants. In India, today, they form the sub-stratum of population known as Dravidian -a jungle folk broken into numerous small tribes scattered throughout the Deccan, the despised Bhils, the Veddahs of Ceylon and other peoples of like nature. II The impulse to move, to seek new shores, is a primal trait of the race of man. Outside of Antarctica and the polar ice caps there is not a spot on the whole land surface of the earth that some man has not set his foot upon ages before the dawn of traditional history. Always some promised land beyond the farthest range, some happy valley to dwell in for a space of time, some island not yet lifted into view. Illusion dwells forever with the wave. I know what spells are laid, Leave me to deal For, though he scoop my water in his palm, A few rods off he deems it gems and clouds. I make some coast alluring, some lone isle, South by east we steered as did those ancient voyagers, under the same primal urge, branded like them with the curse of Cain"a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth"-down through Lombok Strait, wind against tide, with the cloud-wreathed Peak of Bali close in on the starboard quarter, the rugged outline of Lombok to port, on into the wide reach of the Indian Ocean. East by south we fetched compass through the Timor Sea while Sumba, the Sandalwood Island, lifted and dropped astern, and later by Roti, and beyond its loom the blue uplift of Timor stood out in bright tropical sunlight. Beyond Timor we knew lay the Banda Sea and on its farther northern verge the clustered Molluccas-the romantic Spice Islands of the medieval world. In these Indian Ocean waters dwelt horrible sea-snakes, deadly poisonous relatives of the cobra, their sickly pale ribbon-like bodies floating out from time to time in the break of the bow. One morning at the end of a week of such voyaging from Lombok Strait a low mangrove-fringed shore came into view the northern coast of Australia. The smell of distant bush fires was wafted to us from the land, stirring up old memories in this far-away end of the earth, but one's imagination was soon to be enriched by more exotic smells and sights. At Port Darwin, where we put in for a load of hides and other cargo, the fragrance of the Frangapani bloom was in the air-scraggly trees with thick fleshy branches that were studded with the showy, deliciously smelling flowers. So Australia greeted us. And in the town there were birds one had read about, strange to the sight of a traveller from temperate climes the little sacred kingfisher glimpsed for a moment, a green and buff bee-eater and a pair of curious cuckooshrikes which always fold first one wing and then another when alighting. In the wide streets of this frontier town some graceful magpie-larks—the "peewits" of the colonists-were walking about. It was just a touch of tropical Australia, enough to stir one's fancy in this strange and ancient land. Usually the traveller's first experience of Australia is in one of the large English towns-Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane. Here, close at hand, is the "cush"-that vast tract of scrub wilderness penetrated by few save wandering tribes of aboriginees, descendants of those men who drifted here in ages past. A peculiar sense of remoteness haunts this far-away settlement of white men, fronting on a lonely sea with a hinterland of interminable bush country where no friendly rivers flow. It was here at Port Darwin that we found her sitting on the edge of the wharf-an aboriginal woman of the Larrakeyah tribe clothed in a white slip of European make, for in such she had to array herself in the presence of civilization, the very whiteness of the dress throwing into stronger relief the blackness of her face; broad-featured, heavy-browed and crowned with a strange tangle of hair that reminded one of nothing so much as the proverbial “hurrah's nest" of childhood. For thousands of years her people had been wandering in the "bush" and across wide stretches of thirstland, with curious knowledge concerning the virtues of various plants and trees, the location of underground water, the habits of beasts and birds, with an extraordinary instinct in tracking game and following up clews unnoticed by men of less primitive nature. Her mind, like the mind of all her people, was woven of superstition and magic, fear of “Bringun”—the "Blackfellow Doctor"—and other evil influences. She and her kind would sicken and die at seeing a sharpened bone pointed at them by some person. Nothing can persuade a man that he is not thus bewitched. Only a month or so before our visit a man had died after this manner and there are numerous instances of like nature all through aboriginal Australia. To sleep alone or to be by oneself in a lonely place endangers a person to the entrance of "Bringun" into his or her body, leaving no mark whatsoever and the only remedy is to have an opening made in the head to let this evil spirit out, else the person sickens and dies through sheer fright although previously in perfect health. Many such cases are well authenticated by reliable white men. Great virtue appears to reside in the fat about the kidneys of a man and an individual of some other tribe with a reputation for strength and courage is liable to be ambushed, knocked in the head, and a slit made over the kidney from which the fat is cut out and smeared over the bodies of the persons participating in the attack with the sole object of imparting to them the virtues of their victim. White men with whom I have talked say that a man so mutilated often has a good chance of recovery only for the belief that the removal of the kidney fat has robbed him of some vital principle in consequence of which he must die and dies forthwith. Into this isolated settlement of Port Darwin the black fellows and their "jins" or "lubras," as the women are called, have drifted in from the nearby "bush" and have become partially civilized, making rather indifferent servants, for the call of the wild is in their blood and sooner or later back into "bush" they must go. "Missy give some tobacco, must go back for awhile"-is the first word of a growing restlessness, a longing to join some "corroboree" or ceremonial gathering, or just to get back to the familiar aboriginal life, to feast on flying-foxes, snakes, or the wallaby's flesh, to hear the loud laughing call of the "kookaburra"--the jackass kingfisher— and the flocks of screaming cockatoos and lories. Tobacco seems to be one of the chief lures that keeps these people about the settlements, men and women alike wedded to this boon of civilization. They became good stock riders on the big ranges where the half-wild cattle run, especially the women, another instance of how readily an aboriginal people with no previous experience takes to the horse. There is much that is obscure regarding the remote origin of the Australian natives. That early men reached this ancient land long ago across some stretch of sea like that between Timor and the shores of North Australia, or over the narrower waters of Torres Strait between New Guinea and the Cape York Peninsula, seems altogether probable. At the time of their very earliest migrations the old land had long been broken up into its present archipelago and the surrounding seas. Notwithstanding their black color they are in no-wise related to the African negro, an altogether different type of man with a peculiar structure of the hair among other specialized features. Professor Sollas has advanced the view that they may be more or less direct descendants of that very ancient Neanderthal type, the remains of which occur here and there over |