Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific. Michael Moran

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       3. ‘No More ’Um Kaiser, God Save ’Um King’

      Australian Military Proclamation 1914

      East of Java and West of Tahiti a bird of dazzling plumage stalks the Pacific over the Cape York Peninsula of Australia, her head almost touching the equator, tail looping above. In her wake she spills clusters of emeralds on the surface of the sea. These are the unknown paradise islands of the Coral, Solomon and Bismarck Seas, the islands lying off the east coast of Papua New Guinea.

As a child I had been captivated by the monolithic Moai statues of Easter Island. Painstakingly, I built a balsa replica of the Kon-Tiki raft on which Thor Heyerdahl tested his theories of the migration of the Incas and their sun-kings across the Pacific to Polynesia two thousand years ago. As I carved, lashed and rigged my diminutive vessel, I dreamed the boyhood dreams of distant voyages to the South Seas with only a green parrot for company. My seafaring uncle, Major Theodore Svensen,¹ a former naval draughtsman born in Heyerdahl’s own Norwegian coastal town of Larvik, was a veteran of the Boer War and the Gallipoli Campaign in 1915. He stoked my imagination with tales of the sea and foreign campaigns, his budgie chirruping on his shoulder, a large tropical butterfly tugging against the thread that tethered it to a palm trunk in his garden.

      ‘Useless to read books m’boy! Head for the front line! Go to the islands – that’s the last virgin land. Sail before it’s too late!’ he would thunder as he waxed his magnificent moustache, jabbing with a finger at yellowing maps. Many years were to pass before I could attempt such a voyage to Melanesia, and in many ways it turned out to be sadly too late.

      The geographical term ‘Melanesia’ originates from the Greek melas meaning ‘black’ and nesos meaning ‘island’. The region was known up to the late nineteenth century as the ‘Black Islands’, a reference to the strikingly dark skin colour of the indigenous population and their former formidable reputation for cannibalism and savagery. Melanesia is situated in the South-West Pacific, south of Micronesia and west of Polynesia, occupying an area about the size of Europe and containing mainland Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji and the innumerable intervening islands. The extreme cultural diversity of the region evades neat categorisation and facile generalisations remain suspect. It can be observed, however, that Melanesian society is more egalitarian and the qualities of leadership more achievement-oriented than in Polynesia and Micronesia, where power is largely based on inheritance.

Melanesian marsupials have been more deeply studied than the origins of ‘Melanesian Man’. The Australian Aborigines and the Negrito populations of South-East Asia are distant relatives from the Pleistocene era some 50,000 years ago. There were two main migratory waves, the ancient Papuan (from the Malay papuwah meaning ‘frizzy-haired’) extending over many thousands of years, and the more recent Austronesian.¹ The intervening millennia have witnessed enormous cultural intermixing. These movements have given rise to the two main cultural traditions in evidence in Melanesia today, the Papuans being the most numerous.

      Geographically, New Guinea provided some of the greatest natural obstacles to exploration encountered in any country, with little prospect of gold or cargoes of spices as reward for the sacrifices of the voyage. Nature runs riot in the hot, humid and wet climate. Superlatives abound – over 700 species of birds, 800 distinct languages, the largest butterflies and beetles in the world, five times the species of fish in the Caribbean. Thomas Carlyle idly observed, ‘History, distillation of rumour.’ He could scarcely have known how appropriate his comment would be regarding expeditions to this fabled land.

      The earliest surviving sketches of Pacific peoples were four rather crude drawings of warriors observed off the southern shores of New Guinea made in 1606 by the Spaniard Diego Prado de Touar. My destination, the coast and islands of what was to become German New Guinea, were mapped almost lethargically by a procession of European voyages of discovery. The Spanish and Portuguese were followed by the Dutch, who were succeeded by the English and the French. In 1700, that colourful buccaneer-explorer William Dampier aboard HMS Roebuck (a true exotic who mentions in his journal consuming ‘a dish of flamingoes tongues fit for a prince’s table’) found a strait between New Britain and New Guinea. He navigated the coasts of New Ireland and named the larger island Nova Britannia. He was the first European to be recorded as discovering and anchoring in the Bismarck Archipelago, formerly regarded as an integral part of New Guinea.

      The French, too, have a distinguished history of New Guinea exploration. In 1768 the French Comte de Bougainville charted New Ireland, the Admiralty Islands, Buka and Bougainville. Louis XVI was an enthusiast for exploration and helped to plan and support the ill-fated expedition of Jean-François Galaup, Comte de Lapérouse. Although an aristocrat, the Comte had remained a darling of the revolution as he had married beneath him for love. For the time, this enlightened navigator held radical views on exploration. He observed in his journal:

      What right have Europeans to lands their inhabitants СКАЧАТЬ