CHAPTER III
THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDERS
The Papuans or Papuasians as Keane calls them, inhabit The
what I will call Melanesia — or the ocean strip 3,000 miles Ion"-, c °**f ,
" °' ana people
which includes New Guinea, New Ireland, the Solomon, Santa ofMela- Cruz, Banks, New Hebrides, Fiji and Loyalty Islands, and msm > New Caledonia. They might be mistaken for West African negroes, but their brows are more and their jaws, noses and lips are less prominent, and they wear their hair like kitchen mops, although short-shorn wool is not unknown. 1 Moreover, a ' small weak lower jaw ' is a characteristic feature ; 2 about one in five have a long aquiline nose whose tip resembles M. Rigaud's nosetip when he smiled ; the skull is often both high and narrow : 3 there is a great variety of shape, size and colour, even in one village and ' the much finer, milder, and grander Fijian' 4 is very tall and very brown.
The Papuans are bounded on the south-west by Australians, Mikronesia on the west by Malays, on the north by the sworded, ^g^aare armoured, stone-building Mikronesians, and elsewhere by very dis- Polynesians who resemble their Mikronesian neighbours in tme ' colour, features, and language. Go halfway round the world from Greenwich ; then draw a straight line from north-west Fiji to a point 3,000 miles due north ; then after excluding Fiji produce it to a point 2,000 miles south by west, and you have the western boundary of Polynesia. From the top to the bottom of this line draw an arc which shall bend eastward
1 Krieger, Neu-Guinea (1899), pp. 372, 373, &c.
2 Sir W. Macgregor, British New Guinea (1897), p. 29.
3 But see M. Miklukho-Maclay in Nature, xxvii. pp. 137, 1S5.
4 Macgregor, op. cit., p. 40.
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